I've had a change of heart about this game

I've played this game to absolute death, pretty much from the first early access on Xbox. It has always been a game where I knew I could sink hours into it, there was always something I could do, something to grow my factory to improve it.

Since 1.0 I've given the game a fair shot, andd I did like it at first. I never did make it up to the new sand area at PT Sierra. I couldn't figure out why, but then it finally clicked.

I feel like they took the factory, out of this game too much, at least in the early game.

Prior to 1.0, the requirements to upgrade Victor and even X-ray scaled up a decent amount with each level. Each terminal upgrade required more and more of ever advanced materials and items.

It encouraged you to build bigger and better because you needed it. You needed more mining capabilities, you needed more planting. To get even better returns you could change to blast mining and smelting.

Now the upgrades to the terminals are so insignificant that you don't even need to build a large factory. Pretty much everything can be handcrafted or simply put through a single Mk2 assembler that you find later.

I used to have to build massive factories, with massive power demands to advance. Now I need one mining set up on Lima, 1 planting setup on a different floor to get stuff for fuel and that's it.

Even the changes to the water wheels and crank generators. I said myself in one of my previous posts how the changes to ratios were good. But then realized that I didn't have a need to build the massive power farms I did before because it could be achieved way easier.

The only thing you need actually seem to need a small factory setup for is to get the mining bits going, which, up until level 11 you only truly need the mk3 which can be done with like a dozen machines.

And then to come on here and read how certain stuff doesn't even carry over into Sierra, like power generation, and how it just becomes a race against the sand just discourages me to build up even more.

I understand the devs wanted to rebalance and change the recipes around but, I feel like they made the early game progression feel like a mix of too slow with the changes of the mining and smelting speeds, but also too fast for the changes to the PT terminals as I said earlier.

It's a damn shame because until Satisfactory releases on consoles sometime next year like they plan, this is the only factory game on console, excluding Factorio on switch. They could have done so much with this game and I feel like the changes went just too far.