About the endgame - kinda frustrating today

[Zhab]

i just noticed this and im shocked... utterly...

why does rocket silo does not require modules????' IT IS SO FU**ING CHEAP NOW >-<

An empty silo wont do you much good. Did you try building a rocket ? Did you notice that it requires 1000 speed modules (among many other things) ? Not sure I would call a space rocket cheap.

[MeduSalem]

I must admit most of what Medusalem wrote is very much like how I feel about the game. Nowadays, with the sandbox games fashion, there's a lot of "do whatever you want to keep yourself busy" in the gaming industry.

And recently, I have spotted what exactly felt wrong about that : at some point, there is a slow drift from devs creating endgame to players creating the endgame.
The same kind of drift I have noticed in some particularly moddable games, where always more game design is left to the community. I have played TESO, and the most thing we said about the game in my guild is "nope, but there's a mod for that".

I don't have that feeling too much with Factorio, but I do have the feeling "invent your own endgame".

Well I won't lie and I hate to spit acid around because of dissatisfaction but sometimes I have the feeling for both.

The most obvious being "invent your own endgame", which is why I replied to the thread in the first place.

The other feeling of "let the community do this or that" I sometimes get when reading heated discussions between well known community members over in the "Ideas & Suggestions" section which sometimes turn out to be a complete strawman debate covering 10 pages always de-evolving into pseudo-philosophical arguments as to why something will or should never be implemented/changed/etc and the first reason when being asked "Why?" almost always being "There is a mod" or "Could be done with a mod".

Which then results in me not even further looking in the thread anymore because as the Borg used to say "resistance is futile" and I just resign because of knowing better ways to waste my time.

Also some of the mods have reached like semi-necessary status exactly for the reason that the Vanilla Factorio lacks certain functionality. I often ask myself if that stuff will ever make it into the main game, especially if they are good, or if digging through the mod section of the forum is the holy grail, though I understand that development time/resources are limited.

Stuff like that is for example the case over in the Sim City 4 community where EA/Maxis promised like a ton of functionality just to abandon the game after the first addon and not even having the goddamn courtesy to make the codebase for Sim City 4 open source so skilled community people could actually fix some notorious bugs or even add some flexibility with new features. Especially for a game engine they are never going to use anymore ever and where they made enough money of the original release to justify a release of the code. And it's not like a 13 years old game could compete with newer, more state-of-the-art real 3D city building games anyways.

There is certainly something to be said for endgame fatigue and it is something that I find all ow/sandbox games suffer from eventually. It gets boring running around killing people in GTA once you have finished all the missions. It gets boring to sit staring at your C:SL city tick by once you've filled the map. It gets boring hoarding resources in Factorio once the tech tree is complete.

The reason for all of this is the lack of challenge. [...]

Well the lack of challenge to get to the Rocket Silo isn't the point in this discussion. Fiddling with the initial map settings is already there as a way to set how long it takes and how difficult it is to get to the Rocket Silo.

But you wrote the core of the problem yourself in the sentence above:

"It gets boring hoarding resources in Factorio once the tech tree is complete."

And that's as "Baem! In your face!" as possible what all the "Endgame" discussion is about. No amount of delaying the Rocket Silo or the end of the Tech Tree changes the fact that the entire factory we are building with all the hard work and sweat invested turns forsaken useless with just one single click of starting the final research or the rocket.

Having such a conclusion in a Sandbox game is basically the nail to the coffin for said game. It defeats any common sense to play any further than that because... as we established... there is no point in it. We reached the end.

Of course one could make reaching the rocket silo twice, no 10 times as hard by virtually prolonging how long it takes to get there by throwing more enemies at the player, giving less resources, making the recipes harder to craft, etc, etc... but deep within it would just increase the empty, sorrow feeling one gets by investing even more time in something that has no fruitation than a simple one-click end. Which is why an "endless game mode", if one exists, should have reasonable gameplay beyond that. That or don't offer endless game modes if there's nothing worthwhile doing.

I think an important thing to remember is that the game cannot carry on forever, there has to be a point where it stops or ultimately the player will just get bored of it and stop it themselves.

That's true. There is an eventual end to everything, but in a sandbox-style game I would rather let the player decide when something is over, when to call it "boring" and not the game forcing an ultimative end on the player, especially not if it took a lot of time and work to get there.

