My first real exposure to Satisfactory was long, long before playing it or even being more than peripherally aware of it, because I really enjoy Let’s Game It Out. Those videos are an equal mix of “questionable games played with a joyous disregard for the ostensible mechanisms of the fictional world” and “actually very good games played in the same style,” and so one of the first videos I watched from the channel as a whole involved Josh using hypertubes to go too fast and clip out of the game’s internal reality entirely.
The game did, in fact, look really fun. And subsequent videos about the game also showed that despite the fact these videos were about specifically building things that were not meant to work but were technically possible, the underlying game was clearly well-developed and meant to support a pretty robust gameplay style. So I made a point to eventually check it out… and now that the game’s 1.0 update is out, I’ve been revisiting the game once again and remembering why I like it.
Because while those aforementioned videos wear chaos as a point of pride, it’s not that far to how the game actually plays.
Let’s back up just a little bit. Satisfactory is a game that has been in early access for a long time (and is multiplayer!) but has just formally launched into 1.0 from Coffee Stain Studios, also known for the Goat Simulator series. If you’ve played that game, you might think that Satisfactory is the game that restrains the studio’s more anarchic and weird impulses, but that’s only true on the surface.
You play as a Pioneer working for FICSIT, which is a company that might seem like a satire of capitalist expansion except that it’s actually (deliberately) not totally clear right out of the gate what FICSIT is actually doing. You are tasked with landing on an unknown planet, alone, and building a series of objects that will be shot up into orbit via a space elevator in order to advance your level of technology and require ever more extreme objects lifted into orbit. The planet may have been inhabited by intelligent life at one point, but it isn’t now; there are animals, however, which you can occasionally tame, always injure, and sometimes will eagerly seek to injure you.
Here’s the thing, though: In many ways, the game’s experience is kind of an inverse of most current MMOs.
The majority of MMOs plop you into what is ultimately a fully realized world with reliable objectives and structure, and your job is to interact with it. Crafting is present as an option, but it is not really something that you are expected to do; lots of players try it out, find they don’t like it, and then bounce off and move on. This isn’t really a flaw; not everyone likes crafting, and not everyone should be expected to.
In fact, what I just described is the case of most video games. For example, The Sims 4 drops you into a realized world when you start playing. You do not make all of the Sims you interact with, even if you’re the kind of crazy person who starts in an empty neighborhood and builds every lot by hand. The world is a sandbox and yours to alter, but you are ultimately interacting within an established world, just one that you can push remarkably far.
But Satisfactory does not do that. There are points of interest, yes, but nothing is going to guide you to them other than your own incentive. Crafting is the gameplay, and automating that task is the biggest impediment to progress. It makes crafting into its own sort of puzzle, managing the push and pull of resources across multiple fronts.
Indeed, a lot of the guidance the game gives you is thus indirect and self-oriented. You need to generate power to automate most of the stuff in your base, but early on the only way to generate power is by burning biomass. That can’t be automated, which means that your next task is to find a sort of power you can automate, which leads you to coal, but you then need to find water sources and you need space to put them. And that’s just making sure all of your machines keep running. Oh, and you also need coal to make steel, which is another vital step in the process, so you’re looking for something that doesn’t involve a resource you really need for something else…
The game is, in the broadest strokes, a sandbox. But that can mean a lot of different things, and in Satisfactory’s case it means that the game is comfortable letting you drift. You can certainly find everything, do everything, and keep building your space elevator, but it feels like pretty quickly that starts being a secondary concern. Combat, by contrast, is at best a tertiary concern. You have to engage with it from time to time, but it’s always a sideline activity and never close to the forefront of your mind.
And you might think that trying to automate everything and sort out an ever-scaling production pipeline is unpleasant, but in fact, it winds up being kind of relaxing and hypnotic, in the end.
I’ve mentioned in previous columns that games are, at their heart, a series of interesting choices for players to make. The more interesting those choices, the longer you play. Satisfactory presents you with a number of different choices, and really, many of those choices are complex in part because each stage of the journey involves something you only have partial control over. When you have the second tier of mining machines, your resource needs and availability shift dramatically; faster conveyer belts enable strategies you didn’t previously have. And on some level, yes, it can be frustrating to have a really good setup running only to need to rip it all out and start over because it turns out you need a bunch more space for things.
But the fact that it’s all self-directed means that solving these problems becomes relaxing in turn. Sure, you might put together a slapdash, works-for-now solution for the moment just to get your resources flowing. But you can always tear it all out and make it better, prettier, and cleaner. The game even actively encourages you to do so. And each time you do so, you have a little more understanding of what you’re doing and why, how to best benefit from your prior knowledge. Your first few builds are messy. But you can remake it.
It captures the same sort of hypnotic, peaceful rhythm you usually see in MMO leveling… but instead of gaining levels, you’re mapping an ever more intricate web of resources, and potentially even doing it with friends. That makes Satisfactory a fun little gem of a game, and if you choose to use that fun to build messy conveyer explosions that you can only navigate with intense hope… well, it’s not not how you’re supposed to play the game.
There’s an MMO born every day, and every game is someone’s favorite. Why I Play is the column in which the Massively OP staff members kick back and reminisce about all their favorite MMOs. Whether it’s the new hotness or an old fan favorite loaded with nostalgia, each title we cover here tugs at our heartstrings and keeps us coming back for more.
