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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.
There's something that kind of bugs me about players who optimize for optimization with any game they play.
The game, as a piece of software, is basically just a program that is running from a start state to an end state, and the player's inputs are the one factor that determines how long, or even if it gets there. Yes, this is an obtuse oversimplificaiton. I apologize, computer science is not my forte.
Back in the day the end state was often a literal "YOU WIN" splash page before restarting from the beginning.
So by 'playing' the game, you're 'helping' the program reach a given end state. All well and dandy. But when you attempt to optimize your play to push towards that end-state as quickly as possible, you're suborning all of your other goals to that of simply 'completing' the program. The program at that point, I'd argue, no longer exists to 'serve' you, you are choosing to serve the program.
Yes, its all just math at the end of the day, and by creating a certain sequence of inputs you can make the number or the line go up more quickly pursuant to that math, and perhaps that is satisfying in its own right.
But damn, it strikes me as inverting the 'purpose' of playing games. Yes you 'win' when a given end-state is reached, but supposedly the process of reaching that end state should be fun, and/or challenging, and/or educational, and/or induce certain emotional states, and/or 'entertain' you and your friends. In fact, if the process of reaching the end state is enjoyable enough, it should be a tad dissappointing when you actually reach it!
The end state is not supposed to be the point? Unless you're in a very strictly defined 'competition' where the stakes are such that you absolutely MUST reach the end state that favors you as the 'winner' to continue.
Like, yeah, a Chess tournament is not really about 'the friends we made along the way.' Its about finding who is the absolute best at chess, which REQUIRES everyone play optimally for victory.
BUT MOST GAMES AREN'T ABOUT FINDING THE BEST POSSIBLE PLAYER! Its about helping your brain release the happy-juice or to learn something or to maybe even to kill some time... which implies that you want the game to LAST LONGER, not shorter!
At any rate, 'optimal' play, in my book, should be defined largely by what the player thinks their goals are, not inherently what the math/logic of the game itself demands to reach a point defined by the game. Its fair to say that if you do the latter, you're not playing the game, the game is playing YOU!
And yes, I realize I've called out the entire concept of "speed-running* when I say that. These are the guys who go to obscene effort to find every bug, exploit, and corner-case possible to force the game to run from the start-state to the end-state without going through all the steps in between, and thus skipping the 'process' entirely. And they pride themselves on thus becoming so engrained with the program that they can make it run to completion in obscenely short times, by programming themselves to create the best possible set of inputs so as to achieve the endstate. Not because of their own particular goals.
Hmm... I can relate to this sort of thinking. I too think something is lost in the transition between a casual game and a competitive game. But something is gained too.
Speedrunning Minecraft, is a different game than Minecraft. Even if they share most of the mechanics in theory. Letting the game play you... Is the point.
We're doing to ourselves something similar to what we do to train LLMs. Because falling into the flow of that training is pleasurable. And optimizing for something (like speed) helps us to unveil something new about the game and provides a direction for improving our own capabilities.
Those ACE bugs can be used for more than just end credit skips after all. The knowledge generalizes back to casual play. And if you don't like one category, because too much of the game has been cut out or you have grown tired of the route, you can always switch to another. Or to casual play. It's not like your free will has been entirely circumscribed.
I do think the communities get a bit overly excited about the metric of mastery over the game improving, (completion speed) when the more valuable thing to me is the understanding that has been gained regarding the game. But its alright. I won't begrudge them their records.
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