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Review: Satisfactory
I have finally completed Satisfactory after 123 hours.
Satisfactory is an automation game in the same vein as Factorio, aside from taking place in a first-person perspective of a very detailed 3D world. Like all of the other games in the genre, the goal is to craft a series of production buildings to harvest, smelt, and otherwise produce an ever-more complicated string of widgets to achieve certain milestones that unlock fancier widgets that require other widgets to produce, et cetra. The joy and satisfaction comes from planning and then executing these complicated production lines and witnessing the factory coming to perfectly efficient life.
Well, mostly efficient. 80/20 Rule applies.
I’m not an expert on the automation genre. Previously, I played Factorio for a few hours and bounced off; Dyson Sphere Program was starting to get good, but then it left Game Pass. So, coming into Satisfactory, I was a bit skeptical. It is difficult at this point to tell whether it was the genre itself that finally clicked for me, or whether Satisfactory itself had enough tweaks to the formula to break through, but… it did. In a big way. I played nothing else for almost four weeks straight. The genre jury is still out for me, but thus far the evidence points to the latter.
The first thing to understand about Satisfactory is that resources are infinite. When you find an Iron Vein and plop a Miner Mk1 on it, you will receive 120/minute of Iron Ore. Forever. Believe it or not, this is not actually common in the genre. What this certainty allows for is the construction of permanent supply chains. That 120/minute Iron Ore can be fed into enough Smelters to output 120/minute Iron Ingots, which then get split into different conveyer paths leading to Constructers outputting X/minute Iron Plates and Y/minute Iron Rods. The only time things would slow down/stop is if your power grid goes down or if there is nowhere for your end products to go.
That sort of subtlety of design ended up being the secret sauce for me. Is perfect efficiency required? Nope! It may just take longer, and maybe you’re okay with that. Progression in the game comes from taking ever-increasing volume (and complexity) of goods and blasting them into space. If they want 1000 of something and you’re making 5/minute, well… it’s your choice whether to do something else for 200 minutes or try to pump up the other number(s). Maybe you need to tap another Iron Vein somewhere to increase supply. Do you know of an untapped node somewhere close, or will you need to explore? Do you transport the raw ore back to your home base, or just the finished products? Have you unlocked alternate recipes via Hard Drives found in the world that could change entire production chains? I swear to god, Civilization’s “One More Turn” got nothing on this game.
It is hard to identify downsides, as this genre is new to me and I obviously had a lot of fun in this one. Something I will say though, is that there was somewhat of an insurmountable dissonance between the need to automate and the need to explore in Satisfactory. Hitting Milestones and unlocking new resources like Coal? Absolutely, let’s prioritize setting some Coal Generators up. Inbetween that though, there is an entire alien world you can (and should) explore. Not just for its own sake, but because there are Hard Drives that unlock (unfortunately) random alternate recipes, and alien artifacts that will similarly change the way you play the game later. But when can you explore? Those “wait 200 minutes” Milestones I mentioned before don’t arrive till later, so it’s more of a dilemma between “wasting” potential factory output time or just turtling up at your base and exploring only after 80+ hours.
The latter of which, ironically, is very possible because the devs actually over-engineered the world.
Seeing YouTube videos of other peoples’ massive factories and dozens of train track lines made me originally believe that sort of thing was going to be required. Surprise! Not at all. Part of the reason the world is large is because the devs give you the option of several different starting locations. But also… just because, apparently. The sheer size of the world naturally encourages you to invest in the more advanced transportation options, although you can certainly just run conveyer belts everywhere. Or be like me and spend 80 hours along a little tiny slice of the coast until more esoteric recipes required me to branch out. I guess my point is that you have options in exploring early if you want. Or not.
What more can be said? Satisfactory is great. I’ve spent more hours playing it than Skyrim, Fallout 4, Dragon Age: Origins, and actually most other games. Is it better than all those? Nah. I would personally rate a good survival title over Satisfactory any day, let alone a meaningful RPG experience. Buuuuuut… if you want possibly 120+ hours of almost-pure wirehead experience, this game has you covered.
And sometimes that is exactly what you need.
Wildstar Annoyances
Everything ain’t flowers and sunshine, cupcake.
Competitive Questing
It is kind of funny how the release of a game nearly two (!) years ago can so profoundly impact your expectations for all future games, even if you no longer play the other one. Specifically, Guild Wars 2 pretty much forever ruined the “traditional” approach to implicitly competitive questing, and it’s hard to tolerate anywhere else now, especially in Wildstar.
As some might point out, you can technically get quest credit for killing mobs in Wildstar as long as you tag it before someone else lands the finishing blow. Not in the WoW tagging sense, but the “just any attack at all” sense. The problem is that there is a profound lack of all the other supporting social mechanisms. Resource nodes are still exclusive. Quest nodes are still exclusive. Challenges train you early on to hate other human beings, even if you could be tagging mobs together; most mobs at these early levels die much too fast for you to tag them anyway, and meanwhile each dead mob is one less chance for you to actually complete the Challenge. To say nothing about melee classes usually not being able to tag in time, or how hard it is to do so as an Esper.
