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When kovarex said in that interview video that "Developing games is nothing special, it's just like any other app" (probably inexact quote, I watched it a long time ago), I was like "Damn, of course it is, because your game is a heckin' app!". It's so complex and provides a UI/UX of a professional application (think photoshop or something like that) rather than that of a game, whereas underlying algorithms are also clearly defined and thus delightfully testable (as opposed to, say, testing campaign storytelling - which we'll probably see some day but I can easily understand why this didn't go well so far).
This isn't all of the story though, and until recently, despite almost 2000 hours on Steam, I wasn't quite able to put into words why do I really feel this way even more.
Today I finally realized what really lubricates my gears so much about Factorio. There's nothing new here but the connection between these things. The other, probably even more important reason why Factorio feels like an app is because it's fast. UI actions aren't full of fancy animations that go whoosh every time you do something. When you press E the menu simply shows up on the screen instantly. It's so instant it feels like the game already did it by the time you pressed the button. When you move 100 iron plates from your inventory to another slot it simply happens instantly. When you craft an item by hand, this obviously isn't supposed to happen instantly but the time/progress indicator still shows up instantly.
The ability to handle megabases is great and really demonstrates how much Factorio is fast but it's not the full story. Factorio is so fast that it can even handle megabases, but it wouldn't have had the same feel if the engine was optimized but the UI was slow. These days even the OS doesn't ever deliver the same feel unless you go for some extremely minimalistic Linux setup or install Windows 95 on relatively modern hardware. Everybody prefers to hide their intrinsic lagginess behind fancy animations. To re-discover this feeling is the last thing you'd expect from a game and it's completely awesome.
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