Satisfactory: An Unlikely Masterpiece

okay let me lay out a scenario for you you have a pure deposit of iron ore in the earliest stages of the game the most you can yield from that deposit is 120 ore per minute with a mark 1 miner that iron then has to be processed through a smelter in order to produce iron ingots each smelter can produce at maximum 30 ingots per minute whilst having an input of 30 ore per minute basically one to one but you have to keep in mind that you're mining 120 ore per minute so in that case only having one smelter is inefficient and necessitates four smelters in order to get a proper one-to-one ratio on or mined to ing it's produced per minute easy enough but now you have two basic iron parts that need to be produced from those freshly pressed and processed iron ingots iron plates which need 30 ingots per minute which is perfect since your smelters are already making 30 ingots per minute and therefore you can create one constructor per smelter to maintain one to one production but you also have to make iron rods which only need 15 ingots per minute okay no problem two constructors per smelter and bam we still have 100 efficiency oh what's that we need iron rods to make screws okay no problem how many rods do we need to make screws wait 10 10 rods per minute but no but i'm making 15 per minute so what i'm just gonna have five left over where do the other five go well that's not going to be 100 if who the brought an algebra quiz to my video game what i just described is one of the more basic examples of problem solving in satisfactory what's satisfactory well satisfactory is a first person factory building and automation game developed by the swedish base studio coffee stain most well known for their 2014 high art masterpiece goat simulator in satisfactory you play as a lone pioneer employed by the fictional fix-it inc sent down to an alien planet where your main objective is to mine the planet in order to create machines that then create parts that are then sent up a real thick boy of a structure to a mysterious corporation that from my experience doesn't seem to give a two-cent about your health and safety riveted well don't feel bad i wasn't exactly sticking to my seat when my friends pitched it to me either but that's what really inspired this video because despite how monotonous or boring this game may seem in concept it is without a doubt one of the most well designed and masterfully crafted experiences i've had the pleasure of playing through my near 30 years of gaming and i wanted to share why that is right off the bat satisfactory is lush with its style and presentation your first introduction has you strapped into an orbital drop pod only able to look around an unassuming chime indicates the start of a pre-recorded message that is narrated by this robotic like female voice similar to that of gladys and portal which funnily enough is a direct inspiration that was cited to me by a q a i had with one of the community managers you're then inaugurated into your role as a pioneer working for the fix-it incorporated in just under 60 seconds the entire objective of the game is laid out in front of you construct machines for mining explore and exploit the planet for its resources and automate the whole process as quickly as possible as well as reporting back any new discoveries to be analyzed by research and development all done through a very cheeky animated demonstration akin to the short pip boy videos from the fallout series the video ends and the descent begins through a tiny window on the front of the pod's door the flames of the atmosphere burn against the heat shielding of the pod and the darkness of space begins to fade away and the pale blue of the planet's sky fades in the pod shakes and creaks with a faint alarm buzzing in the background clashing against an increasing swell from the game's pleasantly ominous soundtrack the pod stabilizes as thrusters push you back against the planet's gravity the clouds apart from the viewport and you see it the strange alien planet you're going to be spending your time on now this next connection wasn't specifically inspired by this but to me it felt very reminiscent of cressing that underwater mountain in bioshock and revealing rapture for the very first time i plan to speak more about this later but while i'm here i can't help but touch on the incredibly satisfying and almost tactile like quality to the game's sound design like i mentioned with the atmospheric entry phase satisfactory provides a considerable amount of meaningful audio to everything the player does and interacts with down to the thunk on the pods smashing against the planet's surface into the grinding of the door's levers which despite not being something you as a player control the movement of steel feels chunky and lumbering to watch being operated followed by the depressurization of the pot against the atmosphere it's such an engrossing and enchanting experience and there it is after only two minutes and 30 seconds the game sets you loose on your own to venture out into the world and start amassing resources it should be noted that this intro sequence is optional and can be skipped entirely if you choose to start a new game so instead of going through the rigors of setting up and upgrading the hub each time you can begin a brand new build already on tier one and you're off to the races but back to your first playthrough however you're given a box of materials that are then used to create the hub the central base of operations which you as the player will find yourself interacting with throughout the game it provides you with a crafting bench to hand make items two biomass burners which will help power some of your machines in the early game and a terminal which will be used to submit set numbers of materials that will then unlock new tiers or milestones which will provide new items