There is also the implicit annoyance/benefit of walking into one of the many quest caves, following in the wake of what must be The Butcher on a rampage. On the one hand, thank you stranger for clearing out all these mobs. On the other hand, err… I kinda wanted to play the game too.
Terrible Chat Interface
“Addons will fix it” is never an excuse for anything, much less something as important as a chat interface. I was singing the praises of the /Advice channel being integrated by default, and that is indeed good. What is not at all good is the fact that there isn’t a way to reply to Whispers without specifying whom. Every. Time. I just wanted to say hello to the guy who, you know, just whispered me. Having to click their name in the rapidly scrolling chat box is awkward as hell.
The workaround right now is simply joining a party with them, as your chat box defaults to your last channel entry. Why Carbine decided to not do the same for Whispers (specifically defaulting to the last person you whispered), I have no idea.
[Fake Edit] After playing around with it some more, another workaround is to use the Circle functionality. Because we should be taking cues from Google+…? I’m joking, the idea of having multiple “Guild-lite” social structures is pretty good; I could conceivably have a Circle with ex-Auch players, another Circle with the bloggers whom sort of directed me to this server in the first place, and still be in a hardcore guild if some aneurism left me a constant craving for pain and drama. In any case, chatting with multiple people via /c1 is just like chatting in a party. It’s just a shame that I cannot add accounts to Circles – what sense does it make to being able to Friend someone’s account, but having to add all their alts to your Circle individually? Just give us the option, Carbine.
Underdeveloped Mentoring
Did you know there was a Mentor system in Wildstar? You know, an in-game means to down-level yourself to go play with your friends? Me either. If I had not recalled that bit of trivia from half a year ago, I would not have scoured the web in search of the means to do so.
So, Pro Tip: target a party member and type /Mentor. Alternatively:
Right-click > Group > Mentor Player
As far as I can tell, there is no other in-game explanation for this, for god only knows what reason. It certainly isn’t automatic like in Guild Wars 2, which I suppose can be good for carrying friends through group quests or whatever. I haven’t really been able to ascertain how much XP is penalized (if any) for doing this, but at least there’s a mechanism for making playing with friends less painful.
Phasing
One of the downsides of playing with friends though is the hard phasing. Right from the start, you are going to have to click Sync Group whenever you join someone’s party just to ensure you are in the same world instance. Which sort of begs the question for why there aren’t just megaservers, but whatever.
From there, we were confused a bit upon reaching Gallows, as I got a notification that the Mentoring would revert due to being “too far away” from my friend. Turned out the NPC town of Gallows was phased, and so he disappears from my world any time he’s within 10 yards of the place. Quests that take you “off world” also basically just teleport your friends away.
It irks me that these ex-WoW devs will have to re-learn the same goddamn lessons their peers ran face-first into years ago. And, hey, if you are going the hard phasing route, couldn’t you have individual resource nodes too? Or at least individual quest nodes.
Resource Node/Tools
This next one is an incredibly easy fix, either by Carbine or hopefully an addon later on, but it annoys me that it’s a thing in the first place. Basically, gathering professions require a specific gathering tool to be equipped before you can harvest a given node. I have chosen the equivalent of Mining and Laser-Lumberjacking. But here’s the thing: the game won’t automatically switch between tools. You have to manually click on the appropriate tool to go between mining Iron to cutting down a tree. Err… what?
If the goal is to discourage people from having two gathering professions, well, good job. Otherwise, it’s just goddamn annoying.
Salvaging Wat
One quest of particular note during my brief time with the beta was the one which asked you to Salvage an item. It was noteworthy in its clunkiness. Sadly, not much has changed.
As far as I can tell, the only way to Salvage things is to click on an icon in your inventory, which brings up a Salvage window… that then asks you to cycle through your entire inventory. Wut. Why can’t I, oh I dunno, just right-click to Salvage things? Drag them into box maybe? Make it a toggle like with Disenchanting in WoW?
If the game does have these things, they are doing a terrible job at communicating them.
Public Event Nonsense
Finally, I’m not sure whether I have seen a worse implementation of Public Events in an MMO. I’d call it “half-baked,” but that implies a portion of it has indeed seen the inside of an oven, which does not appear to be the case.
While questing with my friend, the path led us near one of the marked Public Events on the map. “Alright, let’s go see what these are about.” When we arrived, we joined in killing an Elite, which ended up being the capstone to the Event. Nothing dropped, no notification of anything, and the quest markers was pointing to an empty field nearby. “No worries, we probably need to start it correctly.”
