![]() Newcomers will be able to jump in and enjoy a very healthy balance sheet, and a farm with plenty of fields already “owned” and ready to farm. In the end there’s something genuinely enjoyable about taking ownership of something and watching it grow, whether it’s an entire city, or just a farm, and Farming Simulator nails that. Having a profitable farm, regardless of how you do it, requires an unending commitment to “work” from you, and while all of this will come across as quite dry to a lot of people, in practice it’s no different to the process of watching cities grow in something like Cities Skylines, with its authentic modelling of the work of a city planner. You can instead ask “helpers” to handle tasks while you focus on other things, though that naturally comes with a wage that you need to pay them. ![]() You can choose to manually manage every single lot of farmland that you’ve got, though that becomes unwieldy after a while. It’s fun watching various bits of machinery start to pile up around the place, though. The equipment that you need to maintain your farm is expensive, too (in in-game currency), gently reminding players that farming is a more expensive business to manage than we’d generally be aware of. If you choose to be a livestock farmer instead, the process is just as intricate. You’ll need to till the fields, sow seeds spray fertilizer, deal with weeds, and then harvest the final crop, all using fully licensed equipment from real-world manufacturers. However, the game aims for genuine authenticity when it comes to the process of growing the crops. A couple of in-game days and you’re set to go to market. But, while it might be a “static” game, it’s a visually impressive one, with meticulously designed farming vehicles and equipment, and there’s a real aesthetic appeal to looking out over field after field of carefully laid down crops.įarming Simulator is abstract in that you’re not going to need to sit there and wait for months for a harvest to grow. Regardless of the reason, I’m sure the developers were going for “rural” in the design of the village and landscape in Farming Simulator 19, but it comes across as “depressed.” Furthermore, because crops grow slowly, there’s just not much motion in the world. Who knows, perhaps the village is dead because it is going through hard times like many real farming villages around the world and no one’s out shopping. Farming Simulator 19 is a fairly “static” game, in that it’s open world but you can be driving through the heart of down and you’d be lucky if you see more than one other car and one pedestrian on the road (which you can’t drive over for kicks, or interact with in any way. One area where there’s been a lot of work done is to the visual engine. The game box quotes “ new vehicles, activities, crops, animals, tools, and ways to play – solo or with friends,” and technically all of that’s true, I guess, but the update feels much like what we expect from the most cynical annualised updates we see to sports games, to the point that I was able to jump into the new Farming Simulator and comfortably skip past the tutorials. In other words, the shop’s at a different set of co-ordinates this time around, and you need to drive a little differently to get there, but you do once there is much the same thing as last time. There’s a different map to explore, but really that’s just moving around all the important places that you had to visit in the previous title. Farming Simulator 19 (which is set in America) plays much like Farming Simulator 18. I do question about whether the series needs to be an annualised thing, though. While they’re not based in Australia, this series does an incredible job of raising awareness for the lives of farmers, anywhere in the world. Which is why I’ve been an advocate for the Farming Simulator series for quite some time now. We live comfortably in cities where agriculture is almost an abstract idea and we rarely question how we end up with food on our plates. That’s something that most of us don’t think about much. Prolonged drought, ruined crops… it’s not a pleasant time to be a farmer across much of the country. In Australia, climate change is hitting our farmers hard.
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