Some months back, I wrote a love letter to SCS’s Euro Truck Simulator 2 – still one of my favorite relaxing gaming experiences.
ETS2, which has been in active development for years, is a robust title with a ton of depth in its simulation. The various name-brand trucks feel genuinely different. They take damage in collisions – not visible damage, but crashes affect a truck’s reliability and handling. The weight of cargo matters, as does the type of trailer you’re hauling. Steep grades and inclines affect how you drive.
AI traffic, though periodically the subject of community cursing, generally behaves in a realistic and reasonable manner. Though cops don’t chase you down in the game – Grand Theft Auto this isn’t – automated traffic law penalties enforce speeding restrictions and red light violations.
What a contrast it’s been to recently dip my toes into a far looser and more janky experience in Farming Simulator 22. FS22 is a game that tosses any pretense of reality in its driving simulation out the window.
Tractors and other vehicles careen along the roads with the barest pretense of a physics model. AI traffic is beyond brain-dead, to the extent that many players simply turn other cars off entirely.
Bouncing off other vehicles – or even smashing head-first into a brick wall – may make your tractor chaotically flip over, but won’t do significant damage. Different vehicles have minor variations in handling, but nowhere near the detail and level of care applied to individual truck models in ETS2.
unusual solutions. I transport
canola oil in my own special way.
More so even than ETS2, Farming Simulator has very little “game” happening beyond its core farming simulations. There’s a basic pricing model for buying and selling crops, and there’s the expected hook of purchasing bigger and better farm equipment from a massive catalog of both official and modded content.
Still, along with thousands of others who play the franchise daily, I found myself hooked by the franchise’s oddly compelling routines. Despite its limitations, the game still gets close enough to fake an addictive simulation of a farming experience and maintain a dedicated fanbase.
How does Farming Simulator succeed so well, despite taking a completely different, and arguably less polished, approach to the simulator genre than the exceptional Euro Truck Simulator 2?
Let’s dig into its fertile soil and find out.
FS22, the Sequel to… FS19?
The Farming Simulator franchise has an odd numbering system that is certain to confuse the hell out of fans. At a glance, with releases named for the year they launched, the franchise appears to follow the same model as a game with a yearly cadence like Madden.
The team at GIANTS Software alternates their efforts between the mobile and PC / console iterations of the game. While Farming Simulator 22 is the latest PC title, Farming Simulator 23 exists for mobile and the Switch. The previous fully-featured iteration of Farming Simulator 22 was Farming Simulator 19, and a new version with a planned release date of November 12, will be Farming Simulator 25.
Confused yet? That’s okay. It doesn’t matter much which version you play – the core mechanics are the same. In fact, I’d encourage a new player to pick up a previous iteration on sale, rather than the latest and greatest, due to the franchise’s excellent mod scene. (More on that in a bit.)
At this time, with anticipation building for FS25 and FS22 having been out for a couple of years, FS22’s mod scene is fully mature and the game itself has been patched and updated with several DLC releases. So it’s FS22 I’m talking about today, and the screenshots are from that version.
European village with a bunch
of noisy, smelly tractors and a
double-wide trailer. ‘Merica!
Toys of All Sizes
Farming Simulator is an open playground without a concrete goal. You plant crops or raise animals, sell the fruit of your labors for more cash, then do it again. Over time, you tweak and modify your farm, perhaps decorating the yard or adding a silo or a barn.
The core hook of the experience is a mountain of giant farm equipment to buy and drive. If you’re not familiar with the processes of farming, much of what’s on offer will be downright perplexing. There are different types of spreaders and planters; there are giant harvesters with special header attachments for various crops; there’s a plethora of tractors from tiny to massive.
While the new player difficulty level starts you out with a functional farm and the basic equipment you need, the real meat of the game is the middle difficulty level, known as “Farm Manager” mode. You start with nothing, but you do have a pile of cash. You’ll purchase a plot of land, then buy (or lease) all the toys you need to transform it into a functional farm.
Then you’ll make mistakes – oh, so many mistakes. You’ll realize you missed a crucial weeding step and need another piece of equipment. You’ll buy the wrong attachments. You’ll buy the wrong tractors. You’ll struggle with figuring out how to get pallets of fertilizer from the shop to your farm.
The information you need to do things right is there, buried under an often-befuddling UI. And the new farmer option does include tutorial content that walks you through the basics.
But Farming Simulator is happy to let you thrash around until you figure things out. In its rural sandbox, there’s no consequence to failure. You might run out of money and need to restart, but you’ll probably want to – with everything you’ve learned, you’ll know how to do it better now.
it’s kind of ridiculous. They even
have a special discount version
of Power Wash Simulator.
A Mod for All Seasons
The community for Farm Simulator is ridiculously dedicated. There are YouTube channels with lengthy multi-part roleplaying stories. There’s a competitive esports scene.
And there is a truly massive modding community. If there’s a feature in the game you don’t like, you can probably mod it away.
Want to auto-load pallets of seeds? There’s a mod for that. Want a weirdly unrealistic but perfectly fair map for competitive farming? That’s there too. Want an obscure old tractor or a new set of farm buildings? There are tons to choose from, most of which are immediately accessible through the game’s seamless built-in mod manager.
As with other games that have embraced the power of an invested community, the Farming Simulator franchise has reaped well-earned rewards. Even today – three years after its release – Farming Simulator 22 is hitting 40,000 or more daily peak simultaneous users on Steam. Its all-time peak user count is just below 100,000 – even higher than Euro Truck Simulator 2’s peak.
Down on the Farm
The Farming Simulator experience isn’t for everyone. It’s fundamentally less of a game than Euro Truck Simulator 2. Like many simulators, it’s a goal-free sandbox that approximates, but doesn’t fully capture, the feel of its topic of choice.
Further, its touchy physics and super-loose driving simulations make the game feel less grounded and far less than real in its moment-to-moment gameplay. I’ll take the time to hook up my driving wheel for Euro Truck, but I stick with the easier option of an Xbox controller when I want to trundle around the fields in Farming Simulator.
And yet, trundling around the fields can be a pretty good time. If Euro Truck Simulator 2 is mostly chill with moments of high stress when you miss an exit or avoid an accident, Farming Simulator is a much more even and laid-back experience overall.
There’s very little time pressure. You can’t permanently wreck your expensive toys (though you might flip them over and curse the farming gods mightily when you do).
brain is truly tickled. When two
vehicles coordinate, it’s cool.
Instead, you go back and forth, back and forth. Mowing great swaths of wheat, elegantly raising the header at the perfect time right at the end of the row, then dropping it again just after making a three-point turn to come back down the field.
Back and forth, back and forth. You kick on the tractor’s cruise control, and now your inputs are limited to minor positional adjustments and turning at the end of the rows. A customized radio stream plays the music of your choice.
The hauling trailer slowly fills up with grain. You watch, almost hypnotized, as golden stalks fall away in front of the massive, purring rotary blade on the front of your harvester.
So yeah. Farming Simulator 22 is not for everyone. After an hour spent manually harvesting a massive field, I’m not even sure it’s for me.
But I get it.
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