Comment by kryptn
9 days ago
> Unfortunately mods are not very good quality, or too difficult to enjoy.
Most of my playtime in Factorio is with overhaul mods, there's a lot of quality content there. I'm not sure how many of them have been brought to 2.0 or even will be. I'm curious where you think quality lacks.
Space Exploration has been my favorite, but Ultracube, Krastorio2, and Nullius were all quite fun. I'll admit I haven't finished Ultracube and Nullius, but I have restarted my Ultracube run in 2.0.
> Space age is interesting because new planets are being added by fans, but I don't think they're going to be as well designed and really bring anything interesting.
Check out Maraxsis and/or Cerys, these were the kinds of planet mods I was hoping for in Space Age. Maraxsis is an ocean planet and you build underwater and in deep trenches, and the planet's building has a base 50% quality. Cerys is a moon of Fulgora that's really quite small and it's more of a puzzle than anything.
What I mean is that the game design is poorly made, unbalanced. Only vanilla and space age seems like they're accessible games.
Generally game design revolves the concept of a effort-reward loop: the player must feel he is regularly advancing in the game, at a steady pace, with a difficulty that slowly increases.
Mods are often badly designed because they are made by hardcore factorio fans who don't understand this or follow this golden rule.
There was a FFF who talked about a game designer they hired, and wube constantly had to make his designs simpler so the game can be a success. It requires a lot of work.
Making a great game is about "easy to learn, hard to master". A lot of people don't understand it, but a game must be attractive enough for casual to medium players, or it just will not sell.
The magic of factorio vanilla and space age is that the difficulty is well designed. Mods often just don't follow that rule, or have a lower quality.
There is more psychology behind game design that we want to admit.
I've been told to checkout Krastorio 2, and myself I've enjoyed the Space Exploration mod
- https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Krastorio2
- https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration