[2021] Appreciation post for the Factorio devs

Some of you may have heard of the disaster that is the new Leviathan DLC for Europa Universalis IV. Currently it sits at 7% positive rating on Steam, and includes minor mugs such as corrupting save files on reload, monarch stats in the billions+ (normally capped at six (6)) and more placeholders than actual pictures. For $20. The game with all DLCs easily costs over $250 outside of sales.

The last DLC was also quite bad and unbalanced, but less so than this one. They are constantly "apologising" (= appeasing to sharehoders) and "promising to do things better", just like last time. They've released two hotfixes and the big major bugs are still in the game.

The fixes they did implement are of a totally different kind. Basically, there's two bugs - the fun ones and the unplayables (literally literally). A fun bug would be, that the native Americans have over 200 development in their cities (constantinople at the start has ~30). Or the basically infinite monarch power which gives you (and a few AIs) a giant advantage. They fixed bugs like those. Your save files are still always lost when you close the game. Or it crashes. Which it at does 1/4th of the campaign. Oh and they fixed a pixel error in the meme-state of Ulm for meme points.

Long story short - it's an absolute sh*tshow.

Now constrast this to Factorio: The only negative reactions I've ever heard of Factorio are from people who didn't like the type of game. The devs and the game itself are almost always almost unanimously praised - rightly so, in my opinion. In a game this complex, it's amazing how stable the game is. Most "bugs" are things like a sprite being slightly wrong and the like.

Now, the devs haven't released a DLC (yet?). I believe they also said, the main features are all implemented, so I don't know if they ever will. But based on the released updates and accompanying path notes I'd say they put a lot more thought and care in their releases, and would never never ever release such a buggy thing for almost full Factorio price.

So just a big fat thanks to all the Factorio devs for giving us such a great game, especially when compared to what could be

Merci tüüsig <3