Differentiation

[CountCristo]

I asked on twitter and got no answer, so I'll try here.

I'm saying this genuinely from a curious place, this isn't designed to be a "gotcha"

What would you say Foundry offers that Factorio and Satisfactory don't? This seems like the main hill the game needs to climb to me, why would I boot Foundry when I have those options?

Again, I want there to be an answer! Not trying to say there isn't.

Thanks

 

[prismaticmarcus]

My impression is that you build robots that can then operate more or less autonomously. Dunno if the other two games have that. I'm only guessing, but...

 

[CountCristo]

I don't take input from people with plays about them.

Jokes aside, that's cool - could be a fun element for sure.

 

[elektrizikekswerk]

What would you say Foundry offers that [...] Satisfactory don't?

Destructible/shapable environment, random map, finite resources. This are at least the things I found important differences from the Demo.

 

[Cymsdale]

I can't speak toward Satisfactory because I refuse to touch it.

But as far as differences between Factorio, I'd unfortunately say very little. It's got a Z-plane and a more minecrafty type look, and... frankly that's it. And it doesn't even have all the features of Factorio like trains. It's pure sandbox in that the only goals it has are ones you make up yourself, and there is nothing to push back like the bugs (so it doesn't have any weapons or turrets or anything).

It seems purely about building factories which help you build factories to make more factory. And if that's the itch you need to scratch and for some reason Factorio doesn't do that for you, then this game might... (when it's finished).

 

[CountCristo]

Destructible/shapable environment, random map, finite resources. This are at least the things I found important differences from the Demo.

Random map and finite resources factorio have.

Are people excited about the shapable environment? Of course it's purely taste, I don't claim my view is the be all end all, but I really don't find that a draw. My goal in a factory game is to make a flat plane, something that you achieve in satisfactory with floors, and that seems to be the same in Foundry

 

[Brynjar]

Random map and finite resources factorio have.

That's probably why they cut out Factorio from the quote before responding...

Compared to Factorio it has first person, z-axis (3D) and being voxel based. That's certainly enough to give a very different experience.

Compared to Satisfacory it has voxels, and finite amount of resources which can be extracted from each deposit.

Are people excited about the shapable environment? Of course it's purely taste, I don't claim my view is the be all end all, but I really don't find that a draw.

I'm not sure I would call it excited, but some of us certainly find it to open a lot more interesting gameplay, at least with the right tools in place (which doesn't seem to be there yet in Foundry). Personally I have never really bothered trying out Satisfactory since the game seems to me like it is suffering from similar issues to Foundy. The biggest issue being that building a factory just to build a factory isn't really engaging for an extended amount of time. For that I may as well play Factorio in peaceful mode (which I don't).

 

[CountCristo]

That's probably why they cut out Factorio from the quote before responding...

Compared to Factorio it has first person, z-axis (3D) and being voxel based. That's certainly enough to give a very different experience.

Compared to Satisfacory it has voxels, and finite amount of resources which can be extracted from each deposit.


I'm not sure I would call it excited, but some of us certainly find it to open a lot more interesting gameplay, at least with the right tools in place (which doesn't seem to be there yet in Foundry). Personally I have never really bothered trying out Satisfactory since the game seems to me like it is suffering from similar issues to Foundy. The biggest issue being that building a factory just to build a factory isn't really engaging for an extended amount of time. For that I may as well play Factorio in peaceful mode (which I don't).

Ah I missed that, thanks for pointing it out.

Factory to build a factory is the genre, so I'm not really sure what has you interested

 

[Brynjar]

Ah I missed that, thanks for pointing it out.

Factory to build a factory is the genre, so I'm not really sure what has you interested

That must be a completely different genre than Factorio then. Factorio have very clear goals outside of just building a factory.

 

[CountCristo]

That must be a completely different genre than Factorio then. Factorio have very clear goals outside of just building a factory.

I'm surprised to hear that. If I had to summarize factorio it would be "build a factory to build a factory"

And if the factorio devs had to summarize factorio they would say "Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories." (line one from steam)

Everything in the game serves the function of helping you grow the factory

 

[Brynjar]

Everything in the game serves the function of helping you grow the factory

How does pollution help you grow your factory?
How does biter attacks help you grow the factory?
How does building a rocket help you grow the factory?
The game itself litterally tells you that the game has a goal outside of building a factory for the sake of building a factory:

Your task is to launch a rocket into space. Start from nothing, work your way up with automation, and don't forget to protect yourself from the natives.This is the intended way to play Factorio.

