Farming Simulator 19 is exactly what it sounds like: tending fields, raising livestock, bringing crops to market. There’s a lot of tractor-driving involved. It’s a simple concept that feels grand in its execution. Farming does, after all, encapsulate a whole mess of activities, each with their own challenges and nuances. For more than a decade, the Farming Simulator series has obsessively concerned itself with the finer details of its subject, recreating the pastoral life nearly all the way down to the pungent smell of the soil. This deep affection for agriculture is why it has pulled in millions of rural and urban gamers alike.
While harvesting virtual wheat at your own pace is indeed soothing, some ambitious players like to test themselves against the rest of the Farming Simulator community. They plant massive fields, herd small armies of cattle, and speed trucks and forklifts across their estates to fill supply lines that barely hold together.
Farming Simulator 19 is the first game in the series to lean into competitive multiplayer, and this summer will mark the inception of the official Farming Simulator League, a circuit of tournaments run by GIANTS Software which will culminate in a sixteen-team world title showdown at FarmCon 2020. This is more than merely a fun idea. Around $280,000 in prize money will be paid out over the course of the contest.
“Multiplayer was always part of the early beginnings of the series, but it was just cooperative,” GIANTS CEO Christian Ammann told us. “What the community did was they used mods to create a competitive game.” This evolution started several years ago, and it typically involved players creating modest racetracks or narrow bridges atop which two players would engage in games of tractor chicken. (Think of a pugil stick fight, but with farming equipment.)
The folks at GIANTS took these ideas and ran with them, staging a handful of multiplayer events in 2017. “That's when we came up with the first season of competitive play,” Ammann explained. “There we did four offline tournaments, and they were very successful. I think after the third tournament, we really started to see a development.” On the back of an overwhelmingly positive response from the Farming Sim community, Amman and company began to talk to sponsors and organizers about setting up a league.
From there, GIANTS went on to put together 2018’s Farming Simulator Championship, the predecessor to this year’s even more expansive Farming Simulator League, which will hold tournaments at a number of high-profile European games showcases like Gamescom and Paris Games Week.
What distinguishes the Farming Simulator League from previous iterations of competitive Farming Sim is that it more closely resembles the full game. “We extended the gameplay quite a lot from the first season,” Ammann said. “It's very deep now, very complex. It has elements of traditional esports titles, but we still tried to keep the authenticity and the spirit of Farming Simulator.”
Those esports elements include players working against each other in teams of three, a dynamic scoring system, and a pregame loadout screen that asks players to choose their equipment from a massive roster featuring around 25 real-life farming tool manufacturers. In short, the experience is a little bit like an online shooter or deck-builder, but it’s also very much its own thing. Players are still tilling, planting, and harvesting. They’re just doing so against the clock and an opponent, with a sizable cash prize at stake.
“There are a lot of games trying to enter the esports market at the moment. What we do is something unique. We don't want to create a new battle royale game,” Ammann said. He stresses that the Farming Simulator League is special because it’s been built upon a series that many people already enjoy. It wasn’t designed to be an esport in the first place; only through the mod community’s inventiveness did GIANTS realize they could put a fresh spin on their long-running franchise.
The league itself is serious business, attracting professional gamers and corporately sponsored teams alongside pure Farming Sim enthusiasts. Ammann and the GIANTS team are evidently proud of what they’re building. “This interest is completely organic,” he beamed.
On its face, a Farming Sim competition seems like a silly endeavor, but it’s a testament to the thoughtfulness of both the developers and the series’ committed fanbase that it works so well in practice. It’s an engrossing esport that belongs to a subgenre all its own. “In the end it’s very close to real farming,” Ammann said. As anyone who has worked the land can tell you, that takes considerable talent. It makes sense that there would be plenty of people out there itching to find out just how far their talents can stretch.
The Farming Simulator League kicks off on July 27th at FarmCon 2019. You can check out the league’s full schedule here.