What makes Factorio an old-school game? Is it purely the graphics? Because almost non of its actual gameplay would have been possible in the 90’s or earlier due to the hardware of the time not being up to the task of a deep simulation and the old-school sim games didn’t have the same kind of depth that Factorio does, in my opinion.
As for breadth vs depth, I agree overall, but in my opinion Tetris had neither (doesn’t stop it from being fun though!) and Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have, in my opinion, both breadth and depth. Maybe not to the same degree as Factorio’s open ended factory building has depth, but still they have, in my opinion, a lot of depth. It goes beyond individual mechanics though and to the game as a whole, including how fun it is to simply explore and how intriguing the story is (especially when much of the story is optional and you have to find it for yourself, as in the Dark Souls games).
I’m not sure I understand what the point you’re trying to make re: “indies don’t usually have huge hopes to hit it big”. Can you explain a little more?
Regarding your “don’t get me wrong” comment, I personally don’t include those things as depth. They’re cool effects, sure, but they don’t really impact how deep the gameplay loop is. I do, however, include the overall world building if it makes me want to explore and the story (both of which Rockstar do well, certainly in Red Dead Redemption).
But I guess overall, we are in agreement — we want deep games with interesting/innovative/unconventional gameplay loops that are fun for a long time, over games that have a lot of stuff that ultimately gets boring quickly. In my opinion, some AAA games and many indie games have this. Some are retro in style, others aren’t.
Factorio's roots are in Transport Tycoon (1994). In fact, the OTTD (open-source clone of Transport Tycoon) rail-signaling methodology was blatantly "borrowed" by the Factorio Devs (And the Factorio devs are quite open and honest about this! There's nothing wrong about being inspired by earlier games, especially since Factorio adds so much gameplay on top of the core loop).
Coal -> Power Plant -> Electricity, as well as Iron Ore -> Steel were originally Transport Tycoon concepts as well. Factorio added many more items, but the "core items" of the game are clearly based on Transport Tycoon.
Transport Tycoon was first published in 1994. One can very easily call Factorio a high-performance, modern "Transport Tycoon" game, with aliens and guns added. The core element of collecting resources, loading them into packages to be delivered across the map, and growing a transportation empire is... well... Factorio in a nutshell. The vast, vast majority of player thought goes into moving items around in Factorio, just like the game it was based on.
Granted, Factorio has a LOT of additional details. But its gameplay roots are very, very clear. The devs really took the old formula and crafted something new out of it. In any case, its old-school because its roots are clearly inspired from games in the 90s.
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If you like Factorio, I highly suggest you play Chris Sawyer's simulation games: Rollercoaster Tycoon and Transport Tycoon (or at least, OTTD, open source clone of Transport Tycoon).
I feel like Factorio is a continuation upon Chris Sawyer's obsession over detail, even if its done by a different dev. The original games have aged quite well IMO.
> but in my opinion Tetris had neither (doesn’t stop it from being fun though!)
There's a large community of players who strongly disagree with you. When you see what players have learned to do to take advantage of the RNG to score the most points in a 150-line Marathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F90TIwPLPyw
Here's another player who can do it, although not quite as long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umNTGq9p0qQ
Well... the game is deep. Not a lot of players can do the BT-Cannon Triple-TSpin Double-TSpin perfect clear loop. Then you've got players who focus on 4w center wells, then some players focus entirely on 9:1 sprints, while others focus on 7:3 splits instead.
Most players aren't trying to break the high-score lists against experts. But if you're an expert-player trying to prove yourself in the Tetris community, you'll have to pull out crazy tricks to keep up with everyone else's gameplans.
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> I’m not sure I understand what the point you’re trying to make re: “indies don’t usually have huge hopes to hit it big”. Can you explain a little more?
Today, there's just so much competition in the game development space. Something like 10,000+ games are released to Apple or Android app stores each MONTH.
