I love this team and their game and have ~1k hours in it. But I hope they soon choose to do a whole new game. Incremental improvements to their masterpiece is a suboptimal use of their talents. Just a few more bulbs in an already brilliant room. A fresh start would be a bigger risk but for a possibly bigger payoff for us.
I'd love to see their take on something like Universal Paperclips or Dyson Sphere. So many homages have been built to Factorio; they could return the favor.
Given the sheer amount of work that went into Factorio, it feels like a waste to just park it and move onto something else; it has a solid base to work off of. Its performance and the amount of Stuff it simulates is amazing.
I'm thinking they may get inspired by some of the mods out there; there's a mod to go into space (build a factory inside of a spaceship) and land on other planets, for example. They could reach out to those and buy it, iirc that's what happened with some of the KSP features and addons as well.
I wouldn't mind if they'd do something big with the enemies / monsters. Maybe introduce a new antagonist entirely.
Or a whole new class of sea and/or undersea base buildings, with unique resources that have to be launched up to the surface for your main base to process.
Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
I've always thought that factorio should have bulk transports, things that arrive after multi-hour trips. There are a handful of mods that tie the character into an external economy. Rather than the survival scenario, I think Factorio 2.0 could be based on taskings surrounding the arrival/departure of transports. Rather than "build the rocket" the task could be "have 200k of blue circuits ready for the arrival of a transport in X days." Changing up the tasking would allow for truly different factories to be developed. I'd love it if the game suddenly told me that I needed to switch from one end product to another, any excuse to delete an entire factory and build a new one optimized for a different goal.
> Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
There's one thing that could work with this idea that I haven't seen in any game so far. You've built this complex factory and have it running like clockwork. The game should be able to observe it - to notice that the flow of inputs, intermediate products and outputs has been stable (even if cyclic, because you built a solar-powered factory or have some intermittent backpressure on the conveyors) - and then abstract away your factory, simulate its matter balance via closed-form mathematical functions closely approximating the steady-state behavior. This way, you could have many complex factories running nearly for free, while your attention is focused elsewhere.
Factorio itself, in its current form, may be a tad too complex for this idea to work (at the very least, there's extra complexity in managing finite resource deposits), but I think it's doable in principle. But for some reason, as far as I'm aware, nobody ever tried it.
(Even in Kerbal Space Program, the closed-form math only applies to stable orbits; internal state is not processed. There are mods that try to simulate e.g. life support or power flow for such craft traveling "on rails", but as far as I know, they all do that by running numerical simulations and have problems with error at high time accelerations - whereas my idea would be to approximate a continuous function of time for relevant values, and use it instead of numerical integration.)
> Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
I like this idea. imo the core of factorio is conquering scale. the base game is already very polished. at this point I just want more stuff to do post launch. taking the scale up another order of magnitude (huge ships, point to point air transport for latency sensitive goods, etc.). would also provide the opportunity to expand combat a bit to provide automated defenses for far away shipments. I want my robot navy, now shut up and take my money!
Yes, but one-hit wonders are more common than repeat hits. I'm reminded of Notch's post-minecraft dreams, that space game that never got off the ground. Or KSP. Monkey Squad boiled out into nothing (KSP2 is a different team). I think they should milk the cow they have by launching massive content expansions (Take my money!).
Imho Factorio's next step should be into 3d. I don't mean a 3d game render, I mean factories biuld on different planes, or even a spherical planet. There is a game out there (I shall not name) that is claiming to be a multi-planet 3d version of factorio. People do want more.
The actual author of KSP (Squad is an ad agency... the creator made KSP inside Squad as a deal when he tried to quit, they said they would let him create a game with their money if he didn't quit) is now making another game in the same style, also closer to his original goal (he was my classmate, and told me his goal was to make a buildable airplane game, rockets were probably just easier to simulate at first) named Balsa Model Flight Simulator
> There is a game out there (I shall not name) that is claiming to be a multi-planet 3d version of factorio.
Any particular reason you don't want to name it? I mean, I know what it is, and I've sunk 12 hours into it so far. While it still has a lot of polish left to do (It's only been in Early Access for two weeks!), it shows a lot of promise. I like it because it allows me to stack belts to more than two levels which makes dealing with spaghetti a lot easier.
