Release Date: 20/11/2018
Played On: Win
Available On: Droid / iOS / Mac / PS4 / Stadia / Win / XBO
Time Played: 67h 31m
Progress: Owned all fields on 2 maps + worked everything available
Developer: Giants Software
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Yearly iterative games are nothing new in video game world, where it even seems like the measure of a successful franchise is whether or not it can sustain annual releases or not. However, while being a measure of success, this can also be a curse of limitations and uninspired development. After all, I'm sure we've all played an annual release and wondered what (if anything) has changed since the last time we dove in.
This might seem familiar to anyone who plays the big sports games, or the hot FPS franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Even large open world epics seem to enter the annual cycle when they reach a certain level of popularity, with Far Cry and Assassin's Creed showing that with enough developers at enough keyboards, anything is possible.
Then again, even the big brains at Ubisoft took a few iterations of unsuccessful Assassin's Creed games before they realised that taking a year off to put in some more work on the next title might actually be a good thing. Thankfully this shift in schedule seems to have worked well for Ubisoft and they might continue releasing new assassin games every second year. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that more time to work on a game means that the game will benefit and be a much better product by the time it hits shelves. I can only hope that other big publishers take note of how well Assassin's Creed has benefited from the time, and decides to give their own washed out franchises the same room to breathe.
Elsewhere though, away from the bright lights and big budgets of triple A monoliths like Call of Duty, there are those other games that get regular updates and iterations, as well as regular releases. For some reason, it seems like the simulator genre is one that allows for iterations over sequels, which kind of makes sense when you think about it. After all, these are games that completely lack any story or narrative element most of the time, and are just about a hundred percent driven by mechanics and game systems that can always be embellished and improved.
One of my favourite simulator franchise is the Farming Simulator series, which has managed to find its own place in video game libraries, as a worthwhile waste of time for quite a large audience. I may joke about it being a big waste of time, but only because I tend to play these games as a secondary function, as they rarely require much concentration and effort to progress. In fact, one of my favourite things to do is put on a movie or a TV show, then fire up a game like Farming Simulator on another monitor and work on my fields while I watch.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't to diminish the value of these games. Sometimes all I want to play is something that I can kind of ignore every now and then, all while knocking of a TV series or listening to some podcast episodes. Plus, I feel like there's room for all kinds of entertainment and that's something that video games offer more than other media formats. I don't always want to have my entire focus sucked into a game, and it's awesome that there are genres out there that cater for those times when you really don't feel like concentrating, but still want to accomplish something in a game.
Hence why I've spent hundreds of hours in the Farming Simulator series, as working the farm is something that can always been done while focusing on something else. It's why I'm always interested in whatever new version gets released, even though they never seem to bring a lot in the way of new systems and benefits. In fact, I still think that Farming Simulator 15 was the height of the series, with every game since then being a bit disappointing.
It reminds me a little of the official EA golf games that continually get new releases, but very little in the realm of improvements or iterations. Perhaps it's the same in many other genres, but I'm not aware because I don't play those games regularly. Hell, the first FIFA game I ever bought was FIFA 17 and I'm still happy messing about in it years later, even though there have been a handful of newer versions released.
So rather than talking about the ways that Farming Simulator 19 is fun and interesting, I'm going to focus more on how it's different and disappointing, as someone who has played every Farming Simulator game for hundreds of hours. I don't think it's hard to tell whether or not you're the king of gamer who wants to spend many hours working virtual fields of wheat and barley, so I doubt there's a lot that I could say to change your opinion. Instead I'd rather explain why I think you'd be better off finding an old copy of Farming Simulator 15 instead of playing the latest version.
First of all, there are a number of things that will always be different in each release of the series. The available maps have changed in each version, with some being better than others, but those are largely open to interpretation and reliant on what you want to do with your farm. The other big change is always around the crops and animals that are grown and kept on the farm, as their underlying systems make some of the biggest impacts on the game overall. Then there are all the little changes like new vehicles and tools to use, but those aren't going to be game-changing for anyone but the most hardcore farm equipment nerd.
The downside to these larger changes is that they often end up making the game worse, or changing certain systems simply for the sake of changing something. Thankfully there are systems that have never really changed, like the logging of trees and the janky physics of the game itself. You do eventually get used to how the messed up physics work in Farming Simulator games, and it would be a shame these days if they actually corrected it and made everything more realistic.
To further illustrate what I mean by these questionable changes, let's have a closer look at one system in particular: root vegetables. Basically this covers crops like potatoes and beets that grow in the ground and need to be dug out of the soil instead of threshed like wheat. As you might expect, these undergrounds crops require special equipment to plant and harvest, but they also need somewhere special to be stored. This is all cool, as it would be weird to throw potatoes into the same silo as all the other grains.
Back in the older games, you had access to a number of pre-built barns where you dumped your potato harvest on the floor so that it could be stored in a dry place. When it came to selling the harvest, you drove a trailer around the back of the barn where a conveyor belt would pull them from the pile and into the trailer.
While this system was undoubtedly simple and you only had the option of using pre-built sheds to store your potatoes, it worked flawlessly and never required any tweaking. After all, the grain silos were also a fixed element in the world and you had no say in where they would be placed. Clearly these were limited systems, but they worked perfectly and players just had to get used to transporting goods across the map whenever they wanted to unload a harvest or take a trailer-load to be sold.
