Farming Simulator Franchise

[Huntn]

​

Anyone playing?
I recently got a wild hair and purchased Farming Simulator 19 for $7 on sale. I've tried other simulations like Truck Driver, and that one pissed me off because they had reduced States to ridiculously small representations of States, so something that should be a 3 hour drive is a 15 minute drive. Yes I understand that gamer's don't want to sit and drive up the simulated road for 3 hours, but I mean even a city like San Diego is ridiculously small.

Anyway so I've got Farming Simulator 19, and it has 3 modes, easy for learning (which is not that easy) although there are a lot of tutorials, a normal and a hard. The first thing I did was give myself $1M so I could experiment in easy mode and not be sweating going bankrupt. A real plus is that you can set up a tractor to do something to a field, and then hit H to hire a driver who will run the tractor back and forth and alleviated the mind numbing job of plowing a field, although I understand it could be soothing for some people. Anyway I'm not yet ready to quit this, and still playing Kingdom Come Deliverance, enjoying that and some of the conversations you find yourself in. It's holding my interest so far.

So anyone playing this franchise? there is a FS 22 out for about $50, but I'd rather try it for $7 and see if it sticks. And I have Disco Asylum also purchased on sale, waiting in the wings...

 

[Huntn]

Regarding Farming Simulator 19, on easy mode it started fun, but quickly became apparent that this was steps 1-7, get some money, buy some better stuff steps 1-7 over and over, and over, whatever fun quickly fades away into a mind numbing routine. If you play this game, don’t be offended, and I’m curious to know what the appeal is?

On easy mode, you have a farm, some equipment, and some money. The graphics and environment are nice. You disc a field, plant it, fertilize it, clear it of weeds a couple of times, harvest it and deliver it to market, all with heavy equipment, doing this with multiple fields. As you make money, you buy more stuff for your farm, and buy more fields So you can do this even more.

I suppose the attraction is emulating something, not unlike the truck driver simulations*, but this simulation appears mostly about getting up to speed with the best way to grow multiple crops (there is a market with fluctuating crop prices), what equipment does what best, and so far I have not seen any disasters, so I’m not sure why I would want to invest 500 hours in steps 1-7 to get paid for a crop to just acquire more land to wash, rinse, dry, repeat.

*Actually this is much better than a truck driving simulation where you pick up a load and drive from point A to B and drop it. Farming Simulator has more tasks involving driving a tractor back and forth across a field, to keep you occupied.

Farming Simulator 19 has one saving grace, that won’t save it, but you don’t have to run your tractor back and forth across fields yourself. If you get bored out of your mind, you can hire a worker to do this for you, so you can more treat this as a farm management game.

If you play on hard mode, I’m especially not sure what the attraction is others than playing a harder (non-friendly pricing) shallow, methodical, boring, simulation pretending to be a farmer. This simulation has zero depth imo, your existence is in the fields with infrequent trips to town to deliver crops or buy equipment. In this version, (and there are newer versions which might be better?) there is zero social life, zero social interaction, you never eat, sleep, go to a dance etc, just doggedly sweating in your fields to harvest the next crop and grow wealth so you can do this with 10 fields instead of 3. It’s pretty though.