What Makes Factorio Stand Out
- Steeeeev
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Throughout the years, I have played and enjoyed several construction and management simulation games, especially in the factory simulation genre, where I find myself "losing" tons and tons of time just tweaking or planning. Though I don't have a preference for which I like the most, Factorio, as the first one that brings a lot of attention to this genre, might be the most well-designed one.
The Duo
In my understanding, Factorio has two main verbs that guide the entirety of the game: build and balance. "Build" is when a player builds equipment, units, and buildings to harvest resources, process materials, and produce more advanced parts and equipment. "Balance" is when a player needs to balance between different uses of limited resources, and between developing and polluting the environment. And from here, two major difficulties are formed for the player to tackle.
Time is money!
The first is the challenge of efficiency. Because the game provides a clear path for a player to evolve by setting up a tech tree, a player must produce the necessary materials to unlock more advanced equipment, units, buildings, and so on. And the way to produce those materials is to use the resources on the map. And since the resources are not unlimited, and there's only a certain amount of them in a certain area, how to effectively producing the target material is the difficulty for a player to go through. For example, just the logistical challenge of transporting raw materials to various processing units can be solved through a myriad of conveyor belt configurations or even train systems. And each solution has its own unique set of advantages and efficiency trade-offs, forcing a player to tweak and re-evaluate its designs constantly. Thus, "building" in Factorio is not just placing units and creating fabs, but rather an action related to the difficulty level a player sets for themselves. How many harvesting units should be placed? How much energy should be produced? Where should the production line be built? When to expand production capacity? There's no "correct" answer, but all answers will work one way or another; it's just up to the player to decide. That's why I think a famous quote from a game producer fits this scenario so well: "It just works!"
What's behind that tree?
The second is the environmental challenge. The world in Factorio is a hostile environment where a player would be attacked by alien species if a certain condition is reached, which in this case is the pollution index. More production equals more pollution, equals more polluted areas on the map, reducing some resources like forests in those areas, and triggering more aggressive attacks by the "aliens", or actually the natives. There are typically two ways to approach this challenge: either a player tries to lower their pollution index, or KILL THEM ALL. In order to lower the pollution index, a player may need to redesign its factory in a lot of aspects to keep the alien species from attacking more and more aggressively, for example, the power generation may need to be switched from carbon-based to sunlight-based, and some defensive structures may need to be built to counter regular harassment. On the other hand, "KILL THEM ALL" requires more production of ammunition and weapons, and even more defensive structures, since the alien attacks would be more frequent and more dangerous. Again, it's up to the player to decide which path to take and face the balancing challenges that follow. How to balance the need for upgrades with the need for defense? Which strategy is better suited to a particular terrain? "Balancing, along with development, is always necessary for a player to survive in Factorio. You can’t develop without trade-offs, just as in the real world.
The followers
These two major difficulties, in my opinion, are the key that sets Factorio apart from other similar games in the field. For instance, the game Dyson Sphere Program, released five years after Factorio, “inherited” many great building aspects from Factorio and even expanded the background to multiple star systems, creating even more building possibilities (namely, the Dyson sphere). Yet, due to the lack of environmental challenges in the first couple of years, the game could sometimes bore a player from actively playing the game, as many of the later developments are purely automatic after building, and all a player can do is wait. This led the team to eventually follow up the Factorio route, where they introduced a huge update purely focused on environmental challenges (the Rise of the Dark Fog).
The other great example is the game Satisfactory. Revealed not far from Factorio, the game provides an exciting first-person perspective with a fabulous 3D world, which enables a different experience in building factories in a new dimension. Both difficulties are presented in the game from the get-go, with the goal of building the space elevator becoming more and more demanding, requiring the player to expand and improve production, while the player finds out more and more dangerous creatures when developing and exploring new regions on the map. Yet, “balancing” is basically absent in the game – the resources nodes are unlimited on the planet, with only some location constrains, while the creatures seems to protecting the resources in the first place, but they won’t attack unless the player gets real close (and they won’t attack any buildings or structures), and their amounts are constant with a fixed respawn mechanisms, meaning that they can be seen as part of the resource as well (and it is in the game where the player can harness the creatures to put into the production). It is quite leisurely to be honest, especially when you are simply waiting for some products to meet the requirement, but since there isn’t any urgency to develop maximum efficiency and balance the usage of resources to affect the environment, the motivation here is mostly self-guided. This is so true to me, as I had several Satisfactory saves that I only played when I really wanted to (thus none of them were finished), while my few Factorio saves were all completed since I had a sense of mission while playing.
Thus, it is fair to argue that by setting these two major difficulties, Factorio has achieved a relatively good balance between giving the player the freedom to create and giving the player a sense of purpose to keep going. The factory is yours—you can build it in almost any way you want—but the game also makes sure your choices matter.
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