machines and equipment the main core of the progression and satisfactory is funneled through this terminal and is something that i'll explore later but for now i'd like to touch on how the early game works speaking again with one of the community managers the topic of balance was brought up particularly early game and how difficult something like this was to balance something that i noted after starting a game getting so far into it learning new ways to do things and creating a new one was the dichotomy between handcrafting items or streamlining automation like previously mentioned one of your main directives is automation yet one of the first things you have to do as a new player is to mine refine and create all of your raw materials by hand so within the span of five to ten minutes you're being told to do one thing and then forced to do something that completely contradicts those directions this isn't an accident this was deliberate and it's a phenomenal example of how to prime your players as a game developer behind the facade of a game that's centered around construction and automation parallels those objectives with a world full of potential like a blank canvas for creative and imaginative people to manipulate to their heart's content this subtle act of priming makes the players either consciously or subconsciously aware that like the proverbial cat there is more than one way to skin this thing something satisfactory does in such a way that allows you to figure it out on your own respecting your intelligence as a player while not burying it so deep within the nuance of the game systems that only experienced players will discover this to me is not only one of the greatest design decisions within the game but a great example of design philosophy when it comes to making games providing agency over the process and completion of tasks naturally the most efficient way of creating items within satisfactory is to establish production lines that create those items for you autonomously yet there will be times in which setting up that new line of production would in fact take longer to complete than it would be to just craft a handful of those things manually typically where this method takes preference over the other would be in those instances where you're short a couple of units in order to complete a milestone or construct a new building where this trade-off begins to rear its shortcomings however is through the game's progression and necessity for mass creation of those items again the majority of the items in satisfactory can be crafted by hand but in doing so you limit the potential of what the game is intended to be and artificially create a less than ideal amount of tedium which can bring your enjoyment and progression to a screeching halt despite not having an economy in the game with the exception of the awesome store which you earn tickets by feeding all of your extra goodies into the awesome sink the game forces a different kind of economy on its players the economy of time sure things cost materials to make other things but more than the value of those things in relation to one another is the value each thing takes to construct based on the time it takes to construct it this is exemplified through both the amount of time it takes a machine to construct it as well as how long it takes to construct these items by hand at the workbench back to the early game and how it acclimates and teaches new players how to play the disembodied voice of the game's ai ada does a great job of providing adequate information about how things work without overwhelming the players her blurbs about newly acquired resources or constructables either provide a basic overview of the item or in the case of upgrading an existing item provides information that scaffolds off the knowledge of the previous iteration again i cannot help but praise coffee stain on their design philosophy in regards to how they approach game progression and player information everything is pieced out in such a way that being able to keep up with what's going on never feels as daunting or overwhelming as it could with that in mind they also knew that the game needed to have information not just be available but accessible as well things like the end game notification and resource log which gives detailed breakdowns of all the things that you have unlocked and access to as well as the baked in search function that also doubles as a calculator so if you're ever forced into a debate with your math teacher ever again about life and its lack of readily available calculators tell them i said they can suck it because satisfactory has your back and trust me the deeper you get the more that thing becomes relevant into your gameplay being that this is an open world game there are plenty of similarities between this and other open world games but several deviations that set satisfactory apart for starters there are no quest markers of any kind the most you'll find in the way of telling you where to go is done through the pings on the compass when scanning for mineral deposits i found this to be easily one of the most refreshing aspects of satisfactory because it further deepens the idea that the game is yours to be played however you see fit like i said before there is no one way to do something in this game in terms of how you approach a particular problem or objective by this point you've already learned about your resource scanner and now have to make the decision about which direction you choose to go this also begins a trend in which your previous decisions immediately begin to impact your future decisions based on where you decide to erect your hub you may or may not be close to other available or necessary resources something you will constantly be evaluating the further you progress through the game upon the discovery of newer resources once you've gone through the process