[fs2]

Looks like fun and it's a game that's been on my watchlist for years. But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to be the main goal) I'll never play it again. Just can't be bothered anymore by endless grinding and optimizing. Addictive games like MMOs and building games stopped being addictive for me once I figure out how it works.

[kllrnohj]

> But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to be the main goal) I'll never play it again.

It'll still probably take you a good 40+ hours to do that. Which is fantastic entertainment value for $30.

Looking at the steam global achievements, 16.1% of people have finished the game at all (mid-game achievements are sitting around ~40-50%). There's then 2 other achievements - finish the game in under 15 hours, and finish the game in under 8 hours. Only 2.1% and 1.6% have those achievements, respectively.

I'm also a "finish the game & put it down forever" type of person, but I've come back to Factorio multiple times. Helped tremendously by the map generator settings letting you basically "skip" parts of the game you don't like, or double-down on ones you do like. Enjoyed the trains? Make the ore patches more spread out, but larger so that your train installs are both more necessary and are more permanent. Enjoy being forced to improvise base layouts? Ramp up the cliff generator. Hate cliffs? Disable them. Feeling stressed from the external pressure that enemies provide? Disable them. Etc...

[Dahoon]

That doesn't mean it isn't worth playing the games. Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time.

[lucb1e]

I don't know anyone who launched their first rocket faster than most story-based games that you pay €60 for and get one or two dozen hours of content if you're lucky.

Factorio is half the price for more hours of entertainment, even if you never touch it again after your first rocket launch (assuming you do enjoy it until the first rocket launch and don't put it away before then).

A minority of players (like me) likes to continue expanding and optimizing after the first rocket launch, but indeed most people go play something else first and start another map later, perhaps with friends. On your second run, you'll build a much better factory. Not necessarily because you like optimizing so much, but now that you know the game you can do things much better and most people enjoy seeing that they really made progress in learning how to play a game.

[chillacy]

If it helps I found the addictive driver of factorio to be very different than MMOs. It's more like the feeling of cleaning and refactoring code, but more enjoying than frustrating. Hard to explain but their game design is quite good.