Well good... the game doesn't force an end, but it doesn't offer gameplay value beyond the Rocket Silo either. We are back to the "Invent your own endgame" problem. It's like the game doesn't know what it tries to be from that point on.

Either the game really stops right there and you can't play any further and you get nothing more than a wet handshake with some statistics about how you have been doing... which also means not getting too attached to a factory, cutting half of the unnecessary game features not needed to get there and therefore nobody questioning what's beyond or what some of the stuff is good for...

... or the game has to give the player some endless gameplay features that are worthwhile the effort of continuing so people don't start questioning "now what?" or "why use <xy> when there's no point?"

At least not "build a factory for the sake of building the factory" and then watch it go as nobody but a lonely stranded engineer profits from the huge and useless contraption. That's not good enough to call it a decent endgame, even the devs admitted that over the course of the development various times.

Movies and Series with cliffhangers are always hated upon, especially if there is uncertainty if the franchise continues and that's in my opinion also the case with Factorio. We are left with a cliffhanger, namingly the Rocket Silo and that's it and we don't know for sure if there will ever be a replacement for the planned endgame content that has been canceled.

If you were to combine this, with a lot of polish to the GUI, and existing features as well as some feature expansions and a couple of new ones you have yourself a pretty damn fine game.

For my part I would never doubt that Factorio is one of the best, if not the best strategy-puzzle game around for what it is currently capable of. Even with its primitive functional GUI and other quirks. The existing part is really a damn fine game.

But it's more about the not existing part, which is: A reason to play beyond sending a rocket to space and/or a reason to play from scratch because after you beat the game once you basically do everything the same way over without any difference along the route. Okay maybe you make the factory a little bit tidier the next time around and not as much temporary mess, but that's because you know what exactly to expect and when to expect it. Nothing changes because there are no alternative routes to the end of the game. It's always the same outcome: You send the rocket to space and that's it. It's like building the same 1000 pieces jigsaw puzzle over and over just to build it once more.

Thinking realistically the game won't be able to have both I guess... It won't have replayability AND a reason to play beyond rocket silo, but at least it should provide the player with one of both options. And as a sandbox-type game I think it should go for a reason to play beyond launching a rocket.


I mean from this point on I could say I beat the game too often... Move on with your life. But well that would be really sad as it isn't even officially released yet. Maybe lurking on the forums and providing some help to people who haven't beaten the game to death yet is the true "endgame". The worst part about it being that I experienced that with other games in the past 5-10 years (basically ever since Alpha/Beta access became a popular method to promote a game) and is what eventually really caused me to move on with most of them (Like Prison Architect, Warframe, Galactic Civilizations 3, and several others). xD

[ssilk]

I want to put two points in:

pseudo-philosophical arguments as to why something will or should never be implemented/changed/etc and the first reason when being asked "Why?" almost always being "There is a mod" or "Could be done with a mod".

It takes time to develop things. For example: From the development of the Personal Roboport as mod to the implementation into the vanilla: more than one year. With this background I see it as a legitimate question to ask, why someone wants to have something added into the game.

And the second is: The devs changed the plans. The previous plans where that you should build a space-platform, build a spaceship and have to manage a hyper drive. The current end-game is a compromise to be able to go to Steam now.

[MeduSalem]

I want to put two points in:

pseudo-philosophical arguments as to why something will or should never be implemented/changed/etc and the first reason when being asked "Why?" almost always being "There is a mod" or "Could be done with a mod".

It takes time to develop things. For example: From the development of the Personal Roboport as mod to the implementation into the vanilla: more than one year. With this background I see it as a legitimate question to ask, why someone wants to have something added into the game.

And the second is: The devs changed the plans. The previous plans where that you should build a space-platform, build a spaceship and have to manage a hyper drive. The current end-game is a compromise to be able to go to Steam now.

Well I can't deny that. Some of the things just take their development time.


Unrelated to the topic... ssilk... you have a talent to strike a nerve. At least with me.

I don't know how the Personal Roboports are now because I haven't been using them... puhhh... almost ever since they have been released because if you remember there was this big discussion back then where the robots should take their items from when building stuff and where they should deliver them to when deconstructing them, etc: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/viewtop ... 23&t=14246

The outcome was annihilating for me and I boycott the feature ever since and act as if it isn't there because it would only get in the way of my personal playstyle.


