Factorio is a game where the player is stranded on an ugly bug planet and has to escape by building a base, pouring obscene amounts of resources into science, inventing space travel, and then building a ship. It shares this theme of "survive in a dangerous environment, gather resources, craft gear" with Minecraft, Don't Starve, and Stardew Valley. It's also a gameplay experience that is in no way similar to any of those.
In Terraria/Don't Starve/Minecraft, there's this pretty standard "adventure" (The normal meaning of the word adventure, not the special "Use Bird On Handcuffs" type of game that Sierra made you associate with adventure) genre welded to it where the crafting process is meant to enable this Tarzanic vine-swinging heroism. You want some tin so you personally wander out into the wilderness until you see a tinny looking rock and hit it with a pickaxe, and probably get in a knife fight with a skeleton on your way home. It's basically Dragon Age but you have to sew your own pants.
Factorio is different. There's almost no combat and the combat there is is almost a tax rather than The Game You Came To Play. Instead, the game revolves around making resource gathering easier and faster, but in the process creating new tasks to perform and new barriers to progress. Near 100% of my headscratching moments in Factorio come not from game-presented challenges, but from the arrangement of my OWN solutions to previous challenges.
It's a bit like how buying a cat solves your rat problem, but introduces a cat-hair mechanic you have to manage. Buying a roomba reduces your vacuum duties, but the cat hates it so you have to manage conflicts between them. You can do that by setting up a complex network of automatically opening and closing doors, but of course that requires its own investments and infrastructure. You know there's a "Perfect" house arrangement out there, where everything is aligned and the work does itself, but right now you're putting out a grease fire you started. Idiot.
I love this very much.
Factorio is ideally (exclusively?) enjoyed as a cooperative game, because then other people can see your engineering sins. You're going to make horrifyingly inefficient designs and say "heck it, I want coal now, and this gets me coal" and let it be, and then forty minutes later have to decide whether to make every design stupid from now on to accommodate your bizzare coal output, or re-do your coal mine the right way (but the right way would involve moving your gear factories to make room.)
Absolutely buy this game. I don't know what it has to do with D&D.
In Terraria/Don't Starve/Minecraft, there's this pretty standard "adventure" (The normal meaning of the word adventure, not the special "Use Bird On Handcuffs" type of game that Sierra made you associate with adventure) genre welded to it where the crafting process is meant to enable this Tarzanic vine-swinging heroism. You want some tin so you personally wander out into the wilderness until you see a tinny looking rock and hit it with a pickaxe, and probably get in a knife fight with a skeleton on your way home. It's basically Dragon Age but you have to sew your own pants.
Factorio is different. There's almost no combat and the combat there is is almost a tax rather than The Game You Came To Play. Instead, the game revolves around making resource gathering easier and faster, but in the process creating new tasks to perform and new barriers to progress. Near 100% of my headscratching moments in Factorio come not from game-presented challenges, but from the arrangement of my OWN solutions to previous challenges.
It's a bit like how buying a cat solves your rat problem, but introduces a cat-hair mechanic you have to manage. Buying a roomba reduces your vacuum duties, but the cat hates it so you have to manage conflicts between them. You can do that by setting up a complex network of automatically opening and closing doors, but of course that requires its own investments and infrastructure. You know there's a "Perfect" house arrangement out there, where everything is aligned and the work does itself, but right now you're putting out a grease fire you started. Idiot.
I love this very much.
Factorio is ideally (exclusively?) enjoyed as a cooperative game, because then other people can see your engineering sins. You're going to make horrifyingly inefficient designs and say "heck it, I want coal now, and this gets me coal" and let it be, and then forty minutes later have to decide whether to make every design stupid from now on to accommodate your bizzare coal output, or re-do your coal mine the right way (but the right way would involve moving your gear factories to make room.)
Absolutely buy this game. I don't know what it has to do with D&D.
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