There used to be a time when fans of strategy and simulation games were stuck playing exclusively on PC, but in recent years, the genre has really started to grow with fresh support for consoles. In some instances, it has hardware support, like the ability to use mouse and keyboard input on Xbox. In other instances, the ability for a strategy sim to leap to console required a little more effort on the devs' part to create a UI that was controller and big-screen-friendly.
One of the more recent strategy sims to cross over from PC exclusivity to launch on consoles is Satisfactory. This first-person strategy simulator with an open world was incredibly popular on PC during its extremely lengthy Early Access period — racking up over 123,000 reviews that are Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam in the time since its 2019 debut.
Wholesome resource hoarding for the corporation
Satisfactory offers players the opportunity to experience the planet Massage-2-(AB)b, either alone or with friends, to discover vital resources that can be refined and returned home to the FICSIT corporation. To do this, players will need to explore the planet and locate useful resources like power slugs and various ores. Factories are a massive part of your gameplay loop here, and players will need to refine the resources they harvest with their factories to upgrade and continue to fulfill FICSIT’s request for material goods.
The game begins with players choosing where to start their expedition on the planet. There are four biomes to choose from: the lush grass fields are relatively flat land with ample resources, a rocky desert with balanced resources that is close to water, a northern forest that presents a greater challenge due to varied terrain with a lot of verticality, and a more risky dune desert that can make getting started extra challenging.
You don’t need to fret too hard about missing out on resources by picking easier starter locations. There’s only one map in Satisfactory, so you’ll ultimately end up exploring all of the great biomes over time as you build and improve your factories.
Once you decide where you (and your friends, if you’re playing cooperatively) are going to start your adventure, you are free to take exploration at your own pace. Despite the storybeat about exploiting an alien planet for precious metals, Satisfactory is a surprisingly wholesome gaming experience. There’s no true failstates here. Instead, player death results in a crate being dropped that can be retrieved later. Or, players have the option to go into the settings and opt to keep their loot upon death, eliminating the risk and freeing you to explore Massage-2(AB)b at your own leisure using a variety of traversal options like vehicles, jetpacks, and jump pads.
After you’ve successfully explored and uncovered viable resources, you’re going to need to find ways to refine those resources into useful items to send back to FICSIT. That’s where the automation comes in. In the start, players are limited in the tools unhand, but with refining and crafting, players can build massive sprawlign factories that are fully automated in no time.
Factory building is done from the first-person perspective, and allows the player to automate and optimize their resource collecting operation — whether that is building high into the skybox or over mountain peaks or across the great plains of lush grass. Satisfactory encourages the player to experience the game in a way that suits them best.
Creating a simulation game for the console
Satisfactory’s developers, Coffee Stain Studios, are no strangers to creating a simulation game experience for consoles. The team has previously developed the wildly successful Goat Simulator, while the studio’s publishing arm was partly responsible for the successful launches of Deep Rock Galactic and Valheim.
In a developer vlog for Satisfactory, Coffee Stain Studios’ community manager Jason Edwards answered some important questions about the game’s console launch. In the video, Edwards describes some of the decisions made regarding cut content or features in the console version.
Players loading Satisfactory up on the Xbox Series X|S can expect to choose one of three gameplay modes. Quality will lock Satisfactory into a 30fps frame rate, while performance offers some extra wiggle room to lead up to 60fps gameplay. A hybrid “balanced” mode will see Satisfactory running at 40fps.
In addition to dedicated performance modes, Satisfactory on console does not feature crossplay with PC players — though Xbox and PlayStation 5 players can coexist to cooperate with one another. Edwards describes the decision to forgo crossplay and mod support on consoles to the limitations of console development.
If the console version of Satisfactory can only support a few thousand items being displayed at any one time, it could cause instability to the game to allow those limited players to join PC servers that may be running mods or otherwise increase the amount of live objects in the game.
Even without support for mods or crossplay, Satisfactory offers players the chance to engage in a wholesome and relaxing gameplay experience while adding in the tension of upkeep a corporate overlord’s opinion of you that can be fun and just a little silly.
The game’s console edition is expected to continue to receive updates simultaneously along with Steam updates for the foreseeable future, and the game’s 1.2 update has already been teased.
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