Author:
Simulacrum
<
nub
>
99.67.112.42
Use
this link
if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion.
Date:
1/26/2022 8:06:02 AM
Subject:
Farming Simulator 2022
This is the only thing I bought during the Steam winterfest sale or whatever they call it in their ridiculous attempt to avoid using the word "Christmas." The game was not on sale, but I was interested in why it sold 1.5 million copies during the first week.
To allay any suspense about the nature of the product, it's a farming simulator. You get up, feed your chickens, cultivate, fertilize, plant, fertilize some more, get rid of rocks in your fields, get rid of weeds in your fields, and go to bed.
The greatest challenge is coping with the game's horrible driving physics. They clearly intended you to use a steering wheel like the Logitech G920, which costs about $530. Since this is ten times the retail price of the game, I am doomed to struggle with keyboard steering, which at any random moment can have either a dead zone or high-sensitivity limit zone. There is no consistency, so there's no sweet spot to practice toward -- you just hope you don't run off a bridge.
I've figured out that people like this thing because it's absolutely teeming with things to do and buy. The game imposes no objectives or limitations -- you devise both for yourself. My long-term objective is to have at least two production chains -- making and selling cooking oils and clothes, for example. In the first case, I would buy a field for growing canola or sunflowers, and maybe I would start an olive grove. These would need to be pretty big fields, and I would need a production facility, like an oil plant. In the case of clothes, I would need to grow cotton and keep sheep. All of this is really expensive and requires a great deal of patience and attention. But the payoff is pretty huge, assuming you can achieve a decent scale of production. The big money maker, believe it or not, is cakes. However, this requires a really complicated and slow-yielding production chain. So it would be a really long-term thing.
It's the incremental, step-oriented, patience-trying aspect which, I think, makes the game interesting. As in Morrowind, you can do something great if you can figure out what you need and how to get it.
But never doubt: you will be punished, but not for your hubris. You will be punished because the developers think it's funny.
