Yet another base builder, Satisfactory.

[shortylickens]

 

[shortylickens]

Save 45% on Satisfactory on Steam

Satisfactory is a first-person open-world factory building game with a dash of exploration and combat. Play alone or with friends, explore an alien planet, create multi-story factories, and enter conveyor belt heaven!

store.steampowered.com

Theres too many in general, way too many in early access, and WAAAAYYYYY too many that never get finished.
The gaming industry loves to put together massive stuff with big ideas and then abandon them cuz the people in charge dont know how to complete a project. Whats worse is they ARE good as making screenshots to get people excited and encourage us to spend money on titles which will never be fully realized.

Terratech took forever to come out and when it did it was basically the same as the Early Access. Osiris New Dawn is still not complete. GRAV was abandoned entirely but the cocksuckers are still selling it for money. And theres a dozen more I played and cant be bothered to mention here.


But it looks pretty dman good.

 

[Zenoth]

No Man's Sky has taken this route as well. It turned into more of a base building game than anything else. Its actual exploration 'branch' is still a skeleton 4 years on. Not just planet surface exploration but space as well. The Fauna, in particular, is just as boring and the same on the 4th planet than it is on the 300th, with some color pattern variations. And it's exactly why every time I go back to it to see what changed that I end up stopping once more until the next update comes out 3 months later, only to repeat the same cycle again of being lightly interested for a week only to stop again (at this point it has more in common with Diablo 3 Seasons in how it repeats cycles of same content over and over than a game of exploration, mysteries and wonder as it was advertised to be originally).

There's probably a good audience for 'base building' types of games out there, otherwise that sort of content wouldn't work (be it in a game specifically designed for it, or in NMS), but it's definitely not for me. I did try it at first when it was introduced in NMS, and by "trying it" I mean I just followed the tutorial quests for it, but once that was done I never for a single minute had any desire to focus my time on building a base on a random planet where nothing matters because it's "there" more than if it had been built on the moon next to it, or on another random planet 17 systems away that I would have eventually found a year later.

To be frank, any game focusing on "building stuff for the heck of it" that I ever played where I had actual fun even if it was very brief was RollerCoaster Tycoon (the first one I believe, which I bought second hand all the way back during the early 2000s or something like that).

 

[EXCellR8]

I don't mind a little base building here and there but yea, tons of games have it now. 'Explore' and grind to unlock new modules and then build a bunch of stuff, sometimes with friends. Can be fun for awhile but without some kind of incentive to build, other just doing so for the heck of it, the act of doing so isn't enough to sustain the experience.

 

[shortylickens]

Well, I caved.
cuz I'm a giant wimp.

Game is actually fun but theres almost too much to build and research. You need to harvents and process a TON of resources to get each upgrade. Theres 5 upgrades per tier.
Theres seven tiers.

On, and after each even tier you need to build a special thingamajig that also takes a crapload of resources.

 

[Stg-Flame]

So, it's 3D Factorio?

 

[shortylickens]

So, it's 3D Factorio?

Yes, and its a pain.
After 13 hours I am already tired of it.
Everything you do can be automated, and eventually it needs to be automated because you can only do so much by hand.
But setting up all that automation is a pain. You need loads of flat open ground to set up your foundations, and those require insane amounts of concrete.
Then you need multiple power sources cuz realistically each one can only power 4 constructors or 2 assemblers. I figure I need a total of 8 constructors AND 4 assemblers to do what I need to do in order to advance thru the tech tiers before I grow old and die.
And that many power supplies requires a metric butt load of plant matter to fuel.
Plant leaves are easy to find but in order to be really useful you need to refine them twice. First into bio-bales and again into bio-logs.

Also, unlike Terratech you cannot trust your storage units to automatically feed the resources your constructors need. They keep spitting out the wrong items and jamming up the works. Then you gotta stop everything, delete the conveyors, pick up the resources, rebuild the conveyors, and start all over again. Its a hassle.
Nothing in Satisfactory is as smooth or automated as Space Engineers, but that game requires a lot more time and effort to set up everything properly too.