After waiting about two minutes, the NPCs respawned and the Event began again. So we collected boxes, dropped some mining bots, killed some mobs, spawned the Elite, and then killed it. Aaaaaaand nothing. Literally nothing dropped at any point. There wasn’t even an indication that the event ended, other than the NPC camp disappearing in a cloud of dust. We eventually figured out to click on the Public Event text in the sidebar, and I was presented with this screen:
Hey, thanks for tracking precisely how much time I wasted.
Err… wat.
I mean, on the one hand, okay. I can understand if their Public Event system is to only award things to people who contribute the most. It’s profoundly anti-social, and even Warhammer gave people in the middle a shot at getting loot, but whatever. What is less excusable is the lack of any indication of anything. And, you know, the fact that I actually did appear to be a top contributor. This is just a newbie zone Public Event, yes, but both my friend and I have come to the conclusion to not waste our time with these things again. One shitty experience with a game mechanic at the very beginning can poison the entire mechanic going forward.
___________
That is about where I’m at with things. I just dinged 12 13 on my Medic yesterday, so I’ll soon see how Adventures, Dungeons, PvP, Housing, and Mounts work out. I have been reading about how group content is leading to rather crazy amounts of Renown gain, which is an alternative currency you can use to purchase things like Mounts and such.
I have to say though, some of these classes are just obscenely underpowered compared to the others. Rather than Mentor my Medic down to level 8, I switched to my level 7 Engineer to play with the aforementioned friends. Jesus Christ, guys, it is so bad. It might not feel that way if that’s all you have known, but I challenge you to roll a Medic or Spellslinger and tell me Engineer belongs in the same game. What’s worse is that at level 8, you’re three levels away from getting anything approaching another DPS ability. You get Shitty Shotgun, Tickle-Me-Elmo Electricity, a reactive Crit attack that can’t really trigger off anything, and two Dumbass Bots that will aggro all the things. If the level 11 ability doesn’t blow my fucking mind, I might be forced to put on the waders and start mucking around the official forums.
PlanetSided
PlanetSide 2 continues to be a part of my daily gaming routine. It’s a tough game to nail down though, balanced as precariously as it is between FPS and “MMO.” Battlefield 3 is probably the better shooter, and certainly can be paced better, but there are moments in the epic firefights of Ps2 that simply cannot be replicated in any other FPS that I have played.
Flying around in one of the “jets” is how I usually start any play session. Sometimes – more often than I like to admit – I die within a minute of taking off. Since my timer on the jet is 8 minutes long (I spent some Certs to bring it down from 15), I usually try and spawn at some sort of hotspot, hopefully in an already-filled platoon. Sometimes that is enough for the rest of the night. Other times we either win or are pushed back, and it becomes difficult to tell where to go afterwards. If I am more than 5 minutes away from any sort of action, I usually just log off.
I inadvertantly joined an Outfit (aka guild) a few weeks ago during the Double XP weekend. During that time, the coordination resulted in Certs raining from the sky and was pretty awesome. Other times… well. To be quite honest, actual coordinated “fights” in Ps2 are pretty boring. It is like running around in premades in WoW BGs: a lot of time spent rolling over a handful of randoms, while actively avoiding other premades. Capping empty, undefended bases is about the most boring thing you can imagine. At the end of the night, you have “claimed” territory that is fairly irrelevant to your gameplay the next day, barely getting the equivalent of 2-3 kills worth of XP per base. I caught myself thinking “I should have been doing daily quests in WoW instead” the other night.
That’s the macro view. On the micro view, I’m having tons of fun in the actual shooting.
For the longest time, I was stuck in a limbo zone of wanting to buy a new gun, but wanting it to go on sale first. About a week ago I finally buckled down and bought my Engineer (some guns can only be used by certain classes) the Solstice SF, which is basically a slightly-worse default gun… with the possibility of an under-barrel grenade launcher. It cost 700 Station Cash, i.e. $7, or technically $2.33 since all my Station Cash came from a Triple SC day.
I have an extremely hard time justifying purchasing anything in F2P games as I end up second-guessing everything. “Do I really need this gun?” “Remember that one time you threw down money on a F2P/DLC purchase and then quit the game two days later?” “Will I even be playing this game 2-3 weeks from now?” It is kind of a vicious cycle, or perhaps more of a self-filling prophecy – the longer I deny myself fun, the more likely it is that I quit playing. It is not as though I even need to be so miserly with my IRL money, I just derive zero pleasure from spending money on non-deals. It’s why I can have hundreds of dollars in Steam purchases for games I have never played, but waffle for weeks on a cash shop purchase for a game I’ve got 51 hours into and counting. My hesitation is actually even dumber than that, considering the SC was already bought and paid for months ago; why I cannot see the $30 as being a box purchase of Ps2 instead of dollars I can hoard instead is beyond me.
But, yeah. Otherwise, I am having inordinate amounts of fun in the jets, and now sitting on my own engineer’s ammo boxes shooting endless grenades at my foes. Now all SOE has to do is stop releasing patches that drop framerates.
In An Age 