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I'm starting to think factorio space age suffers from the same gamey mechanics problems that make modded Minecraft unappealing for me.
Everything goes quadratic, everything before a particular weird meta becomes instantly obsolete the second you hit an arbitrary point on a tech beeline.
Like the correct way to make Legendary Concrete is a rube Goldberg system of turning stone into basic furnaces and recycling them back into stone with quality modules and filtering. Then taking all the non-legendary concrete, painting stripes on it, then erasing the stripes in an infinite loop to farm a 1% drop rate of the highest tier concrete. It's a game mechanic totally disconnected from both reality and the internal rules established at the start of the game.
The same sort of thing turned me off Minecraft too. You get invited to a group server and play for a bit, and then someone goes:
I don't know, it just ends up seeming so arbitrary that there's no real joy in thinking your way through it, like one of the old point and click adventure games with the nonsense puzzles.
Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but this is the reason I always preferred the vanilla experience in games. It's like all the mods are just cheat mode but with an extra long and frustrating to type console command. And space age feels like a mod.
This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless. That’s part of why I loved PUBG so much: you had to scavenge limited supplies of items from the game world so most of the time nobody is running meta because they have to work with what they can find.
I don't really mind if there is a right way to do things, irl or in games. It's just that figuring it out should feel like reasoning from first principles, not trying to get into the head of the writer to follow his weird moon logic.
It's like the old adventure game puzzles where to fix a broken pump you had to use a banana on a metronome to hypnotize a monkey. There's no way your intuition can lead you there, you just have to know what the designer wanted you to do.
Minecraft mod packs almost transcended this because the appeal is in exploiting unintended interactions between different designers' moon logic progressions. You're back to real reasoning again, but at the end it's still built on a pile of gibberish.
And yeah, I feel the same way about working with what you get. Starsector is at its most fun in the early game, when you're using ships and weapons because they're what you salvaged from an ancient debris field.
It's less fun later on when you're micro-optimizing fleet builds to farm the end game content for 1% AI core loot drops
You take that back about Monkey Island 2! The correct example is Gabriel Knight 3. In a world where masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair, you use it to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't have a mustache.
This is my favorite sentence of the week.
It is a summary of Old Man Murray's article, who absolutely deserves the credit here.
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