But that out of the way there is a legitmate question if something should be in the game or not. But if it becomes the standard conclusion to refer to "mods" for almost every proposal it becomes senseless to propose something because of the obvious outcome. That's one reason why I stopped proposing new features/ideas and another because the devs - even if they wanted to - would have nearly no time to accept any new ideas and features anyways as they are way too focused on getting things ready for Steam now.


On the second part with Steam... yeah I know that. Though they could have gone to Steam with the game a year ago or 2 as well. The quality of the existing stuff was good enough back then as well to justify that. A lot of the games on Steam Greenlight are a lot less functional or bugfree and even less have actual content to play to begin with. Half of them are to be honest... Just money grabbing scam. They would have stand out of the crowd no doubt. No-one would have argued about going there back then. On the contrary people asked a lot back then when they will make the game available there and people encouraged the devs by saying the game is already good enough.

But if I remember right the response was something similar to "Okay we hear you, we want to go to Steam eventually but in our opinion some parts aren't good enough yet so we want to do some necessary improvements and polishing first BEFORE releasing to Steam". So it was a self-imposed burden and that's where the community said "Okay, why not, go for it if you guys think it is absolutely necessary". People have been a lot more patient back then before coming up with feelings of doubt about something, including myself.

And that's when they started to become a little bit carried away with the additional freedom by proposing certain stuff (like the space platforms, underground mining, etc, etc, etc) or by re-doing some parts of the game basically from scratch or adding massive features like the Multiplayer that did take much longer to stabilize than expected and other minor stuff adding up to further and further delaying the release to Steam because the additional work also caused additional bugs that had to be fixed eventually or because the additional content made additional features necessary and so on and so on.

Such things just happen. Can't always avoid all the hypetrains one is about to start and one can't know every possible outcome in advance and it's surely not easy to make an estimation on development time with a project like Factorio with dynamic development cycles where there is an active community reporting problems and giving suggestions down the road.

If one would want to make it more predictable then the devs would have to act as stubborn and narrowminded as many other companies do during the development where they have a plan set in stone with hard deadlines and never diverge from the plan and schedule until they have a final product and leave the complaints of the community to the support team which is skilled at telling the community about how to screw themselves if they have problems with that. But I refuse to believe that the guys behind an awesome game like Factorio could ever act like that because then they would loose their identity.

I think hardcore deadlines and final releases are a thing from the past anyways. Developing new installments for games/programs or products in general that make actually sense and get people to buy them become gradually harder and harder to develop and one might as well be better off by improving the existing installment further. Currently we have something like a rolling release cycle already anyways where at some point a particular build is called stable and there are various buggy builds in between for the brave (haha buggy, I only had two crashes in the past 2 years on unstable builds and both were during the startup while trying to update to a new build, that's more than can be said for final releases of most triple A games nowadays, just look at the ridiculous mess the PC version of Batman Arkham Knight became for example). Nobody really gives a damn which build number is attached to the title. If it's 0.12 or 0.13 or 1.12 or 1.13... Who cares. So why not keep it that way? Other software does it the same way. Why has there always to be a forced "final release date" or "final product" at the end?

And that's why I think something like the Steam release isn't a good excuse to drop some of the longterm plans, especially since the lacking endgame was declared a problem necessary to be dealt with as well eventually (and obvious prototyping or possibilities even being worked out to solve the problem, granted they might not have been the most realistic ones, though that could be changed).

I really ask myself one major question "Why the hurry all of a sudden to get to an end?"

Some of the rush is already having influence on the current development of the game and how remaining/new problems are handled because the solutions to those problems become more and more of a band-aid nature rather than sophisticated longterm solutions. Some of the stuff isn't even thought through anymore, just the easy solution has to do for now, causing only more work if they ever decide to come back and re-do the stuff in the manner originally intended.

And obviously the reason for that hurry must be important enough to abandon some of the longterm plans that have been in discussion and preparation for months. More important than the Steam release... or is the Steam release now the official release of the game as well after which major development on the game will be ceased? Is there something I missed in the matter? Have I misinterpreted the plans of dropping the longterm plans? I don't know. But I'd like to know. I'm trapped with this uncertainty feeling and I don't like it.

If I am misinterpreting things and there are plans to bring all the stuff eventually, but not before the devil knows when... I'd say, yeah get the game to Steam, and sort out the problem afterwards because there will be a truckload of fresh feedback afterwards anyways of how to further improve some of the game features and content.

The obvious fear of the Steam release is already comparable to the fear of getting one's wisdom teeth surgically removed. Might as well get over with the inevitable and live on happily ever after.

[safan]

wow, you wrote a lot. I'll try to give my opinion on things on a equally eloquent way. I sure hope kovarex reads this post since you express a lot of thoughts and fears me and other factorians have.

First about the steam release: kovarex has a team of 8 man now, and they all need to get paid. I think the steam release is mainly a way to find the necessary new customers to keep the team working. The timing is okay, but i agree that the game is not done yet. Even more: i think important things are missing that may mess up the steam release. In fact i'll throw my list out at once:

- new game menu: This should be changed in easy - medium - hard - custom options, with the current complicated setup hidden behind the custom. New players will be confused by all the options and not give the game time to grow on them.
- graphical interfaces: all the menus and actions need to be reviewed by a specialist. Again, we don't notice this anymore because we are used to it, but new players will be anoyed and give negative reviews.
- map generation: the map generation hasn't been touched in a long time and it shows. The standard settings are balanced nor interesting, but it's still the first that new players will try out. When they are working on it they should also include mountains and rivers: at the moment all maps look the same: plains with some lakes in it. And if you dare to touch the water settings you may end up on a island, with no way to escape. How long before a steam user will put that in a one line review with 'not recommended' notion?

The reason we say 'that can be modded' is because we know the developers have little time and resources to spare. So we want them to make things that can not be modded. But ofcourse the standard game still has to be playable! My personal opinion is that they for example spent way to much time on combinators, a feature that only a few players will use. And as a result, some more used elements are a little rough. For example I wished they would work more on the platform stuff so we can have underground mines and caves.

After all "endgame" is a really hard part of game development. From banished to civ5, from prison architect to cities:skylines. They have all problems keeping players interested enough in the long term. In all these games i stop with playing once the initial difficulty is gone. Once cash is no problem or you have surpassed the AI these games get boring and repetive. So factorio is just the same and i don't hold the developers responsable for it. I've done way longer with factorio then with banished, where after 2 playthroughs you are finished with the game.

Specifically finding an endgame in factorio is pretty hard since its a mix between rpg and building game. Rpg is based on exploration and encounters: pretty hard to do when you are alone on a planet and need to be near your factory. Or do you imagine encountering a old man who wants 1000 inserters in exchange for a staff of endless rocket fuel? The bulding game is also based on satisfying population as a god, where in factorio you are pysically in the world and alone. And what will population other then you do? What do you need them for? And why aren't THEY building a factory? I can't imagine inviting people on my planet that will just be there and consume everyting i make without giving something in return. And then start complaining about pollution ...

-- i have to go now, so ill edit the rest of the post in later

[ssilk]

The outcome was annihilating for me and I boycott the [Personal roboport] feature ever since and act as if it isn't there because it would only get in the way of my personal playstyle.

This is interesting, cause I also have still small problems with them. I wait for a feature to swap the modular armor easier/faster, and a better behavior when deconstructing stuff (when your inventory is full), because that would solve this problems.

But that out of the way there is a legitmate question if something should be in the game or not. But if it becomes the standard conclusion to refer to "mods" for almost every proposal it becomes senseless to propose something because of the obvious outcome. That's one reason why I stopped proposing new features/ideas and another because the devs - even if they wanted to - would have nearly no time to accept any new ideas and features anyways as they are way too focused on getting things ready for Steam now.

Let's make a game. There is a new suggestion about "Sorting splitters".

Now the game rules: We just swap the personality (for a short time only ) I'm MeduSalem, you are ssilk.

I want a spitter that can sort out stuff.

Count me in on that

Hope you don't take that personally. Your target as ssilk-moderator is to be helpful. Give useful hints how to improve this suggestion and the level in that board. You should also have in the eye, that others also find this post and will orientate on that answer, so you need to give a hint for others who already want to play like so.

What would you write then?

Of course I don't await you to do this (only for fun reasons), it is just, that I think (and already explained 2 or 3 times) that using mods is much, much better than any cool suggestion. If there is a mod, the best you can do is using it and give feedback instead of making own suggestions, cause suggestions is just written ideas, mods are specific implementations.

And that's why I think something like the Steam release isn't a good excuse to drop some of the longterm plans, especially since the lacking endgame was declared a problem necessary to be dealt with as well eventually (and obvious prototyping or possibilities even being worked out to solve the problem, granted they might not have been the most realistic ones, though that could be changed).

I really ask myself one major question "Why the hurry all of a sudden to get to an end?"

