I'm suspicious. WoW added quality to crafting recently and it kind of sucks. This looks like a much more thoughtful approach, but I'm still skeptical that it will actually be fun and not a headache.
It's an interesting juxtaposition if nothing else, since WoW crafting has you going for quality over quantity at all times - since you don't really do bulk crafting there, while Factorio has always been about quantity and optimizing crafts per second.
I'm personally really interested to see how the addition of quality will affect factories going forward, going to be fun to see how people adapt buses and the like to handle it.
I was entirely skeptical of the concept at first and honestly had to check to make sure this wasn't an April Fool's post, but after getting through the article I think it'll be a great addition to the game lol
What sells it for me is the mativation: end game you can use a calculoter to create the most efficient blueprint (or just watch nilaus). Hopefully this extends the time when you are designing a base rather than plopping prints
I feel at this point, those colours and names are essentially a cultural baseline - in the context of game item quality, to differ from them is rarer than to use them
meh, so far 2 out of 3 announcements have been very underwhelming for me. I tried space exploration, didn't like it. A simplified version of that is still just a simplified version of that. And this quality thing just serves to make shit unpredictable, which is a step backwards to me. I hate probabilistic recipes, and the main draw here is to make everything probabilistic
So far I only liked the bot improvements. I feel quite disappointed so far, tbh
I think there's a group of people who are just going to avoid quality completely and have entire factories running at normal quality only. Kinda similar to how some people don't really do nuclear.
If you don't like the concept of going into space though maybe this expansion is not for you. I think the base game will get the bot upgrades for free anyways.