Comment on What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype?
De_Narm@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:
God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that and of course your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.
Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. On top of that, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.
I feel vindicated. I have the exact same feeling of factorio feeling too much like work, having to refactor everything because the requirements change is one of the more frustrating parts of software engineering imo, and the game feels tailored specifically to invoke that frustration.
I imagine that part gets better after the first hundred hours where you basically know what’s coming. I don’t have the patience to learn the tech tree though, given that I don’t even enjoy the game.
I’m curious how you play factorio because when I played there was very little refactoring, just adding more and more onto the assembly line.
Factorio sucks for perfectionists. You have to be able to embrace the spaghetti, and not everyone can
Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.
I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:
Then:
Oh and:
Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.
That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.
Interesting. Optimizing the factory for your immediate current needs sounds very tedious, because those needs change all the time. I instead optimize for expandability and adaptability. The factory game genre isn’t for everyone, but if you are interested in some tips:
My solution is usually something like:
This construction allows for easy expansion without having to destroy anything. I typically don’t disassemble anything unless it’s actually a problem for some reason or I need the space. This is especially important because you often need some basic components like the level 1 belts even into the late game.
Also, once you unlock robots, you can literally copy-paste, just select an area to upgrade all belts/arms/etc. in, and a lot of other neat tricks that drastically speed things up.
And one last peace of advice: Overproduce everything and let belts backing up balance out the resource distribution. Then if you discover that belts that previously were backed up are now sparse, figure out why and optimize it, usually by adding more production of whatever the missing resource is.
Ultimately throughput is all that matters. Loss of throughput because you don’t need something isn’t wasteful. Loss of throughput because you aren’t producing enough of something is a problem to solve. Things that don’t affect throughput don’t matter and aren’t wasteful.
I feel both of these strongly for the same reasons, also GoW had all the sluggishness of a Souls-like which immediately made it not fun to play.
Agreed. New GOW was much better.
wxpwn@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Factorio’s the awakening for a lot of people on certain ends on the spectrum. My AuDHD makes it crack for me. I will say though, while the tutorial teaches you some essentials, it just throws you into the deep end once you start a real game.
I only discovered all the tips and quality of life from videos online, and there are some troubles in the game you can solve on your own but good fucking luck (belt balancing).
Might not be your kinda game, but if you ever feel like giving it another chance, check out some vids online for beginner tips (: It’s a game about stimulating the Eureka! part of our ooga booga caveman brains and it feels amazing.