Staff – November 6, 2018 at 6:44 AM
What better way to escape from the banality and stress of urban life than to come home and simulate a carefree life of farming? That’s the idea behind GIANTS Software’s Farming Simulator series, which for a decade has been tweaking its formula to produce games that are increasingly more realistic with each installment.
Farming Simulator 19, however, might just be the biggest update to the series yet. The ability to build and customize your own farm alongside the farms of your peers is a brilliant way of allowing players to maintain a true-to-life sense of agricultural community with each other, toiling away at their own farms while lending a hand to others. In addition, new crops, animals, and vehicle brands help flesh out the virtual world of Farming Simulator.
The revamped multiplayer mode encourages many different ways of playing with friends. “Before Farming Simulator 19, all players on a server worked together on one farm and basically had a shared bank account and vehicle fleet,” GIANTS Software’s public relations and marketing manager, Martin Rabl, said. Now that players can manage their own farms on the same server, they can choose to mind their own business, offer occasional help to their neighbors, or even engage in some friendly competition.
“You can play as rivals but also invite people from the other farms to help out on your fields,” Rabl said. This flexibility helps the game feel even more realistic; you aren’t locked into specific relationships with your fellow farmers, but are rather free to interact with them how you wish. This makes offering a hand for a certain strenuous task feel even more like a voluntary gesture of kindness and generosity. “You should promise them some money for it though,” Rabl suggested.
Farming Simulator 19 will allow up to four farms on a server at a time, though each of these farms could be managed by a single player or by a team of players. The game’s mission system, in which players complete tasks for friendly NPCs to earn cash, will also work with the new multiplayer mode.
As far as building your own farm goes, the game will give you a couple of options at its outset. Players will be able to either start from scratch with a bounty of cash with which to start their farm, or they can begin the game with an established farm and set of buildings with less cash. Players will be able to upgrade farm buildings to house more animals, and can now purchase large sections of the map, which will include not only individual fields contained within them but the forests and meadows within their bounds, as well.
Oat and cotton join the Farming Simulator family of crops this time around, as well as the vehicle brands Samson Agro, Komatsu Forest, Schuitemaker, and Wilson (to name a few). The game will also introduce vehicles for previously added brands like Case IH, New Holland, Challenger, Fendt, Massey Ferguson, Valtra Krone, and Deutz-Fahr. A whopping 300 authentic vehicles make up Farming Simulator 19’s fleet.
All in all, these changes will no doubt please Farming Simulator fans who have been craving more opportunities to customize. At this rate, Farming Simulator will likely one day be providing such a realistic escape into the life of a farmer that it will be difficult to ever want to leave.
Farming Simulator 19 will be released for PC on November 20, 2019.