of upgrading the essential parts of your hub a process which acts as the game's tutorial you're now ready to begin the game in earnest in a way satisfactory also acts in ways that are akin to puzzle games the puzzle being not only how you set up your factory but where and how effective those choices lead to a desired outcome more than likely your first time playing satisfactory will result in a streamlined tunneled tunnel vision-like approach to automation remember that ran at the beginning of the video about parts per minute and production efficiencies yeah that's a concept that may or may not come to most players right away instead the most common approach seems to be to create one thing that leads into one thing that leads into another thing so instead of looking at how many parts per minute something is making your only concern was simply producing a finished product from raw materials resulting in a single miner into a single smelter into a single constructor that sort of thing might seem trivial at the time but it's a single breadcrumb of a larger loaf of information meant to subliminally teach you about bottlenecks overflow and production now i can't confirm what i'm about to say next but it feels too intentional not to be the case so while i'm going to be pulling this out of my ass just know that it's being done with a lot of educated thoughts and assumptions now satisfactory purposefully goes out of its way to subvert your ideas about problem solving in video games let's use portal as an example in the first portal test chambers 1 through 18 are designed to teach you about all the mechanics the game has to offer culminating in test chamber 19 and the subsequent sections after meant to challenge your knowledge of all those mechanics to be used in tandem in order to complete the game satisfactory on the other hand while doing things similar also twist your knowledge of systems and mechanics forcing you to approach and solve problems laterally instead of vertically let me try and explain what i mean a parallel between satisfactory and portal and their approach to problem solving can be best illustrated with a companion cube level and satisfactory you're given tools i.e the portals companion cube to create products i.e solve the test chamber we know what these tools and materials can do because we've used them and seen them used in basic and familiar ways now imagine if at the end of portal you're given another companion cube exactly like the one in test chamber 17 but now the cube can make portals of its own and shoot the rockets needed to defeat gladys that's how satisfactory feels while everything your given and taught builds upon itself it also never stops forcing you to rethink how it's being used challenging almost every decision you've made and creating problems where they didn't exist previously this is made even more apparent by the inclusion of alternate recipes which i'll discuss more in the open world and exploration portion of the video but for now i want to address how the problem solving lends itself to both organic and manufactured solutions to said problems let's start by looking at power in order for your machines to function they need electricity despite all the future tech available to you you're still on an alien planet without an established electrical grid of any kind so you'll have to start from the bottom with the most basic materials the first thing you're given are two biomass burners attached to the rear of your hub each of these burners are capable of generating 30 megawatts of power for reference a mark 1 miner needs 5 megawatts of power a smelter needs 4 and a constructor needs 4 as well they may not seem like a lot but it certainly adds up quickly but the real kicker here isn't necessarily focused on how much power you'll need but how often you'll need it you see when you build multiple biomass burners in order to conjure up the necessary power needed to run your machines each one of them will need to be filled with materials capable of being burned as fuel the most basic of which being sticks and leaves which can be gathered by walking around the world and picking them up now because this is satisfactory this isn't the only source or version of this fuel should you feel inclined however you can take the sticks and leaves you've collected and construct them into biomass at a workbench by hand the biomass has a much better fuel efficiency and will take longer to burn resulting in power for much longer versus the raw sticks and leaves what's that sounds like a huge pain in the ass well kinda but i can assure you that it's supposed to and that's okay because once you've unlocked storage units from the organization milestone you can automate biomass production for your factory by placing copious amounts of leaves into a storage container you can then send them to a constructor to make the biomass for you now all you have to do is refill the burners once they run out oh i'm sorry that still sounds shitty and tedious okay no problem let's just unlock the clear cutting milestone which gives us access to a chainsaw and solid biofuel now we have the means to collect leaves and wood in mass while simultaneously providing yet another alternative fuel source which will then burn even slower and provide an even better fuel efficiency so now that i've completely sold how awesome all of this is let's discuss why this is designed this way and why it's not nearly as bad as it sounds yes babysitting your power grid in the early game isn't fun or exciting but it isn't supposed to be it's built this way to encourage progression again what satisfactory excels at is teaching the players lessons through mechanics and problems likely the first thing you'll run into is power consumption and how easy it is to exceed it which will then prompt the need for more burners so now instead of expanding your factory and