5thHorseman wrote: Fri Nov 02, 2018 11:19 am
eradicator wrote: Fri Nov 02, 2018 8:05 am
5thHorseman wrote: Fri Nov 02, 2018 5:32 am
I however don't agree with the detractors that removing the pickaxe will dumb the game down to the point that the unwashed masses are going to suddenly want to start making factories instead of trying to beat their high scores in Flappy Bird,
The problem with that kind of argument is that removing a single element is
never going to instantaneously convert the game from x to y. It is the accumulation of tiny changes.
And the problem with that is that it's the "slippery slope" argument and I've seen that eventuality not happen far too many times to even consider it with no evidence other than it could in theory happen.
By that logic, by now there would be hundreds of gun types in the game because once they added a couple more guns. Or biters would be removed entirely because they removed biter science. Or we'd have colonies on the Moon in 2001 because a dozen or so people managed to land rickety space ships there in the 70s.
If for no other purpose, you should be not worried about this because the game is 95% complete according to Wube. I'm actually surprised they made a change THIS big, this late in the dev cycle. They don't have the time to turn the game into a linear point-and-click adventure game even if they wanted to, which as someone who's followed the development of the game for some years I am pretty confident they don't.
Then let me provide an example of it happening - modded Minecraft, on which Factorio was initially based or at least heavily inspired.
In the days of modded 1.5.2 and earlier (circa ~2011-2013), mods were very much defined by three characteristics:
- You are given tools to a solution, not the solution itself. For example, you are given a set of machines, three of which when used together might be able to accomplish a simple goal (eg automatically farm a crop), and a different nine which when combined in the right way might be able to build an automatic fuel production facility from renewable resources.
- Everything is tangible. By that I mean everything is visibly and acoustically "alive", such that you can tell at a glance what is doing what. Engines animate and make sound, and differently based on status, as do machines. Quarries have large moving digging arms, and harvesters have similar visual cues. You can see power, water, and other things flowing through pipes.
- Failure is entirely possible, and not a mere slap on the wrist. For example, engines require coolant, and will suffer a violent failure (read: explosion) if this is not provided for too long (warnings being provided by increasingly threatening colors and increasingly aggressive animations). Reactors can be designed poorly, such that they produce nothing, or, worst case scenario, enter a spiral of out-of-control reactivity and eventual meltdown.
Things continued that way, until some time after Minecraft 1.6.4 had become the primarily-used version. Over the course of 1.6.4's lifecycle, community attitudes started to shift, with some vocal elements becoming more prominent. Namely concerns related to "lag", "grind" and "excessive punishment". Wrong as it may be, an idea took root in many that those three characteristics above were the
direct source of those problems. People started to believe that animations, sound, and complex code (for complex machine logic) caused lag. People started calling having to design a solution from parts "grind". Any possibility of failure was treated as more and more draconian.
So, towards the end of the 1.6.4 lifecycle, Thermal Expansion, along with some of its associated mods, such as BigReactors, made major design changes, the chief of which was the introduction of a new power system, the (in)famous Redstone Flux ('RF' in common parlance). Internally, RF was and still is coded as a fluid, using fluid transfer code, meaning it has no concept of things like voltage/potential, flow rate, or thresholds. It is merely a resource which is generated and "pools" in machines until they have a sufficient amount to do one "work cycle". It was and still is, despite frankly baseless insistence to the contrary, incredibly simple compared to older power systems and designed to remain that way.
Thermal expansion also ditched everything that could conceivably be called lag. Models, animations, sounds, et cetera; all were scrapped in favor of inert boxes for which the only indication of functionality was a progress bar in a GUI (TE did end up adding sounds back in late 1.7.10, around 2016). Nothing had complex functionality logic like adjacency, or environmental requirements (think like waterfalls for waterwheels); it was all reduced to "Do I have power? Check. Do I have an item to process? Check. Then I do my thing." There was no concept of failure at all - the only way a machine could not work at full capacity was to be deprived of input power or items.
This all became important when, during the switch to 1.7.10, many of the older mods, in part due to heavy public pressure, switched from their power systems to RF. With that switch came an inherent loss of complexity, particularly in anything related to power generation.
But the real damage was more subtle: Now that the older, more complex mods were using the new, simple power system, they felt incongrouous. People starting demanding to know why those mods were being "more difficult to use", why they would "punish the player for nothing". Everything was compared to Thermal Expansion as some sort of "standard", in part due to that mod's unprecedented popularity. Some developers immediately caved to the demands. Others only did so once they were called "obstinate" or people told them that their mods would become "dinosaurs" that would be "relegated to the dustbin".
However, over time, over the course of 1.7.10's lifecycle (going up until fairly recently), a very obvious trend emerged. Mods were growing increasingly simple, increasingly "hand-holdy", increasingly visually inert, almost entirely due to community pressure to do so. Some of those flagship defining examples I referred to above? Gone.
It was not very long - maybe a year and a half - before the "old" style of modded gameplay was a relic that one had to
actively work to achieve, often with limited success. (I have a modpack designed in part to bring back the "glory days"; do you have any idea how much work it has taken? Months and months, much of it patching other mods' code. And even that is only an echo of what it once was).
It is rare now for mods to have much "going on" in them; the majority are comprised of simple place-and-they-work machines (commonly referred to as "magic boxes") with no complex logic or requirements. Power generation is no longer a heavy focus of logistics as it once was; it is now largely simplified to "build this power generation multiblock, that, once complete, generates 500000 units per tick, and you can just copy the design online anyways". Things are so simple and uniform that even minor departures from that, something that would be completely unremarkable years ago, generate huge attention for how "innovative" they are. (Example: "Wow! that mod sends power through the air instead of wires! that's so cool!") For all intents and purposes, the "old" gameplay style of modded minecraft is
dead. And many of the old players have simply moved on; they are no longer able to play the game they enjoyed, so they found other games entirely (of which Factorio is one).
Normally, I bring this story up to complain about how I, as one of the last developers who
refuses to switch their mods over to simplicity, face ever-growing hostility for it. Today, however, the focus is different. I raise it as a cautionary tale, to show that yes, a game can indeed go down that path, due to nothing more than ceding to demands for increased simplicity. To show where that ultimately leads. To strongly indicate that the foundation for such a shift already exists (cough cough "should nuclear/fluids be axed for UPS concerns?") And to, I hope, demonstrate why that path must be avoided.
And before anyone makes the argument that modded Minecraft is different, that modders just want popularity and so cater to the lowest common denominator:
Do games not
also do that to some extent, to increase sales? They have just as much - if not more - motivation to do so. And some of this recent near-constant focus on "new players" has very much felt like this for Factorio.
5thHorseman wrote: Fri Nov 02, 2018 11:19 am
By that logic, by now there would be hundreds of gun types in the game because once they added a couple more guns. Or biters would be removed entirely because they removed biter science.
I have feared for a long time that biters
will eventually be removed. A
huge portion of the playerbase disables them, and many people vocally consider them superfluous. But such a drastic change would ruin the game for everyone else, for whom they represent an integral part of the game. Not to mention the thousands of mods that would be made irrevocably dead, and not just direct enemies mods; what is the importance of things like space or pollution without biters?