I have the "other", more eh..."satisfying" factory game as well. It's beautiful, but placing objects in first-person is actually rather frustrating.
I would like to see simulation games which work together. For example, combining a transport simulator, a city simulator, a production simulator and a theme park simulator. You build a quarry which digs up clay, and another which produces coal, create bricks, use the bricks to build houses in a village, expand the village, find you need a glassworks, connect your villages together and handle trading between them with a transport system...
An idea I've had bouncing around for 20+ years was a variation on Transport Tycoon where you could "zoom in" on towns/farms and play them as if you were in Sim City/Sim Farm, or "zoom out" to connect to other regions run by other players, with trading or even combat. A universal format for "simulation stuff" would mean you could have it extensible, so you could have a dedicated farming simulator if you wanted, else it would be treated as a box with an average output, with the same logic applying to sub-elements, so if someone wants to micro-optimise a plowing algorithm, they can have a "plow management" simulator which plugs into the farming simulator, which plugs into the transport simulator. At the other extreme, someone who was only interested in country level trading could have the country outputs boxed based on an average level of output.
Might be too complex for any one player to handle everything, but even so!
I feel like this similar to what Spore promised, but only achieved a sliver of.
I think the challenge is that there's a tension that comes from having lots of optional, interacting systems that the player both a) can make meaningful improvements to a system that contribute to the rest of their game experience ("If i make farming better, my town will have less food") and b) can ignore systems they aren't interested in without crippling their gameplay (or, conversely, improving one system making the rest of the game too easy).
The tension is almost tangible in games like the Paradox grand strategy games: if you pick up something like EUIV as a novice now, it's very difficult to figure out which systems are actually important to moving the game forward in a meaningful way.
Edit to add: this does sound like an awesome idea though
> You build a quarry which digs up clay, and another which produces coal, create bricks, use the bricks to build houses in a village, expand the village, find you need a glassworks, connect your villages together and handle trading between them with a transport system...
I fully endorse this idea. Like a blend of factorio + sim city + Civ VI -- though the complexity might make it unplayable, i would absolutely buy it and try anyway!
There was a mod once that after you launched your rocket in Factorio you could fly it in Kerbal Space Program, then you'd get science packs in Factorio when you landed it.
I like the idea of an expansion. In particular, the current vanilla gameplay seems to lack any concrete goals to work towards once you get your first rocket launched - you're just expanding your base for the sake of it. Which is a lot of fun, sure.
Launching your first rocket could trigger an alien invasion on the planet. You now have to fight much harder enemies than the biters you have dealt with so far. You and the aliens will fight over resource fields. And you have to stop them from building their base to the maximum level.
I'd love to see their take on a City builder. Skylines and Sim City are fun, but not challenging.
Programmatically, it's not that different from what Factorio is - isometric, moving stuff on conveyors = moving cars on roads, etc. They have the talent to make this genre more than "balance residential, commercial, and industry".
As they have stated, it is niche game / segment. It's not easy for the team to make other successful game, either on niche genre again or more broad / casual gameplay.
Additionally, the assets, algorithms, experiences and engine are optimized for factorio-like genre, it's logical that they want to utilize them more or less.
If they start into 3d like Satisfactory or Dyson Space, I won't be that optimist. Even if they can do it, it'll take much time. It'll be amazing if they can pull it though.
I think big expansion pack will be the best course for them, bonus point if they can really expand the gameplay.
If there are 0.34 lines per buyer and 37 days per line, does that mean that the average playtime could be in the proximity of 12½ days? That's impressive, and is probably much higher if you take into account the traditionally large number of Steam who don't install many of their purchases.
Something that may contribute to that may be that Factorio has never been part of a Steam sale or bundle, which is where I suspect most of those "owned but never played" games come from.
Factorio is my number one favourite game ever, and a large part of that is because of how open kovarex and the rest of the team has been during the whole development cycle, with the weekly development blogs etc. I've been a player for many years, and watching Factorio grow and get better over time has been very inspiring!
Part of me is happy about their decision to make an expansion because my friends and I can return to this amazing game in a year and enjoy a fresh experience.