It seems pretty clear to me that a key parts to Factorio's gameplay, and therefore success, are that it has something besides building a factory.

 

[CountCristo]

How does pollution help you grow your factory?
How does biter attacks help you grow the factory?
How does building a rocket help you grow the factory?
The game itself litterally tells you that the game has a goal outside of building a factory for the sake of building a factory:
It seems pretty clear to me that a key parts to Factorio's gameplay, and therefore success, are that it has something besides building a factory.

Sorry I should have been more clear, everything the player does
so mitigating pollution and defending from biter attacks would be the things that help grow the factory

I don't think launching the rocket has a lot to do with factorios sucsess, most players don't do it

 

[Brynjar]

Sorry I should have been more clear, everything the player does
so mitigating pollution and defending from biter attacks would be the things that help grow the factory

I don't think launching the rocket has a lot to do with factorios sucsess, most players don't do it

If people played the game just to build a factory they would play in peaceful mode. I don't think I have ever seen anyone do that. I would also argue that drones with requester chests are antithetical to the whole build a factory to build a factory mindset. They make it so that the player can basically ignore what I would consider to be by far the biggest part of the factory building.

If people's only wish from a factory building game is to build a factory I struggle to see why you think it needs to offer somthing which factorio or satisfactory doesn't. Shouldn't offering pretty much the same be enough? It's not like people aren't willing to pay money to get more of the same gameplay they already enjoy.

 

[Pyoro]

I think what disappoints me the most as of yet isn't really that the gameplay is some sort of no-challenge Minecraft-Factorio, but that thematically it's sooooo generic.

Surely you can do a game that's "just" Factorio or Minecraft and give it a different theme and that's also already interesting. Bit uninspired, maybe, but if we look for example to city builders then building a Roman city and then an Egyptian one and then a modern one or whatever, yeah, that already makes a difference even if the mechanics are largely the same. So, dunno, make it about some weird bio-engineering or something.

Instead it's kinda giving those generic scifi vibes and you do the generic resource-extraction-belts-processing loop.

I don't know. There's a lot of games like that and more coming out and I would say that "what are we doing that makes us different" is really going to be a critical question to be asked if this is supposed to be some success.

Maybe there's more in the dev diaries or whatever. So far I've really only scrolled through a few of them and then there's early access demo which presumably, well, a demo of something that's not even finished, yeah, of course not going to be fully representative. I suppose we'll see. I'm skeptical as feels usual lately ^^;

 

[Negru Voda]

After liking Minecraft in it's hayday and absolutely adoring the elegance of Factorio, then trying Satisfactory but feeling that it lacked that "blockiness" that gave Minecraft and Factorio the elegance in order to help me think about stuff like in a grid matrix... I went into the Foundry Demo with moderate hope and thoroughly enjoying it.

The best tease was the tech tree showing a jetpack, which was exactly what I was hoping to see when I first saw gameplay trailers.

I'd love to be able to get to a point in the game where I can fly to a birds eye view and be able to get the feeling of puting down blueprints in Factorio and having the little bot drones and logistics network I've set up to go around and built the stuff.

The vision feels pretty solid to me and the game feel is quite promisingly placed more between Minecraft and Factorio than Factorio and Satsifactory.

The underground stuff is pretty promising, and the up in the air stuff is not something to sleep on - I can see this game doing water ships, air ships. Lots of potential if the team can figure out the technical solutions.

 

[Troyen]

Are people excited about the shapable environment? Of course it's purely taste, I don't claim my view is the be all end all, but I really don't find that a draw. My goal in a factory game is to make a flat plane, something that you achieve in satisfactory with floors, and that seems to be the same in Foundry

Yes. My MP group (which is made of players that have 2000+ hours in Factorio) was having fun trying to build a "nice" looking factory that was still quite performant. Digging out the underground to speed up mining and relegate smelting out of sight so plate and component belts come up from the abyss, having walkways above the surface factory with decoratives, digging rivers and canals to bring the water to your base (in base factorio you can only remove water, not add it), etc.