focusing on the tasks and milestones you have to derail your progress in order to get everything back on track this isn't meant to impede you necessarily but rather to balance progression in a way that feels natural which simultaneously drives the desire for self-sustaining power of some kind nudging you in the direction of progression in order to obtain said power thankfully this comes once you've obtained coal power in the third tier but as the famed philosopher once said mo money mole problems by now you're into the meat of the game and you have begun to see the fruits of your labor you've likely gotten a modest but productive chain of facilities crafting all of your basic parts and necessities with the exception of running out of or exceeding your power usage your facilities if set up correctly are now able to operate on their own thus it's time to leave the nest and explore the planet for additional resources now it should be noted that the game can be explored at any time should you feel inclined to do so but i'd be lying if i said it was advised because your means of defense and mobility are so limited in the early game it creates an organic limitation on you as a player that almost discourages exploration without feeling like you're being told not to more than likely you've been too busy building up your factories to really even consider doing so and in turn the game sort of allows you to limit yourself based on your needs at the time unlike other games which have tiered unlocks and progression satisfactory rarely limits the places you can go sure you may not be able to reach certain heights due to a lack of materials but that boils down to the limitations to your capacity to get there not the game telling you you can't the only exception being areas encased in toxic gas or irradiated uranium deposits which kill you quickly over a short period of time places which later become accessible once you've unlocked the means to protect yourself otherwise the planet is yours to explore but like i said it isn't immediately encouraged as you've likely already encountered there are hostile creatures on the planet typically in areas where there are resource nodes or power slugs most of these creatures while still deadly vary in degrees of threat level things like the fluffy tailed hogs spitters and flying crab hatchers can decently be handled with just the xeno zapper which is nice since they are the primary enemies you'll encounter on the planet that said there are other creatures such as the alpha hogs and the red and green alpha spitters which typically protect higher valued areas such as pure resource deposits drop pods or the yet to be implemented summer sloops and mercer spheres these can still be killed with the xeno zapper however but it's exponentially more difficult as they have higher damage thresholds and output more damage themselves and then there's the stingers those hell spawned spider-like abominations conceived in satan's anus designed to drain the bladder and bowels of all the encounter i don't know who's responsible for the creation of these things but i want to take this opportunity to address them for a moment if i may now i don't take what i'm going to say personally because i love and respect all that you and the other developers have put into the game but you in particular i've played my fair share of horror games and have plenty of other games stress me out or get my heart racing but nothing nothing compares to the unabated fear and terror those things incite unironically the game even features an arachnophobia mode because of these things which doesn't make them any less deadly but instead replaces their character models with a sprite of a cat and the ass puckering skittering noises they make into adorable meows that should give you an idea of how horrid these things are okay sorry for the rant but it needed to be said all right back to the game and the other that it does well and stuff this is how satisfactory curbs the exploration in organic and meaningful ways again the game doesn't tell you you can't go anywhere but once you've wandered off into a fight you aren't prepared for you'll quickly realize how unequipped you are to properly defend yourself this is similar to how fallout new vegas did with its players when you leave goodsprings at the start of the game you can walk yourself right into an area littered with deathclaws hinting to the player that while yes you can technically go here you're going to have a bad time doing so it also keeps the player progressing through the milestones that are laid out for them instead of just dipping out to hike about the planet by far one of the more interesting creatures if you could call them that are the power slugs they serve a pretty incredible role in the automation aspect of the game after finding and researching these things you learn the ability to overclock and underclock your machines which at first sounds like a no-brainer which would be better to do so more power means you'll make things more quickly but just like everything else at this point there's a trade-off that being a significant increase in power consumption for any machine that you choose to overclock the flip side though being that in cases where you might be overproducing or perhaps don't necessitate things to be made at 100 capacity you can choose to underclock your machines which again reduces power consumption and in a lot of cases provides a better load balance of materials to other machines and flattens the curve of overall power consumption in the process all these design decisions work in tandem with each other perfectly in the early game you can't leave your factory because it will inevitably run out of power and even if you did you're substantially ill-equipped to deal with the threats of the world it's a beautifully ingenious amalgamation of players desires encouraging