Factory construction game Factorio is getting “one big expansion pack”, according to publisher and developer Wube Software. The title has also sold over 2.5 million copies since development started more than 8 years ago.
Factorio’s 1.0 version launched last August and was followed by January’s 1.1 update, which will be the vanilla game’s final release. “It will be maintained, so bugfixes, simple modding interface additions, or minor tweaks can happen, but that’s about it,” the developer wrote in a blog post before delving into options for the title’s future.
Other options were taken into account alongside Factorio’s upcoming big expansion but, as the post explains, they wouldn’t have been as good a fit for the title. Its niche appeal and smaller player base would have made it harder to grow the player base through constant free updates.
A sequel is the “exact opposite” of what the developer wants to do. The post also brings out the difference in expectations between modern and older sequels. The former are “expected to be very different in many ways,” the developer says. Smaller DLC packs were also taken into account but would have been a messy option for everyone involved.
Factorio’s big expansion pack was chosen because it allows the team to “focus purely on extending what we have and make new content.”
“It would be one well-defined product that would be significant enough to recapture peoples attention, and it would be compatible with our workflow. Technically, it would be ‘just’ a new version of the game, so all the infrastructure of mods being updated, multiplayer etc. would just work the same as it worked until now,” the post reads.
Wube Software is “starting work on it now” and doesn’t “think that it will take less than a year to develop.” Due to its early stage of development, no details were shared about how it will expand the base game.
Nevertheless, the news of more Factorio being on the way is bound to please fans, regardless if they jumped in eight years ago or later in the game’s journey to selling over 2.5 million copies.
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