Satisfactory is an addictive game. Probably because it is so completely open-ended. Like
Minecraft, there is no clear end game, no victory condition. The original gameplay loop sort of fades into the background as you spend more and more time building for the sake of building.
I mentioned how Subnautica had an almost perfect gameplay loop. To solve the mystery and escape from the planet, you had to dive deeper and deeper. To dive deeper you needed better gear. At each stage, you are building better equipment and diving deeper to retrieve the materials and information you need to build the next round of even better submersibles.
The base building sort of hung off it like the proverbial cart, though. Not as bad as Fallout 4, where the base building is effectively pointless. Unless you take it as a longer, more open-ended campaign; to "retake the Commonwealth." Except as much as it gets across the emotional beats of living the life, starting farms and fighting off Raiders, you actually don't change the game world at all.
Subnautica has a similar issue. There isn't much point in building more than a primitive habitat. Sure, there are some deep dives where it helps to stick a shelter down there, and -- like Skyrim, like so many other games -- you eventually need a place to stash all your stuff. But there really is no point in making elaborate undersea habitats.
Except for the fun factor. And that brings us back to Satisfactory. It has the factory game game play loop; build things that allows you to build better things. In this case, the main mechanism is you have to turn in so-and-so-many of whatever thing is currently wanted to your off-planet superiors, who then download blueprints for more complicated and exciting things.
Some of this is quality of life, like Subnautica. Having even a rudimentary habitat really saves on swimming back to the surface to get air. In Satisfactory, the most fungible resource is player time. You don't want to spend time hammering when you could automate it (and go on to do something else) and more than anything else, travel time is a huge challenge.
Well, here's the first thing that Satisfactory does:
First, it isn't a top-down.
Satisfactory does that part right; you are planning layouts and doing math, you are in the loop of researching better technologies, or building the parts you need to build a new machine that will build even better parts. But you aren't up here.
The game not only puts you on the ground, the design of interaction; the animation, sound design, and of course all that Unreal Engine splendor, make the experience of these machines and the building process itself visceral. You aren't plopping another refinery on the grid. You are climbing this hulking, belching monster as it makes sub-base rumbles at you. The game makes you feel like you have sore muscles and grease on your cheek and you
earned every bit of what you built.
And there's a human instinct. To arrange, to neaten. Every player (well, almost every player!) goes out of their way to find out how to make conveyor belts make clean turns. There is a certain summer Shakespeare, working on the car in the yard splendor about machines littering a grassy field, but pretty soon you put them up on foundations and start trying to optimize.
Optimized factories run better, get you to the next goal fast, and are easier to fix when something was hooked up wrong.
But that still doesn't explain why people go sideways. At some point, it stops being about making the goals, and starts being about trying to achieve aesthetics. A machine for living in; structural elegance not just for what it achieves in game play terms, but for its own sake.
Because honestly, all the function is achieved if you never add walls. You can lay stuff out on platforms on the ground and it works just fine. Walls are...an excess. The only thing they do is make you happier.
Well, I did find a new reason. Spiders! This isn't a base defense game but there are some annoying creatures. The spiders...those things are the most horrifying thing I've ever met in a video game, and I've played
Alien Isolation and
Dead Space.
And they are around some of the advanced resources. So I started building hermetic; throwing up walls, putting in doors and even airlock-style anterooms, running long enclosed corridors instead of just a catwalk.
There's a whole play style of building platforms high in the air, and going down just low enough to drop a mining rig, at which point you bring the goodies back up into the safe, safe sky. Like everything in this game, the environment is very present. Even when things aren't trying to kill you, it can be wet and miserable and the dripping jungle (depending on which biome you are in!) is filled with strange and disturbing sounds.
Having a roof over your head is satisfying on a deep visceral level. Having a nice habitat with doors and lights and viewing all that through the safety of a window is wonderful. So base building, too, becomes enjoyable.
And also. It is a game that is always changing the paradigm. Not just adding new challenges. At various points in the game the entire feel of the loop shifts. In early game it is all about finding resources. But then power becomes a problem, and more and more the machines are easy, but getting power for them isn't. In the later parts of the game the resources are spread further and further across the map, meaning you have to invest in transportation infrastructure; both to move the resources, but also to move you.
Every solution has by design things that keep it from being fully optimal. Trucks run out of gas. Trains get their AI locked up over complicated crossings. Conveyor belts are relatively slow. And the human transport is also full of compromise.
At the moment, I've been staying away from trains and using roads. Downside is building roads is much harder and slower than building rail lines. (Although a nice looking rail line is at least the same effort). Hypertubes are slightly slower than driving but have the advantage of being the only real "public transit" option where you don't have to keep going back to where you parked.
And in the very small scale, I've started putting moving walkways in some of my buildings. Those are a hack of the conveyor belts and only speed up the process of getting across a factory floor by a little.
A last thing. I've tried a couple times to make a clean start of things. I hate that I have abandoned factories littering the landscape, cobbled-up solutions standing in for a dedicated factory, and so on. But the progressive unlocking of builds makes this necessary. You do have to strew equipment across the grass in early game, because as much as you might know you want to arrange them neatly on a grid, you have to do a bunch of building before you get that grid.