Simple explanation: Cause they want to live from the stuff they are doing.

They said that and they live it. I have been there: They want to make a ground-solid game for a new genre. The engine should be super mod-able. The stuff they are developing has never been done before (or better: not in this depth and combination). And while they are working hard on that stuff, they want to live from that.

Some of the rush is already having influence on the current development of the game and how remaining/new problems are handled because the solutions to those problems become more and more of a band-aid nature rather than sophisticated longterm solutions. Some of the stuff isn't even thought through anymore, just the easy solution has to do for now, causing only more work if they ever decide to come back and re-do the stuff in the manner originally intended.

AFAIK nothing in Factorio has thought through the end. The game is developed like the gameplay is. (*)

And obviously the reason for that hurry must be important enough to abandon some of the longterm plans that have been in discussion and preparation for months. More important than the Steam release... or is the Steam release now the official release of the game as well after which major development on the game will be ceased? Is there something I missed in the matter? Have I misinterpreted the plans of dropping the longterm plans? I don't know. But I'd like to know. I'm trapped with this uncertainty feeling and I don't like it.

Because they need the money? I think somewhere in summer or autumn we had 100,000 sales. Now we have "only" about 10,000 more. The sales are going down, the company is too small to have expensive marketing. They need to bring it on Steam cause that will hopefully rise the sales.

yeah get the game to Steam, and sort out the problem afterwards because there will be a truckload of fresh feedback afterwards anyways of how to further improve some of the game features and content.

Exatly. And

The obvious fear of the Steam release is already comparable to the fear of getting one's wisdom teeth surgically removed. Might as well get over with the inevitable and live on happily ever after.

Well, I'm sure as moderator is will not.


(*) I need to explain it a bit better: First they implement it just so that it works. Somehow. Nobody understands it, but it works. It't like a Factory in the first 5 hours: Total chaos, no space, it works only, cause your belts are never full.
If this works stable enough they play with it. Then they see, what needs to be changed. Like in the factory: When the robots come in and you deconstruct the whole stuff and rebuilt it completely new.
And this in 1, 2, 3 or more iterations.

[Kewlhotrod]

I want to see the development proposals in teh game already.

[MeduSalem]

Hope you don't take that personally.

Nah, don't worry I don't take it personally because I try to understand what you are trying to achieve. xD

That said...

What would you write then?

Well... I wouldn't want you to do it any differently as you are doing it now because I know you are a community mod and you are posting most of the stuff to help and show people their way around the forums and by that sparing duplicate threads and posts and you are just trying to be an overall nice guy and there is nothing wrong with that. Also you try to come up with constructive perspectives on things and give a reason to why something should be there or not there, etc.. Of course we can't always agree on everything because some things are just a matter of taste and so on but I still respect your opinions and at least try to view it from your perspective.

So with that in mind when you say "there is a mod for <xy>" I think of it very differently than when reading the discussions between other people where someone immediately responds with "there is a mod" or " Hell no! will never be a thing!" for the sake of strawmen debates, trolling if you so like. Some of the posts have this bittersweet taste to them, I can't say why but some of them just feel that way.

Granted, sometimes it's real hard to differentiate between "trying to help" and "trying to troll" and sometimes my view is as biased as anyone elses is because in the end we are all only human. But the point is that it is almost guranteed that someone is always derailing a constructive discussion about why something should be there or why something shouldn't be there into a meta discussion (yeah writing that I know we derailed this thread by a huge deal already) or at least tries to avoid coming up with actual arguments backing up their "hell noes" which one could live with. And that's when it stops being fun to give suggestions or feedback.

Simple explanation: Cause they want to live from the stuff they are doing.

Well I feared writing that in the huge post because my post is intimidating enough already the way it is. Though it is a reason I can live with because I am realistic enough to know that they won't be able to survive if they don't make their cut, let alone do another game. It's just the way they acted when being asked about how they fare financially was always "we are doing fine" and that's why I always felt rather safe about a definite future development for Factorio.

