A Game that Exceeds its Name

Back in 2019, after months of looking at teaser trailers, and trolling the internet for more information, I finally started playing.

In early access, as an Epic exclusive, and having a computer that could run the game the best in my household, many times I realised that my Epic account was signed out and one of my housemates' accounts was signed in. The past five years this game has been a constant in my life. Watching it on Twitch, playing in groups and in dedicated servers (when they released) and it’s shaped how I game in general. Becoming my go-to standard on what I'm looking for in games as a whole.

One of the best things in the game and Coffee Stain Studios have done is build a gigantic community of dedicated Pioneers. We’ve been lead through the development journey, be it with Streams on Twitch and Youtube, a Great presence on X, and a Community constantly posting details, designs, and completely stupid builds to show off to the public and share in our mutual obsession of exploiting a planet for resources. This first-person, open-world, exploration builder with a dash of combat, has progressed and advanced through regular major updates in the early access status since 2019. Its release launch stream had almost 20k viewers when I tuned in at half past midnight before the game went live, with many other notable satisfactory streamers live and watching along, with many of them pulling 24 hour streams post release. You are dropped on MASSAGE-2(A-B)b with nothing but a short video tutorial explaining the basics. You’re then introduced to ADA, (Artificial Directory and Assistant) that will talk to you as you discover and unlock various stages of the game. (With Early Access, they used a Vocaloid for this. The 1.0 Release only tweaked it in a minor way).

You progress on unlocking and exploring the resources of the planet, shipping requested materials back to FICSIT, the company that you are working for.

For myself, I've spent the last five years hitting the end of the unlockable content, then continuing the game until the next big update and starting again. Others have been playing the same way for over a year, some for the entire five year period. Since the games 1am release (well, for East Coast Australians), there’s been many people around the world racing to get through the storyline and new content, to then work out how to optimise and develop their big factory projects, or to get back to their original factories and fix any factors that changed with the final map adjustment that occurred with the release of 1.0.

Essentially, this is a factory building game with resource management, as well as many easter eggs. Having played it as the game was developed, myself and many others are starting a fresh run and finding all the new content, because as of 1.0 there’s now a storyline. There hasn't been a storyline until the release of 1.0. Many people have over five thousand hours in the game, myself having near double that. With many games being developed going into early access convincing people to play the game in the hope the game gets finished, of all the early access games I've partaken in, this is the one that surpassed the initial promise, in my opinion. The game has naturally evolved with player input and support. One thing also: The developers would request players saves when trying to sort out bugs and glitches. One streamer’s save was used as a stress test for how they changed the system. If I recall correctly, quite a few of the developers machines were unable to run this streamers save file due to the amount of content it contained. This got them working on optimising the save file system, and we’ve literally seen a patch come through that meant that a save process that would take ten minutes to complete turned into two minutes. For the record that is an extreme case and your average game save takes less than five seconds. Here’s the base Information; DEVELOPER: Coffee Stain Studios PUBLISHER: Coffee Stain Publishing Epic Games Exclusive Release Date: 20/03/19 Steam Release Date: 09/06/2020 and Full Version Release Date: 11/09/2024 The Game was developed for eight years by a dedicated team that had excellent Community Managers. They handled the staged upgrade release, as well as actively working on improving the game from its Unreal Engine 4 duild to it's Current Unreal Engine 5.3 Build brilliantly. Look, I can't really write more about this as it's taking me away from playing the game. Satisfactory Game Review: My game rating on this is a complete 9/10. Additional Note, I've purchased this game for myself and others a total of fifteen times. I tell everyone: get this game. Thanks for reading this! If you want to experience Satisfactory for yourself, check out the links below; Steam | https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/ Epic | https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/satisfactory Both stores at time of writing have the game at 10% off, bringing the price to $52.65 AUD as a promotion for the 1.0 release.