Back at the
beginning of October, I made a post talking about my latest hook in gaming.
That hook came from revisiting the Feed a Cow For Christmas Jingle Jam 2018 stream
of the Yogscast, and within the post I gave a brief history of my exposure to
Yogscast content which led into how I first got that hook into Farming
Simulator.
At the end, I
said I had my eye on what would become of Farming Simulator 2020 on Switch.
Depending on if I felt that would give me a great experience, I’d either buy it
or give it a miss and wait for 2021 – which would be the new entry rather than
a mobile port of the previous year’s game.
Well, things
didn’t progress that slowly. From 2017 on the Xbox One, it took no time at all
before I jumped onto the Switch edition of 2017, which is pretty much the same
game with just a few tweaks to get it running on less powerful hardware. I was
already having doubts about 2020 on Switch being the full content packed offering,
and to see that there was such a thing on Switch had me wanting it. In a
portable form, I’d get more play out of it.
And that indeed
happened. In near enough two months, it has seen more than one hundred hours of
play. To make things feel unique between the two versions (I’ve still been
putting a few hours on the Xbox One version since buying the Switch version), I
played on the other map included within the game, with separate goals in each.
I was still in love with the gameplay loop, the relaxed nature of everything,
and even exploring around the maps.
2017 was great
fun, but I’d already said how it wasn’t as refined as 2019 looked within that
previous post. From that Feed a Cow For Christmas stream, I’d seen a good
amount of the maps within 2019 and wanted to explore them for myself. So, to
try to push myself back to playing games on a PC (other than GTA V), I bought
Farming Simulator 2019 on Steam.
I’ve recently hit
and gone beyond ten hours of play on it, and it does feel a much better
experience over 2017 in some areas. The mission system, where you’d help other
farmers, feels more involved now. Whereas 2017 would have you work from the
field the mission was tied to and hold you there until the job was done or the
timer ran out, with 2019 you are no longer locked to the field of the mission’s
origin. Missions can be accepted anywhere on the map through the menu, and you
are no longer restricted to the set vehicles of choice, with the ability to use
any you already own.
The freedom that
offers is a lot better, and the same goes for the start of the game. With 2017,
you started with a full farm already – complete with buildings, machines,
fields, and a silo to store crops within. 2019 gives you none of that, instead
giving a large sum of money for you to do what you want with. Instead of buying
fields, you are now buying pieces of land, so you can choose where you want to
base yourself. While the largest pieces of land are not going to be available
to you even with such a large amount of starting cash, there’s a good amount of
areas you can buy with the freedom to go for however many you want.
But you still
need to buy all that equipment to run your farm, so there needs to be a balance
of land ownership and vehicle purchasing (or leasing if you want to go straight
for the big stuff). But it’s those vehicles that are perhaps the largest
downfall of the game. Things were floaty and very easy to lose control of in
2017, sure, but in 2019 the problem seems a bit worse. Harvesters – great
massive heavy beasts – shouldn’t be losing grip so easily. It’s not a problem
when working on a field, but when travelling between them and on the roads,
they do seem to like acting the same as the lightest of tractors when turning.
There’s also a
few things missing that 2017 had, most notably placeable solar collectors and
greenhouses, though a mod can sort that easy enough. Instead, animal pens have
now been made placeable, which is much better than having a set point where you
have to look after them. It’s a feature that really pushes that freedom to have
things where you want them, and I’m currently saving up the in-game cash to
make use of it.
Two months with
the series has been enough to cement it as one of my favourites. There will
come a time that I burn out, as always happens with games, but I’m confident that
it won’t be happening any time soon with this series. No matter which version I’m
playing, I can lose myself in it and pass hours away. It can always grab me,
and unlike a few other similar games, still continues to do so.
Once again, I
must give a shout to the Yogscast, as while I knew of the series, it was seeing
the Yogs play it on that stream that pushed me to giving it a try. And my wish
of seeing them return to it for this year’s Jingle Jam has happened, with the
first week of the schedule having been released. This year’s Jingle Jam is
one I am sure will be brilliant, and it gets started on the first of December, with Feed a Cow For Christmas being on the second.
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