It might have been an option though not to say "we abandoned the thing without replacement" but rather "we abandoned the thing for now, but if enough people would be willing to buy an expansion/addon/dlc/whatever we might do it, given the time"

Some people, or at least I would have taken that far better. Also given the game would have a fitting endgame (doesn't need to be as sophisticated as the space platforms and going to other planets and whatnot), I would even say it is worth 45€ instead of just the 15€ they are asking for now because other games offer a lot less gameplay hours and ask for ridiculous 60 bucks and hundreds more for DLCs that are not worth their money. While speaking with some of my acquaintances we came to the conclusion that the devs have been "gifting" Factorio away for quite too long already. I mean I know that the devs don't want to seem like they are greedy, because that's not the kind of reputation they want, but I bet quite a lot people would agree to me to a certain point that they could ask at least for twice the amount they do currently.

[Zhab]

Granted, sometimes it's real hard to differentiate between "trying to help" and "trying to troll" and sometimes my view is as biased as anyone elses is because in the end we are all only human. But the point is that it is almost guranteed that someone is always derailing a constructive discussion about why something should be there or why something shouldn't be there into a meta discussion (yeah writing that I know we derailed this thread by a huge deal already) or at least tries to avoid coming up with actual arguments backing up their "hell noes" which one could live with. And that's when it stops being fun to give suggestions or feedback.

So just to be clear, you are ok with "hell noes" so long as the people saying it are providing logical arguments as to why ?

It might have been an option though not to say "we abandoned the thing without replacement" but rather "we abandoned the thing for now, but if enough people would be willing to buy an expansion/addon/dlc/whatever we might do it, given the time".

Isn't that what they pretty much said ? Or am I imagining things.

This doesn't necessarily mean we will throw the idea away. One of the possibilities is that the space platform content could be part of an expansion (but no promises here), so we could make it really shine and use the possibilities of the idea fully instead of making hasted prototype squeezed into the regular schedule.

Sounds like it to me.

[MeduSalem]

So just to be clear, you are ok with "hell noes" so long as the people saying it are providing logical arguments as to why ?

Pretty much yes.

Given the discussion isn't about stuff like "I like Heavy Metal more than Hip-Hop" for example because that's a matter of taste and stuff that's a matter of taste usually defies any logical discussion. And therefore I try to avoid getting involved in them. Such discussions normally always end up being a complete mess.

It might have been an option though not to say "we abandoned the thing without replacement" but rather "we abandoned the thing for now, but if enough people would be willing to buy an expansion/addon/dlc/whatever we might do it, given the time".

Isn't that what they pretty much said ? Or am I imagining things.

This doesn't necessarily mean we will throw the idea away. One of the possibilities is that the space platform content could be part of an expansion (but no promises here), so we could make it really shine and use the possibilities of the idea fully instead of making hasted prototype squeezed into the regular schedule.

Sounds like it to me.

That's interesting! I hadn't seen that paragraph up until now!

But well, I was told the other day back then that they are off the list and only went online next day to comment on the forum thread belonging to the Journal to express my concern and only visually rushed through the Journal, so it was my fault for not reading in detail. I apologize.

That said... yeah if an expansion never happens I would still be sad (who would not?), but at least they didn't exclude the possibility right away and I know now what to expect vaguely. That's sufficient to ease my mind for now.

[Zhab]

That's interesting! I hadn't seen that paragraph up until now!

Reading this forum gives me the feeling that you are not the only one as many others seem to speak in a way that implies that the idea is totally and completely gone forever with no possibilities of ever making a comeback whatsoever. I was thinking that maybe their faith in a possible expansion was so little that to them the feature might as well be gone forever. However your words just now left nothing to interpretation.

[ssilk]

The current end is a compromise, also not satisfying the devs, because they planned it differently. And they had surely a lot of internal discussion about that. But they don't want to promise something, cause they cannot know, how the game will sell in the future.

I think the devs need to make that point very clear before going on Steam.

[ske]

The current end is a compromise, also not satisfying the devs, because they planned it differently. And they had surely a lot of internal discussion about that. But they don't want to promise something, cause they cannot know, how the game will sell in the future.

I think the devs need to make that point very clear before going on Steam.

At this point I'd thank the dev team for their openness. With the many releases and also with the many FFFs which give great insights into the develoment process. In the beginning things often go pretty fast and large advances are made. But after that phase it gets considerably harder to keep everything working well and to polish it for release. Changing the original Plans about the story line is hard. Look at the many games released with a weak story line. Running out of money and seeing the end approach way faster than you are comftable with is hard. I imagine the current situation like a ship in heavy (but not too heavy) seas. Fresh money needs to be acquired. Solid land is not yet in sight. Decisions need to be made. Some people will be disappointed. That's to be expected.