But I would have liked to see what else this amazing team could have done. Like maybe a city building simulation game, optimized as well as Factorio? Would have been amazing for sure.
I think one of the best parts of this game are some of the unique multiplayer mods that exist. If development was to focus on creating some really fun and polished multiplayer mods that would attract 50+ people continuously to each game, I'd happily pay a monthly/annual subscription. It's a shame though that typical multiplayer numbers are fairly low in the order of 20-40 players in each of the top 2 games, then 10-20 games averaging 5 players, and hundreds of empty games. I wonder what it could be like with a multiplayer tower defence style game with 100+ players, or with 5-10 innovative and fun multiplayer game types all filled with enough players to make each game viable?
There are plenty of mods in this game that increase the number of resources, buildings, technologies, etc by a factor of 5 or more and I personally find this is far too complex and takes the fun out of the game and makes it too repetitive and clinical. Fragmenting the small-ish user community between "base game" and "DLC game" would possibly make the multiplayer experience non-existent due to low player numbers.
I'd really enjoy some kind of campaign expansion, a connected series of missions with specific goals and constraints. One of the tutorials, where you need to rebuild a half destroyed base (with satellite mining bases) aiming to produce a certain number of materials as the goal, is a nice example of what a campaign mission could be.
I suspect they'll go off in a different direction, Factorio is more of a pure sandbox make your own fun kind of game but I think you could do some fun campaign stuff.
They had the main campaign like that for a while, but found that losing your build between missions didn't gel with how the game was supposed to be approached.
As good it is on mobile, the interface is so small and hard to navigate / build. Now I secretly want wube to tackle factorio mobile. Not as complex as desktop factorio of course, but I want to know what UX improvements they can achieve.
Readit News
I'd love to see their take on something like Universal Paperclips or Dyson Sphere. So many homages have been built to Factorio; they could return the favor.
I'm thinking they may get inspired by some of the mods out there; there's a mod to go into space (build a factory inside of a spaceship) and land on other planets, for example. They could reach out to those and buy it, iirc that's what happened with some of the KSP features and addons as well.
I wouldn't mind if they'd do something big with the enemies / monsters. Maybe introduce a new antagonist entirely.
Or a whole new class of sea and/or undersea base buildings, with unique resources that have to be launched up to the surface for your main base to process.
Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
I've always thought that factorio should have bulk transports, things that arrive after multi-hour trips. There are a handful of mods that tie the character into an external economy. Rather than the survival scenario, I think Factorio 2.0 could be based on taskings surrounding the arrival/departure of transports. Rather than "build the rocket" the task could be "have 200k of blue circuits ready for the arrival of a transport in X days." Changing up the tasking would allow for truly different factories to be developed. I'd love it if the game suddenly told me that I needed to switch from one end product to another, any excuse to delete an entire factory and build a new one optimized for a different goal.
From the blog post:
> One of the steps we have already taken is hiring a concept artist, he might be known to you under the nick of Earendel
Earendel's list of mods for those curious: https://mods.factorio.com/user/Earendel
> Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
There's one thing that could work with this idea that I haven't seen in any game so far. You've built this complex factory and have it running like clockwork. The game should be able to observe it - to notice that the flow of inputs, intermediate products and outputs has been stable (even if cyclic, because you built a solar-powered factory or have some intermittent backpressure on the conveyors) - and then abstract away your factory, simulate its matter balance via closed-form mathematical functions closely approximating the steady-state behavior. This way, you could have many complex factories running nearly for free, while your attention is focused elsewhere.
Factorio itself, in its current form, may be a tad too complex for this idea to work (at the very least, there's extra complexity in managing finite resource deposits), but I think it's doable in principle. But for some reason, as far as I'm aware, nobody ever tried it.
(Even in Kerbal Space Program, the closed-form math only applies to stable orbits; internal state is not processed. There are mods that try to simulate e.g. life support or power flow for such craft traveling "on rails", but as far as I know, they all do that by running numerical simulations and have problems with error at high time accelerations - whereas my idea would be to approximate a continuous function of time for relevant values, and use it instead of numerical integration.)
