The modern doom saga gives me the same vibes. The team really poured their hearth in it!

Factorio is in that top-tier. I just tried Core Keeper and had the same feeling, gushing with QoL and thoughtful design. Refreshing to play sandbox-y games where mods don't feel mandatory.

> brimming with QoL features.

I'm surprised they didn't find a way to further improve the belt system. I thought they had it solved pretty well but e.g. Shapez is leagues better (talking about belt placement only here).

IIRC, a number of the team members started as players.

This is a weird perspective. The middle planets can be approached in any order. And mods allow near-infinite variety - especially those that build on the platform of custom planets.

> there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.

Sounds to me like you are caught up in trying to chase optimization and bemoaning the fact that there's only one optimal strategy. Do a no trains run! Or a no bots run. Or a 1000x science modifier run, or Lazy Bastard, or Death World, or... there are plenty of constraints, both programmed-in or self-imposed, that can push you out of the "standard" optimal strategy.

It's a deeply philosophical question in many ways - if you don't enjoy the direction a studio takes its game, is that their problem? Earendel who designed Space Age has a rigid take on game design that was absent from the original Factorio. In the base game if there was some aspect that you didn't like it was totally fine to disengage with it. In Space Age there is a lot of mandatory requirements down to the bizarre approach to prescribing weapons for particular maps (in hindsight it is actually a bit weird that they didn't make the use of flamethrowers mandatory at some point; they may change that eventually).

Space Age doesn't respect the people who played Factorio as a light a-la-carte design sandbox experience. But it isn't obvious that is worse as opposed to just different. Wube doesn't have to build games for those people, they have many players who clearly wanted different things.

I agree. I played Space Age once, and don't plan to ever play it again. The devs approached things from the angle of wanting to generate new logistical puzzles, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted the expansion to play much like the base game, but with more stuff added. I did like Vulcanus (the most vanilla-like of the new planets), but otherwise the expansion was a big whiff for me.

Space Age is intentionally a different game. They did not discontinue the original game. Space Age is a mod. You can play it or not, just like you can play Bob's/Angel's or Pyanodon's or not.

Do you play Space Age just on Nauvis or are you playing without Space Age entirely?

Success is downstream to passion, not the other way around.

You may love https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2__Factory...

Have you played the Factorissimo mod yet? It's literally abstraction.

Agree - I see Kafka on it!

With actual (virtual) drills!

I felt this

Not sure if this seems too random but I think that's what I like about OpenStreetMap editing: it's only a few clicks to improve the map and thousands or more people will come across it. You're changing the world in one of the literal senses of the phrase, and can do it from an armchair (doing quality assurance or using aerial imagery) or use it as motivation to seek out places near you that you've not visited yet. Maybe that's something you'd enjoy as well

You think Factorio its self is bad? Try the Space Exploration mod! It expands the game with a ton of fun new problems.

Literally what I just said

You can make it consume more VRAM if you want. There's a 13GB texture modpack that I use so it looks nice on my high DPI screen. Totally optional but it sure looks good.

I'm not certain but my guess is Factorio doesn't have the elaborate systems for streaming and unloading textures 3d games has.

In fact, sometimes when your game lags too much you can speed it up by zooming in! (Only in some cases)

> The game doesn't consume that much VRAM. It plays on 4 GB GPUs just fine.

Not everyone bought a GPU to run LLMs on. That is quite a bit of VRAM, especially for non-desktops

Purely from a vram perspective. A triangle is just 3 vertices and some edges. A few bytes of data.

A similar 2d image of a triangle would likely be thousands of bits of data.

The 2d probably uses a little less per pixel. Whereas the triangle has slightly more expensive compute per pixel cost. But modern gpu have dedicated hardware for that.

3d is probably more expensive compute but cheaper vram usage. At least to a point and a certain set of conditions. Barring things like textures and others.

But we can't program it yet.