Going public with half-assed plans (as plans always are until you're actually 3/4 there) will disappoint many.
Not going public with the future plans will also disappoint many.

What factorio IMHO could use is a person smarter than anyone else in regards to epic storywriting. There are so many possibilites in factorio, it's overwhelming. There is so much content already made it would suffice for ten space adventures. I've already had enough fun that I'm satisified with what I got compared to what I paid for. I would be happy paying for well made episodes or singleplayer maps. It will get better and better from here on.

[Buggi]

I always thought of my character in the game not as a crash-landed survivor, but as a early settler/terraformer working to build up some infrastructure for future colonists. Making the area safe, setting up production, etc. Just a step away from making homes, cars, and biter-skin boots.

[Supercheese]

I always thought of my character in the game not as a crash-landed survivor, but as a early settler/terraformer working to build up some infrastructure for future colonists. Making the area safe, setting up production, etc. Just a step away from making homes, cars, and biter-skin boots.

A bit off-topic but: I always presumed the biters had exoskeletons like insects. I don't think they'd provide any leather, just chitin.

[MeduSalem]

Reading this forum gives me the feeling that you are not the only one as many others seem to speak in a way that implies that the idea is totally and completely gone forever with no possibilities of ever making a comeback whatsoever. I was thinking that maybe their faith in a possible expansion was so little that to them the feature might as well be gone forever. However your words just now left nothing to interpretation.

Well yeah, that's exactly the point of view I got back then. The conversations about the original proposed endgame went from active to dead pretty soon afterwards, implying that they are completely off the table.

But on the other hand I understand now why because if they'd still keep on poking around in the sore topic there would only be two possible outcomes (because I have seen similar during other game developments):

• Eventually give in and say "yeah we will do it", starting a second hypetrain which might crash because they can't promise anything yet.
• They get annoyed by the periodically recurring theme and finally say "It's dead Jim.", which would also cause a major depressing wave to go around.

So maybe it isn't that bad that the topic about their longterm plans isn't brought up daily and if it's just to keep up the moral.

I guess that there is nothing more to add to the topic now as the important things have been said and cleared up (at least for me). xD

[slpwnd]

Just a quick disclaimer regarding the endgame and the space platform. I haven't read all the conversation, but here is a sort of our current stand on the topic. This is not to be taken as a solid plan but rather as our current direction (which can shift as we have seen already=)):

The amount of work to do this is vast (almost feels like making another game), however the topic is still very interesting for us. Hence the most probable option at the moment is to wrap-up the game with the current end goal (launching rocket to space) and expand to space in continuation or data-disk.

As mentioned before we took a very big bite with the whole endgame. But this is a natural part of the open development process. By sharing our intensions we create illusion that this is how things will be done. One could say that we fix the direction in which the game is going. That is limiting for the development yet interesting for the players to know. We decided to share our intensions with the understanding that if we need to shift the direction (which is often necessary) then some people will be disappointed.

[DailyFrankPeter]

In late/endgame there are no consumers for the produced goods.

[/quote]

After reading this and other suggestions my vote would go to some kind of trade facility with variable prices. This, combined with a randomized set of resources, would mean you would have to make up for a lack of one with mass production of another - so a playthrough would never be quite the same.

Hell, you could even imagine trading with another yourself in another gameplay (where you got different resources)!

[MalcolmCooks]

Here is a simple fix to make the current endgame a lot better, and it just requires a few changes to the "story" of the game.

Instead of you being an advance party to colonise the planet, you have actually crashed there or arrived by mistake. You know you will not be rescued, so in order to escape and get back home, you have to build a new ship. Either... you build the ship on the ground, and then get in, and launch into space, in which case it functions like the current endgame (except you only have to build one), or if the devs are ever going to implement the space layer, you build the ship in orbit after launching materials up on rockets.
I think having a single solid endgame goal like that would be better. I haven't actually reached the endgame stage yet. I just play Factorio as a kind of city-building game, where my factory exists for the sole purpose of existing, so I can make refinements, improve the way it functions, ect.

[DailyFrankPeter]

where my factory exists for the sole purpose of existing, so I can make refinements, improve the way it functions, ect.

I keep saying that! Make that^ the endgame, but for that to work the devs would have to introduce some criteria by which one factory is better than another. Like in Simcity it was how much money a city makes or how much people it attracts. The keywords are "competition" and/or "achievement".

I put a post in suggestions about real-world economics stats, but any other goal to compete towards would do.