and necessitating progression all done without being told you have to but rather you want to in order to facilitate the other things you want to do to explore this beautiful and strange plant for its resources and its secrets which brings me to exploration and its impact on the game [Music] the open world of satisfactory is not procedurally generated but is instead built and crafted specifically to function the way that it is every rock tree resource or slug has been placed by design and intent you may be wondering if something like this would be detrimental to the overall experience of the game and i don't believe that it does i'm sure arguments can be made that an ever-changing map might be beneficial to replayability but my response to that would be that what you would gain in a single area of preference you lose in the intentionality of everything else the game builds upon i know personally i've become quite jaded over the years with many games that feel this need to be an open world trying to build and fill a place with things to do but ultimately just results in boring landscapes and superfluous checkbox collectathons this to me is what makes the open world of satisfactory so refreshing and unique they don't let a single part of the chicken go to waste here with the obvious exception of the aforementioned items that are currently still works in progress everything else has a purpose and every new discovery or acquisition feels meaningful and substantial in some way something that while i'm playing i tend to get lost in and forget that i'm playing a budgeted early access game by an ostensibly independent studio rarely do i feel the sense of wonder and excitement wandering around in open world games mostly because for the majority of them the world while expansive doesn't feel substantive or worth my time to explore other than the milestones you work towards and achieve through the hub you have a secondary set of goals or objectives you can undertake as well this being the mam or molecular analysis machine the purpose of this machine is to decode and research all the items that you find throughout the world that are not part of the tiered milestones in the hub this ranges from consumable plants all the way to other types of minerals and resources that can then be used by other parts of your production i should mention that these secondary objectives are optional but only to an extent because each thing you find has multiple applications working your way through each one of these things through the progression tree within the mam unlocks further uses of said things but that doesn't mean each tier has to be researched in order to progress plenty of the unlocks are optional or merely aid to assist the players but there are currently some such as quartz and keterium that will need to be researched in order to produce a handful of the goods or objects for later stages of the game as if to work in tandem to the major production tiers imposed on you through the hub's terminal progression system what's most interesting to me about this is that you can actually access a lot of these things earlier than is necessitated for progress things like quartz and katerium can be found and utilized in the process of unlocking items or materials that don't actually become relevant for some time one of the biggest and potentially game-changing aspects of the mam and its research abilities is that of decoding recovered hard drives from previously crashed drop pods what makes these so substantial is their ability to vastly impact how you construct your factories and produce items within them on each one of these hard drives for which there are 96 as of writing this video they provide alternate recipes for production with the exception of two which unlock additional inventory space for the player once a hard drive has been unlocked you are given the option between three alternative recipes to choose from the most difficult part however is that not all alternative recipes would be considered resource efficient meaning they actually require more resources or require a factory layout that may prove more difficult than that of standard recipes provided i'd be lined if i said i haven't looked up each of these recipes every time i was presented with this choice because i don't want to make things harder on myself the game only provides the information it doesn't tell you which is better or what is worse but rather leaves it up to you to decide seeing that the game centers around this vast sense of creative freedom i can really appreciate this approach as it further emphasizes the idea that the player has agency and control allowing you to feel like the factory and the decisions you make about it are yours even when you feel like you have to do things a certain way the game constantly reminds you that you have options and it doesn't want you to feel like you're stuck doing things the way it wants you to so by now i've gone over how the game works some of its systems and how they impact the game but that still doesn't quite address what makes it so special how is it that a factory and automation game can consume one's life to the point that they spend not only hundreds of hours playing it but another couple dozen hours making a video about it what i believe makes satisfactory so special is the culmination of all the things i've been talking about before starting this project i had never played the game factorio a game that helped to inspire satisfactory as well as get a lot of people into the idea of what a factory and automation game looked like i took it on a recommendation from a friend to spend some time with the game in order to provide both some perspective and context to the genre in doing so i was a bit surprised by my experience being that i had already understood the core concept of the game and knew what i was doing i found myself feeling a