Along comes Farming Simulator 17, with its list of new improvements and features. Part of the exciting new game is that there are more customisation options available to the player, allowing us to make our farms feel a little more custom-made instead of the pre-built ones we were used to. This was great, as it meant we could place buildings wherever we wanted to, and reshape the farm to suit our particular needs. Most farms ended up specialising in a particular product type, so all that crap you never used just ended up getting in the way.
I already mentioned it in my original Farming Simulator 17 post, but the potato system was entirely broken and annoying to use, thanks to someone deciding it would be better to allow for a bit of customisation. Instead of having a couple of pre-built sheds with working conveyors, you now had to place your own storage sheds and put together your own conveyor system to get those veggies off the ground and into a trailer. It sucked and was annoying enough that I stopped growing potatoes altogether and pretended that it didn't even exist anymore.
In Farming Simulator 19, I was hoping that this frustrating system would be fixed, but they seem to have doubled down on it even further. Instead of being encouraged to create conveyor systems to help you load potatoes, you're now encouraged to not do anything all with them. Of course, by that I mean that there are still no dedicated sheds for storing your produce, and instead you can either dump them on the ground, or just leave them in a trailer until they're sold. There are machines available to get the crop off the ground and into a trailer, but I simply ended up driving straight to a buyer when I loaded up my trailer with fresh potatoes. Waiting around for the best price turned into a waste of time when I could spend the same efforts turning over more harvests. Suffice to say that the iterations on the root vegetable system have been nothing but disappointing.
You may be thinking that I'm being a bit over-zealous about potatoes, especially when there are multiple systems and crops in the game that function perfectly well. However, the biggest thing that annoys me about the potato system changing, is that they've give other systems the same treatment.
Animals used to have pre-determined pens that were built in appropriate locations, but Farming Simulator 19 comes with no pre-built pens, giving you the option to place pens wherever you please. The only thing is that when you place a prefab on the ground, the game attempts to level out the grass around the placement, leaving some hideous shifts in the terrain where a flat surface has forced harsh and unnatural angles to appear in an otherwise beautiful environment.
Sure there are now horses that can be kept and ridden, and the chickens breed and lay boxes of eggs instead of randomly leaving them around their coop, but rather than providing more entertainment, these features take away from the core gameplay loop. Even new crop systems like weeds growing in fields and the ability to grow cotton, end up being a pain in the butt.
Weeds basically mean that you need to treat your fields with another element like lime, before planting and harvesting can begin. This means that you visit each field about four or five times per harvest rotation, which might sound like depth, but in reality feels like grinding. Cotton is another beast as it requires special equipment to harvest and ends up giving you large bales of cotton that need to be driven to a sale location or stored somewhere on the farm. The downside is that the cotton bales are really large and usually take a few trips to empty out a field, but they don't bring in nearly enough money to make it worthwhile.
At the same time, some of the old gripes from earlier games have still not been fixed, the largest of which is the AI pathing in fields. Part of me was excited about a few improvements that were made to the AI in Farming Simulator 17, even if it wasn't completely perfect either. Hence, it became something that I was really looking forward to seeing improvements on in Farming Simulator 19, but the sad fact is that it feels like nothing was done with the AI at all.
Essentially, when you hire a "worker" to work in a field, they take over the vehicle you're in and go about finishing off the files with whatever it was you were doing. It's a good system, as it means that you can harvest multiple fields at once, or have a worker do tasks you find less interesting. However, it only ever worked well in straight fields that were parallel with the map. As soon as the border to your field deviated from these square restrictions, the AI wouldn't know how to deal with it and would mess up their job.
Ultimately this meant that if you wanted a farm that worked efficiently and that you could hire workers to work on your behalf, you had to set up your fields in a grid formation that lacked any kind of curves or angles. In Farming Simulator 17 they made it so that the AI would understand a 45 degree angle as well as the usual 90, but it still freaked out when it ran into a curve or any kind of complex shape. Sadly, this is still the same in Farming Simulator 19 and I would hazard a guess that no development time was spent on the AI at all. In fact, if you read any of the new features that were announced by Focus Home Interactive as I did, they were very excited about getting John Deere on board, but made no mention of AI advancements at all.
Now, you might be thinking that I'm being picky, but I would argue that this is what you get when you release an annual game. I can forgive Assassin's Creed for only making small iterations, because I'm more interested in exploring new maps and cities, but I suppose a series like Farming Simulator struggles to keep my attention when the only new features they offer are new brands of tractors to buy. Perhaps I'm not as big a fan of these games as I originally thought, because they kind of lost me on this one and convinced me that I probably shouldn't get too excited about Farming Simulator 21 when it rolls its ugly head out of bed.
Of course the maps are bigger and the graphics are more detailed, but I need more out of a full-priced game that's little more than the same game I've played before. Unfortunately for Farming Simulator, they've even taken a step backwards with Farming Simulator 15 still being my favourite so far. It seems that it's not enough to just list some new features and claim that they make the asking price worth it, as your game can still be frustrating and lacking depth, even after adding in a few new bits and pieces.
Thus, it's with a little dose of disappointment that I can say that Farming Simulator 19 is not worth checking out unless you're a super fan who's itching for a new map to play and horses to ride. There's nothing in this version that makes it more appealing than previous iterations, and there's even a bunch of stuff that makes it more annoying and grindy. Maybe this is the natural life of a simulator series that has managed to get away with a lot of repetition up to this point. Maybe I'm just more aware of my time being wasted these days, but as someone who wastes a lot of time in these games, it's a real problem if you've managed to turn me off... and this game has done exactly that.