Factorio is a Marvel of Accessibility

The surprising friendliness of a deeply complex game

A few weeks back, I wrote about how the most persistent misunderstanding about StarCraft II is that it’s not accessible. After I published it, I remembered that I had shelved a video project around Factorio’s accessibility due to lack of time. I figured it was worth reworking into an article; I think accessibility is misunderstood in the gaming space more broadly, and I think it’s worth highlighting the games that get it right.

Factorio’s an interesting subject because it has a well-earned reputation as a deep and complex game. But I don’t think it gets enough credit for its basic accessibility design, starting with the simple idea that it’s a very difficult game to lose.

Compared to Factorio, the most similar games I’ve played are management simulations like Tropico, Rollercoaster Tycoon, or Cities Skylines. A pattern in these games is to implement income sources with accompanying upkeep costs. This design encourages players to balance economic inputs and outputs; if they don’t do this correctly, their income sources underperform or even lose money. For example, in Tropico, this can happen if the player overinvests in industry but underinvests in logistics or raw materials; in Cities Skylines, it can happen if players start losing tax revenue due to lack of public services. Players solve this problem by spending money, but since players are already losing money, they might not have enough. In the worst case, the player enters a death spiral in which their income will never exceed their costs.

Factorio has a bunch of things in place that prevent this sort of one-step-forward, two-steps-backward situation. The player character itself doesn’t cost anything, so any raw materials you mine are pure income. Structures can be disassembled and re-placed for-free; there’s no incremental cost to layout mistakes or re-construction. Conveyor belts don’t have any operating cost, so there’s no downside to undersaturation. Oversaturation is also not a problem because production structures and belts simply stop functioning at little cost to the player.

Aside from a couple of edge-cases, the worst-case scenario in Factorio isn’t bleeding resources - it’s just your factory not doing anything. This shifts your focus away from the fear of losing and toward the game’s core gameplay loop of efficient production.

Once you feel liberated to do your own thing and not worry that it will crash your economy, you can start thinking about what you actually want to do. Launching a rocket is the ostensible goal in Factorio, and it acts as a forcing function to pull you down the technology tree. Each tree traversal requires development of one or two new materials: copper ore to copper plates to copper cables to circuits and so forth. This encourages the player to think in simple, incremental terms: take what I’ve already got and move it one step further.

It’s not particularly smart or efficient to play the game in this way (it’s almost the opposite of how good players do it). But it’s genius in the context of accessibility. Factorio encourages players to build unoptimized spaghetti factories in which each section of production only makes sense in the context of what you happened to be building at the time. As you move down the tech tree, you realize that what you already have doesn’t scale, so you optimize and expand and learn. You spend the game repeating this cycle of growth and optimization, experiencing regular dopamine hits from each micro-optimization and new material.

Factorio obfuscates the fact that most of what you’re doing is fixing mistakes; it encourages you to see inefficiencies as opportunities for optimization. To support this Factorio offers tools that are basic on the surface but deep once you get to know them. Conveyor belts are a great example: limited to two lanes, running in a single direction, and requiring no power, they’re easy to use and understand. But beneath this there’s a lot of small details: the side of lane to insert and pick from, splitting, filtering, the use of chests as sources and sinks, the use of underground tunnels to maximize space efficiency, etc.

If you plan ahead, you can lay down your belts in a way that optimizes movement and gives you fine-grained control of where resources are moving. But Factorio doesn’t encourage you to think in this way; it lets you build and learn at your own pace. The tutorials are sparse and certain things like fluids are hardly explained at all. All of this acts to shift the perspective: mistakes aren’t mistakes. Your factory was perfectly good before, but now that you have a new goal, you have an opportunity to optimize and expand.

When I first started playing Factorio, I found the lack of fungible logistics infrastructure to be very intimidating. In Tropico you just setup your logistics and resource gathering separately, connect them by a road, and let the AI figure out the rest. But the fungible approach is actually a lot less accessible in the long-run. By virtue of quote-“just working”, it leaves the player in the dark about how logistics actually functions. Factorio offers fungible logistics too in the form of flying robots; but it restricts this until the end-game, ensuring players have some notion of how materials should move before offering them a more flexible approach.

Final Thoughts

Factorio’s accessibility and user-friendliness are criminally underrated. It’s a great example of a high skill ceiling paired with a low skill floor. It gives players simple tools with a lot of depth, and a ton of breathing room to make mistakes. It then shifts the players perspective to see mistakes and errors as fun opportunities for optimization. And when all is said and done, the worst outcome is not that you lose, but that everything simply stops. Each time you figure out how to move forward, you peel off another layer of the game’s complexity.

I feel like I’ve seen this several times before - complexity messes around with accessibility, even when that complexity is there to make the game more accessible. Sometimes making a game more accessible is as simple as making it… well, simpler. And once you’ve got your simple building blocks, you can attach a bunch of optional advanced features to bump up your skill ceiling. Easier said than done, of course.

Until next time,
brownbear

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