I’ve found over the last few games that I find crafting more and more frustrating in games. It took me a while but I honestly think it’s because Satisfactory did such an amazing job with automation that I find other systems cumbersome and clunky.
For my example today, I’ve always wanted to like No Man’s Sky. Building bases wherever you want to, flying around the galaxy, it seems amazing! But the crafting, dear god the crafting. I have to go over here, get an ore, bring it back, put it in a machine, take the output, put it back in another machine to finally get something out. The entire time (and now I’m at 15 hours so this was not a 20 minutes and I give up scenario) I was thinking "Why can’t I just connect the miner to the machine here?
I went on the forums, maybe there’s something I need to unlock? Nope, in fact the forums I found literally said “This isn’t Satisfactory, stop trying to change our game, the fun is in the crafting.”
So, maybe my fun isn’t the same anymore. Anyone else feel that way?
It hasn’t ruined other games for me, but it’s definitely the best 1st person automation game I’ve played. But I still love factorio, Dyson Sphere Program and Shapez. They’re all great in their own ways.
I can’t find other ones as good yet though.
Satisfactory is great because you have Z axis (DSP has some but it’s much less developed) and a ton of freedom to build incredible spaghetti nonsense everywhere. I love being able to move freely through the world in satisfactory and I’ve never found anything in its class that comes close. Subnautica is probably the closest to scratching the itch but it’s first and foremost a survival game with base building, not an automation game at all. Now that I think about it I like Grounded for the same reason but the base building in that game is much more tedious and grindy.