Foundary is definitely in an early state and needs a lot more development (and personally I do hope there's ultimately an objective or an option for an objective like launching the rocket - after all, there is a defunct space station floating in the sky), but I do think there is a space for 3D factory builders, as they offer different logistical puzzles and opportunities that you can't quite get in a 2D game. I haven't personally played Satisfactory yet, but I hear that game's map is fixed and you can't modify the terrain.

Whether this game will have the staying power of factorio (a hard bar to beat) will depend on how the rest of development goes and likely what modders can do with the game. I don't know if I'll put 2000 hours into Foundary or even 200, but I'm glad that people are at least trying to evolve the genre.

 

[sterrius]

Unfortunaly im also on the "Why this game instead of factorio or satisfactory?"

To me personally, and i think a lot of people there is 3 key elements to this kind of game.

1-> Game Loop -> 90% of players will focus on this and im not qualified enough to give a opinion here. Just need to be solid and have something the others don´t. Or if the game don´t want to reinvent the wheel, just make it better.

2-> A "enemy" -> Someone or Something to slow down the player, give him challenges, etc. Minecraft have them, factory have the bugs.
The free to build with no challenge to your design is usually boring. This can give secondary objectives and create more random maps as you try to maximize your efficiency based on the limited resources/map available.

3 -> A History and objetives are key to this kind of game for most players. Building is fun. Knowing WHY we are building it can greatly increase the enjoyment you get from the process.

Thats because if you don´t have a objective, even a generic one. Most players will usually lose focus and just stop playing after a few dozen hours.

One game im going to bring is not actually factorio.
its Subnautica.

The game have tools to build a base. In fact you need usually 2-3 bases to finish the game.
The exploration is wonderful and keep you hooked on the history that is basically pretty simple.
While subnautica is not a factory game it is a game that share many of the strenghts that make people hooked to this kind of game.

IF you're going to deposit hours inside a new world.
Its nice to know that world have things to reward you to explore.
Sure, subnautica have a fixed map and this one will have a random one.
But you have workarounds those challenges like having "cells" that can take the space and those cells have the chapters/challenges that wait you and give more about why we are doing this factory.


Factorio and Dyson Sphere program have very simple storys.
But its a story that help people go on with the increasing demand of the factory.

Satisfactory also have a story, i don´t know if they are working on it. And i loved that start based on Subnautica/shipbreakers. Hope they actually build a little more on that.

So i hope Foundry find something unique for the player to do outside of building a bigger factory.
Something to explore, search, defend, etc.

Every factory needs a purpose.
The purpose cannot be "build a bigger factory". The loop is totally fun but it will not be enough to retain the players that help games like this become hits.


This is my humble opinion.
Good luck for this game and going to take a look once its on 1.0.
Would be wonderful to be surprised and find a very nice gem to spend a few hundred hours on it.

 

[Workiwork]

when i think back to my "career" as gamer, Playing the same game in different iterations or samey games again and again is not unheard of. Sometimes the same but different is all you want for a time. Not that i would complain if it is totally different.

 

[Surimi]

The thing about logistics games is that they're always likely to share many, many elements. The difference is in the emphasis they place on different parts of the experience.

For example, Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program are extremely similar on paper, but they feel very different to play because they emphasize different things. Factorio is more about solving engineering puzzles and laying out machinery in a way that is efficient. DSP is more about solving logistical puzzles and using inefficient solutions to reach the point of being able to build more efficient solutions. I personally find they scratch different parts of the brain and thus aren't really substitutable for each other.

I think it's very easy in this genre to just point to elements which are the same, without necessarily considering the way a game actually feels to play, because that feeling is important.

 

[Lord Valdyr]

I think Foundry has a strong enough identity on it's own, especially with the tease about the robot factories. I feel the puzzle of building factories is very different than that of Satisfactory or Factorio itself.

However, one of the biggest things I felt about the game was, overall, there doesn't seem to be any long term goal to work towards. Building and designing a factory is all well and good, but...what am I working toward?
Both Factorio and Satisfactory have long term goals, (Factorio the rocket, Satisfactory will have the story) and Satisfactory even has the short term goals regarding the space elevator.

I can't really tell what I'm supposed to be doing in Foundry. "unlocking the tech tree" isn't really a good motivator; I need a reason to even do that, to push me forward. At every step of the build, I should be asking "Ok, what's the next step?". Foundry has great potential, but until I get that feeling, it has a ways to go.