Koub wrote: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.
xad001x0w wrote: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.
xad001x0w wrote: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.
xad001x0w wrote: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