Yeah a point & shoot game where you can choose your own clothing with various 3D rendering goodies that works at good enough FPS is way more complex implementation wise than a factorio clone with its 2D graphics. For gameplay, it's the other way round.
Factorio is a lot like Dwarf Fortress - the graphics are a very small part of the gameplay.
Interacting with the simulation is the majority of the gameplay - and the majority of the simulation is spent on that.
The thing that is interesting about Factorio is it is entirely deterministic (similar to old games that could "record demos" such as Doom or the original Starcraft) - this simplifies some things and complicates others.
Right, but the simulation isn't as complex as simulating rain in a 3D game or whatever.
Nobody is arguing that Factorio doesn't have complexity. But do you really think a one-man team could create Cyberpunk 2077?
A one-man team built Minecraft which includes Redstone, which allows for some amazing complexity. But that doesn't make it more complex (dev time wise) than an AAA FPS.
> Right, but the simulation isn't as complex as simulating rain in a 3D game or whatever
I think a naive implementation of factorio would be reasonably straightforward. But that implementation would have no chance to scale to the size of bases factorio manages. The complexity of factorio’s implementation comes from its simulation’s optimizations, particularly in the face of its hard determinism requirement. (Something most physics engines and rain shaders never need to think about.)
Making a good rain shader takes expertise but probably not a lot of time when you know what you’re doing (months not years). Making a game like factorio probably doesn’t take more specialised expertise than many devs here have, but even with all the requisite knowledge it would still take me years to implement something as feature rich, correct and performant as factorio’s simulator.
There is a good xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/1425/