The games which happen to "strike it big" and become huge successes aren't usually the games that invented a new style of gameplay either. Flappy Bird and Threes vs 2048 are the examples I give of this.
Flappy Bird is a shallow clone of the Newgrounds Helicopter game. While 2048 became the huge success on iOS despite being a blatant rip-off of Threes.
For every game like Factorio (which is certainly an excellent game), there are 10x examples of relatively poor gameplay games which become big instead.
> There’s a large community of players who strongly disagree with you.
A game doesn’t have to be large or have much gameplay depth for people to sink a lot of time into them or to play them at a very highly skilled level. There are people who sink hundreds (or in some cases thousands) of hours into all sorts of games, including modern shooters which I’m sure you agree are often quite lacking in depth. The videos you showed didn’t show depth in the game, they showed very skilled players who clearly played a lot. I’ll give you an example: does flipping a coin have depth to it? Because given enough practice, I bet I could flip a coin in a way that it will always come up heads.
> Today, there’s just so much competition
The examples you’re giving are on mobile, which is a cesspool of remakes, clones and garbage copies. Of course, so is Steam. The “strike it big” examples you’ve given are also on mobile, where games that can idly occupy someones time while they commute or whatever do well. Outside of mobile, there exist successful indie games that are more sophisticated games that made it big. But you’re right, for every great innovative game, there are 10x trash games that made it, but most of them are on mobile. I don’t know of any examples on PC or console (aside from big budget AAA games) that are like Flappy Bird or whatever and did really well. Instead you see games like Factorio, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Spacechem, World of Goo, Spelunky, Terreria, Bastion, FTL, Super Meat Boy, Rim World, Prison Architect and Braid.
A game made by a huge team is certainly an accomplishment. Take Final Fantasy X, XIII, or XV for instance. There's a huge world to "explore" (linear, but its still a huge world) with many characters, well voiced lines and a huge variety of enemies to face. But its very "wide". There's so much to do, but all of it feels shallow.
Now compare it to recent "retro" games like Factorio, or Minecraft... or the truly early games like Missile Command, Centipede, Tetris.
These games have an incredibly small core. In the case of the earliest arcade games, you never stop doing the same loop (Ex: Tetris: its 7-types of falling blocks and nothing more).
Its harder to make these kinds of "deep but simple" games today. See the "Threes and 2048" controversy for example. 2048 became the more popular version, even if the primary game loop was invented by the Threes developer.
Breadth however, can only be replicated by AAA-studios. And don't get me wrong: breadth of gameplay is perfectly fine. I enjoy Final Fantasy XIII and other AAA-titles (Witcher 3, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption...). But major studios focus on breadth instead of depth: breadth is what their audience wants and only AAA-studios can deliver it.
Indies don't usually have huge hopes to hit it big: there are exceptions like Flappy Bird, Minecraft and Factorio. But for the most part, Indies aren't going to make much money. And in the case of Flappy Bird, the "designer" more or less took the concepts of the Flash Helicopter games, ported it to iOS and put a Mario-like pixel art skin on it. Flappy Bird, despite being a commercial success, is arguably everything wrong with the indie market today. Lets be frank: Flappy Bird is just that generic Newgrounds "Helicopter" game that has a billion clones, except Flappy Bird has Mario-look-a-like graphics.
I mean, its a good gameplay loop. But the core design was certainly not made by the Flappy Bird author.
Also: don't get me wrong. There's a lot of depth in AAA games sometimes. Rockstar games has the "deepest" crowd effects and ragdoll physics. The way NPCs in Grand Theft Auto run from gunfire, or grasp at their wounds, or limp after you've hit them... its actually fun to play with the ragdoll effects in GTA5. In my experience, most people play GTA5 as a glorified dollhouse game... trying to launch cars off of ramps into the city or something. There's something fun about what Rockstar Games has done with its crowd-AI and crowd-physics.
Nonetheless, GTA5's marketing primarily focuses on the story mode. The many hours of gameplay and such.