I like this idea. imo the core of factorio is conquering scale. the base game is already very polished. at this point I just want more stuff to do post launch. taking the scale up another order of magnitude (huge ships, point to point air transport for latency sensitive goods, etc.). would also provide the opportunity to expand combat a bit to provide automated defenses for far away shipments. I want my robot navy, now shut up and take my money!
Imho Factorio's next step should be into 3d. I don't mean a 3d game render, I mean factories biuld on different planes, or even a spherical planet. There is a game out there (I shall not name) that is claiming to be a multi-planet 3d version of factorio. People do want more.
Any particular reason you don't want to name it? I mean, I know what it is, and I've sunk 12 hours into it so far. While it still has a lot of polish left to do (It's only been in Early Access for two weeks!), it shows a lot of promise. I like it because it allows me to stack belts to more than two levels which makes dealing with spaghetti a lot easier.
I have the "other", more eh..."satisfying" factory game as well. It's beautiful, but placing objects in first-person is actually rather frustrating.
An idea I've had bouncing around for 20+ years was a variation on Transport Tycoon where you could "zoom in" on towns/farms and play them as if you were in Sim City/Sim Farm, or "zoom out" to connect to other regions run by other players, with trading or even combat. A universal format for "simulation stuff" would mean you could have it extensible, so you could have a dedicated farming simulator if you wanted, else it would be treated as a box with an average output, with the same logic applying to sub-elements, so if someone wants to micro-optimise a plowing algorithm, they can have a "plow management" simulator which plugs into the farming simulator, which plugs into the transport simulator. At the other extreme, someone who was only interested in country level trading could have the country outputs boxed based on an average level of output.
Might be too complex for any one player to handle everything, but even so!
I think the challenge is that there's a tension that comes from having lots of optional, interacting systems that the player both a) can make meaningful improvements to a system that contribute to the rest of their game experience ("If i make farming better, my town will have less food") and b) can ignore systems they aren't interested in without crippling their gameplay (or, conversely, improving one system making the rest of the game too easy).
The tension is almost tangible in games like the Paradox grand strategy games: if you pick up something like EUIV as a novice now, it's very difficult to figure out which systems are actually important to moving the game forward in a meaningful way.
Edit to add: this does sound like an awesome idea though
I fully endorse this idea. Like a blend of factorio + sim city + Civ VI -- though the complexity might make it unplayable, i would absolutely buy it and try anyway!
Programmatically, it's not that different from what Factorio is - isometric, moving stuff on conveyors = moving cars on roads, etc. They have the talent to make this genre more than "balance residential, commercial, and industry".
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic Transport Fever 2
Additionally, the assets, algorithms, experiences and engine are optimized for factorio-like genre, it's logical that they want to utilize them more or less.
If they start into 3d like Satisfactory or Dyson Space, I won't be that optimist. Even if they can do it, it'll take much time. It'll be amazing if they can pull it though.
I think big expansion pack will be the best course for them, bonus point if they can really expand the gameplay.
2.7 → 0.42 → 0.34 lines of code per one buyer
0 → 2.3 → 4.4 years of playtime per resolved bug report
0 → 4 → 8 months of Steam playtime per one commit
0 → 9.1 → 37 days of Steam play for each line of code
But I would have liked to see what else this amazing team could have done. Like maybe a city building simulation game, optimized as well as Factorio? Would have been amazing for sure.
Check out biffa plays YouTube channel for some great traffic optimisation.
There are plenty of mods in this game that increase the number of resources, buildings, technologies, etc by a factor of 5 or more and I personally find this is far too complex and takes the fun out of the game and makes it too repetitive and clinical. Fragmenting the small-ish user community between "base game" and "DLC game" would possibly make the multiplayer experience non-existent due to low player numbers.
I suspect they'll go off in a different direction, Factorio is more of a pure sandbox make your own fun kind of game but I think you could do some fun campaign stuff.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241
My 6+ year old computer can't handle the enormous factory complexes I like to build.
Now I have switched over to my next hard drug addiction:
-> Mindustry. <- https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry
Factorio + tower defence: it's awesome and runs on a potato.
Why did it have to have an Android version. Nice game though!
You must be hire-able in EU, because they can't afford to sponsor people.
Sadly this doesn't include me :(