My family in law goes on a bi annual diving trip around my birthday and every time they get borderline offended that i want to spend my birthday with my friends and family instead of on a boat doing nothing all day because diving scares the living shit out of me.. like????

First-Impressions: Farming Simulator 15

I’m sorry mum, I bought a Farming Simulator game.  I honestly don’t know what the hell it is about esoteric games with a weird amount of acclaim that I find so attractive, but for some reason I find myself indelibly pulled to them every single time. Reviewers like Noah Caldwell-Gervais will often analyse games that have been poorly-received in the mainstream, and give an alternate perspective on things that make me feel like I need to see what charm these titles hold, so I suppose it’s the mystery that arouses my curiosity, or the fact that I’m so tired of AAA formulas that I flock to these games. It’s why I bought Homefront: The Revolution. It’s why I’m thinking about buying No Man’s Sky when it’s gets cheap enough. And it’s why I bought Farming Simulator 15.  Farming Simulator 15 is the fifth of six games in the Farming Simulator series, and, unlike so many of the titular ‘Simulator’ series, this one, along with the Euro/American Truck Simulators, actually displays some semblance of competent design. That’s not to say that its barely-iterative, bi-annual release schedule doesn’t reek of the developers milking a cash cow (farming pun not intended), but at least these games are functional and somewhat entertaining. 

I suppose it’s pretty sad when I’m writing the words ‘at least it’s functional’ as a positive attribute of the game, right?

In any case, after doing a bit of research I chose Farming Simulator 15 due to the fact that the gameplay is roughly the same as it’s successor, and it apparently has a breadth of mods that placed it over-and-above FS17. It turns out that most of these mods pertain to different types of equipment, and vehicle skins, and almost nothing to do with graphical or gameplay enhancements which I’d hoped for, but I’m new to the ‘farming’ genre, so chalk that misguided assumption up to a rookie error.

In Farming Simulator, you are gifted with a handful of tractors and basic farming equipment, and tasked with building your business. There are a few ways in which to do this - crop harvesting, animal husbandry, and logging. Farming is the first thing you will endeavour to master, and to be fair, it’s not a walk in the park (even if the difficulty almost entirely comes from financial management), because those tractors aren’t cheap, and you’re saddled with $100,000 in debt before you even begin. That debt manifests itself as an interest fee that is subtracted from your bank balance at the start of every day. The good news is that you can control the progression of time, so when sowing seeds and harvesting, time can move at a 1:1 ratio if you like, and then when waiting for crops to grow, at anything up until 120:1 speed. The smart farmer will use his time tending other pastures while one grows, and you will need to be smart, because on top of the daily interest fee, you will be charged a period running cost for your machines, as well as for any seed or fertiliser you stock your machines with. As you get rich and buy more plots of land, you may also wish to hire workers to do the tedious jobs for you, and this will also drain your bank account. 

But it’s worth focusing on the word ‘tedious’ there, because, let’s not kid around, farming isn’t the most adventurous of careers. The gameplay mechanics themselves are pretty straightforward, and I was surprised to find that there’s a surprising degree of illusion when it comes to the how the game presents the farming aspect. The typical breakdown of gameplay is: cultivate the plot with a plough or similar device to remove weeds, sow the seeds or plant the vegetables, fertilise the growing crops, and then harvest them at the peak time. The game teaches you how to cultivate and sow the land, but whilst you may be overcome with an OCD desire to see your plot turn into a perfect row of lines meticulously designed, it becomes clear pretty quickly that all the game requires you is that you colour in everything between the borders of the field. The cultivated land has a specific texture, and all you need to do to plant on that land is make sure it’s all the same kind of texture, so you don’t have to worry about having the lines zigzag all over the place - you can cultivate in concentric circles from inside to outside if you wish, as long as the plot of land looks the same. The same is applied to sowing seeds - as long as you’ve run the machine over every bare patch, regardless of the neatness or direction, you will have a complete field when it grows. 

And this is where the newbie may fall down - your early machines are not efficient in their cultivating/planting, and it may take you upwards of 15-20 minutes of running it back and forth over the plot to perform one leg of the job, and oh dear can it get tedious. I wouldn’t mind it as much if you could have music or a podcast running, but there’s no in-game facility for this, and even if if there were, it’s not like Euro Truck Simulator in which you’re constantly having to be alert to your changing surroundings; it’s just back and forth, back and forth until the field is full, then repeat again to sow the seeds, then repeat again when you want to harvest. If you do this with the three fields you’re given as a starter in the first of two maps, it can take you an hour or more just to cultivate them all. What I mean to say is, prepare to play the long game, because this is where FS15 feels like a time waster more than anything else.

Visually, the game is very simple in almost every aspect. Textures are pretty flat and the lighting is very simple, although the day-night cycle is lovely to look at, and it’s nice to feel the day wear on as you work, and I must give a special mention to a nice little detail in which the trailers and hoppers fill up dynamically depending on where you tip your harvest (so, if you position your pipe over the front, the harvest will pile up at the front, etc, etc.) However, the single biggest aspect in which the game goes into a solid amount of detail is in the design and workings of the vehicles - they are all modelled off true-to-life brands, and the complex workings of the mechanisms are all modelled very realistically. It’s almost startling how incongruently intricate the design of the machines are when compared to the overall visual design of the game at large, but it can’t be said that there’s not a deep respect for the machines at work here.

I was also surprised by the open game world - there are several dozen plots of land that can be bought and cultivated, as well as numerous places to sell your harvest, silos to store produce, and shops to buy equipment from. That’s not to say that it’s filled with life, exactly, as the few pedestrians and cars that wander around soullessly fail to make add much of a sense of reality to the world, but in the end I suppose they’re just there to make the place feel less empty .

I haven’t tried the multiplayer, but I can imagine that this is where FS15 will truly come into its own. Sadly, I haven’t managed to convince ‘up to 15′ of my friends to buy the game, but the thought of 15 people rampaging around the terrain, ramming each other and ploughing fields already inspires a great sense of excitement in me. I guess, for the time being, that I’m going to have to go it alone, and after the first initial hours, I felt like I’d hit a wall. My canola wasn’t growing as fast as I wanted it to, but it was close enough to maturing that I didn’t have time to go and start plowing my biggest, unused field (the thought of which filled me with nightmares of hand cramps and carpal tunnel syndrome), and I stood there realising that once it did mature I would have to get in my harvester and drive back and forwards again for another quarter of an hour, and I shut it down and haven’t gone back again in days.  For what it is, Farming Simulator 15 certainly lives up to its name, and it’s only when you get down to it that you realise that so much of farming is driving backwards and forwards over a plot of land for hours at a time. I imagine that farmers love solitude, nature, and the feeling of growing something with your bare hands (and the help of hundreds of thousands of dollars of mechanical equipment), but lacking both nature and the ability to get your actual hands dirty, what stands out mostly with Farming Simulator 15 is the solitude. I’d heavily advise getting some friends to play the game, as I fear that, alone, it’s little more than a time-sink.