Its fun, but its still deep in Alpha and they have a lot of work to do.
I think they intend for you to do this with many players, online. Because theres too much work for one man.
Good news is you dont need to eat or drink, or manage oxygen. Food is only for healing, and theres very little combat, at least on the forest planet.
Oh, they have like five different planet types right now and they have loads of stuff on them. Exploring is actually pretty fun. You dont need to explore much at the beginning, just find a place within walking distance of the 3 basic resources and you can do a crapload of work in a relatively small area.

 

[shortylickens]

Oh, and when I say automated I mean truly automated.
At the beginning of the game you can plop down little mining robots. they fill up quickly and they dont deliver, but they can be emptied quickly and they harvest just as fast as a miner.
Miners require power but they can connect to conveyor belts and those can go anywhere. With clever design you can put all your storage units on your main factory area and shuffle everything around without moving stuff by hand (works better in theory than in practice).

For far away resources you can build tractors and tractor stations, then automate them to bring back resources AND deposit them, all without your micromanaging. After the first ten minutes of the game you never have to manually bash rocks with your chisel ever again. Unlike Osiris New Dawn where you constantly chip away with a chisel and nothing is automated.
Its possible to do all this just by yourself, but like I said its an awful lot of work for one guy.

 

[JTsyo]

Rift Breaker is one I'm keeping my eye on. It more RTS than 3rd person.

 

[shortylickens]

And once again, there are people with way too much time on their hands:

 

[shortylickens]

If you click on the power generator display too many times, you get a glitch then a warning.

 

[shortylickens]

After about 20 hours I was already bored. I started up again after a couple days. Aside from making stuff and using those components to upgrade your tiers, there really isnt much to do in the game. No quests, no bosses, no space travel. Right now its a really pretty but limited version of Space Engineers.
I wanna like Space Engineers more but its just so much god damn work to do anything. And its easy to die.

I think theres something to be said for a game with fewer gameplay features but lots of polish. Subnautica is a good one. You really cant do that much, but everything in the final release of the game is well done.

 

[sandorski]

For this kind of thing, Minecraft with Mods will do. Satisfactory does Look cool and how it works seems very well done, but it does seem to be the most pointless one track time waster there is.

 

[shortylickens]

For this kind of thing, Minecraft with Mods will do. Satisfactory does Look cool and how it works seems very well done, but it does seem to be the most pointless one track time waster there is.

its still in alpha. I sincerely hope they add a LOT more.
My biggest complaint right now is theres literally dozens of crafting games out there which either will never be completed, or will be completed and have very little to do. Thats the problem with indie developers. They have all the best ideas but are too small to get anything finished.
Satisfactory is a two man team.

 

[DigDog]

Minecraft with IndustrialCraft 2 is a really good game - but it's still single-player, so it's really just a way to waste time. You do get pretty darn creative though.

 

[OCNewbie]

Minecraft with IndustrialCraft 2 is a really good game - but it's still single-player, so it's really just a way to waste time. You do get pretty darn creative though.

It's not an MMO, but you can certainly run a multiplayer server for friends. Myself and a couple friends, sometimes four total, have run modded MC servers a handful of times. When I say "modded", I'm talking big modpacks, with 200 or more mods, including mods like IC2, Ender IO, Tinkers' Construct, Mekanism, Thermal Expansion, Thaumcraft, Astral Sorcery, RFTools, Immersive Engineering, etc., etc.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wow, those graphics in OP, pretty impressive. I'm not really that good at base-building games (AoE 2 count as one of them? Cause I'm pretty mediocre at those.), but it LOOKS cool.

 

[shortylickens]

Wow, those graphics in OP, pretty impressive. I'm not really that good at base-building games (AoE 2 count as one of them? Cause I'm pretty mediocre at those.), but it LOOKS cool.

A lot of games look cool but not many provide entertainment.
Satisfactory is mostly manual labor with no real payoff. It least not while its in the development phase. They need a lot more stuff to do. Its marked 10 percent at Steam right now.
You should check it out, but dont play more than two hours. Then decide if you really like it.

 

[JTsyo]

I had Factorio on my wishlist for base building but my friends bought this so I jumped on board too. There's enough to do if you want to max out all the tiers but no campaign. With 4 of us playing on the same map we finished in 2 weeks. It was worth the $22. I'm sure we'll get another play through in too once the game is fully released, probably in 2022.