bit lost and uninterested before eventually putting the game down and coming back to satisfactory while the two games are obsessively the same as far as player motives and mechanics the biggest and most obvious difference is the perspective factorio takes place from a third person isometric top-down viewpoint while satisfactory is in the first person now i'm not one that limits immersion or enjoyability to a title based on perspective but what i can say in regards to the two games is that i personally felt more invested and connected to my experience and satisfactory because of its first person perspective as i discussed with the opening moments of the game it was immediately apparent that i would be building these factories and exploring this world as opposed to moving an avatar on screen to do my bidding contrast that to the opening moments of factorio and there's a lot less fanfare or presentation provided to the players about the experience that they were going to have not to mention the connectivity i had to things i was doing which brings me to my next point about some particular details that may or may not connect with you the way they did with me in one of the developer q as on coffee stains youtube channel the user interface slash user experience lead natalie brought up something that i had never really considered before obviously we know when a game has a good or a bad ui and that becomes even more apparent when a game like satisfactory is going to have you looking at it constantly but what stood out to me the most is when she talked about how things should feel not just navigating them but executing them things like how a button should sound or feel when you press it does it have weight is it satisfying for the player to do even when it seems inconsequential it further brought to light how much consideration has been taken for even the smallest things in this game that's the secret sauce to satisfactory it's truly realizing that everything no matter how big or small has been built looked at reworked tested analyzed and implemented by the dev team despite this being an early access game other than a few minor graphical glitches it feels like this was given the same amount of love and attention you'd expect from a studio like say rockstar or naughty dog it's not hyperbole or attempting to make a pun when i say how satisfactory doing things are in satisfactory placing down a building or connecting a conveyor belt has so many audio and visual ticks that makes every action feel like it has life to it loading up items into the space elevator and sending off the payload chunks and thunks as it's being jettisoned off into space flipping switches or levers feels weighty and sounds mechanically tactile it's no secret by now that i'm completely enamored by this game and everything it does despite it appearing boring or tedious i can assure you that coffee stain has gone out of their way to provide an experience that's equal parts creatively freeing and substantive that's why i wanted to make this video more than anything not just to spend however long this ended up being fellating the developers but to highlight what outstanding game design looks like how a game shouldn't just have things for the sake of having them how some games like cyberpunk or ghost recon wildlands despite being open world games feel shallow and empty feeling like they would have been better served as if they were built out more like hitman in 2016 where the player was provided with detailed and living sandboxes for the rest of the game's systems to be better highlighted and utilized that a game doesn't need to be a multi-million dollar property or franchise to be given the love and attention it needs to be great satisfactory excels at giving the player a fun and substantial experience because it made sure that everything the player would be doing wasn't a waste of time that even when the game threw you a curveball it did so in order to challenge you but not just for the sake of challenge but to provide more substance for things to come the fact that the game is just about to release its 0.5 update is baffling to me basically informing us that this game is just halfway into its finished production that things like narrative haven't even been addressed or implemented yet still manages to retain my attention and excitement and it says a lot about how well designed this game is and that's where i'm going to leave this for now perhaps i'll come back and do more analysis after the full release of the game i know it's something i wrestled with when deciding to even make this video but i knew that there was enough here to discuss that it didn't matter if the game was finished or not if i had to try and sum up why this game is worth your time i still don't think that i could give a good enough bite-sized pitch but what i will say is that once you play it you'll understand how well it takes something that seems boring feel well satisfactory thanks for watching

Channel: Grifflicious

Views: 202,173

Keywords: Simulation, Satisfactory, Factory, Essay, Video game, Pc, Coffee stain, Gaming, Epic, Critique

Id: kq_IklMd0Mc

Length: 31min 40sec (1900 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/fuelbombx2]

That opening quote hits the nail on the head!

It’s a nice video, I feel like he does a great job quantifying some of the things that really keep us coming back for more.

[u/fellipec]

I can't agree more with the video

[u/Grifflicious]

It’s pretty good. A few minor errors here and there but the spirit is solid. Definitely worth a sub!

[u/Dark-Reaper]

1st, some of your factories are awesome. I like the design. I don't usually consider player movement through the factory as something to account for but you clearly did, and in multiple ways.

Excellent video. Thanks for sharing. Hopefully this helps persuade some of my friends that are on the fence lol.