Do not be fooled by the intro image of this post. Contrary to Lala belief, I know what I’m doing, just bear with me a bit.

This Thanksgiving week marked the release of Farming Simulator 2019. The long awaited sequel to Farming Simulator 2017. Those that know me know I’m a whore for this game. After much hum hawing around, I finally bit the bullet and bought it the day after Thanksgiving.

Well I’m here to tell you they should have left it in the oven a while longer. A long while.

I started it up to find a very pretty game with the new equipment from the much sought after John Deere brand. A license they had been working hard to get for several years but John Deere thought their game was better (It was actually pretty terrible) …… and that was about it…. seriously.

I can’t tell if Giants software has something big planned or if they were planning on riding on their past success. Steam reviews are positive but I just don’t get it. It is the same shit as the last one with the addition of John Deere and even some missing features from 17. Courseplay, the most downloaded mod in the Farm Sim community, was still not integrated even though they have been working with those mod creators for the past several years. This mod allows you to program routes for hired workers so that they become far more useful instead of just following field boundaries.

I was soo bummed out that I just shut it down and told myself I’d wait until the mod community starts cranking out the stuff that Giants should have put in.

Seeing as I was in the mood for my casual gaming farm fix, I decided to visit a past disappointment in the farming genre. Pure Farming 2018.

This game came out in March of this year and was touting to be be the game that would give Farm Sim 2017 a run for it’s money. Needless to say, Farm Sim didn’t even flinch. Controls were awkward, no gamepad or steering wheel support, very little options as far as equipment selection goes (to be fair, I think this last bit was due to Giants locking up all the licenses from manufacturers).

I knew there had been a few updates so with nothing else to lose, I gave it a shot. Patches and updates have been nice. It’s not a half bad game now. The addition of adding your favorite radio station URLs in settings and then “tuning” to them in the tractors is fucking amazing as well. Lots of the complaints have been addressed except for the lack of machinery.  Nothing a well organized mod site can’t fix, right?

Wow….. what little mods I did find were not worth the risky click from the websites they were hosted on. Really? Is the game soo bad that even modding it isn’t even worth the effort? I know the Devs support modding because they have a built in importer in the game launcher. This isn’t even the weirdest part. The newest post on the subreddit is 5 months old (aside from the one I made this morning asking “Is U Dead”), a couple posts before that was one from the last active mod saying “looking for a replacement as I can’t stand to play this game anymore”,  and the devs have gone all but silent.

I did manage to find one that poked their head out on Steam very recently:

Boy I have seen that response before after a long silence. As much as I shit on people for getting hyped, I’m hyped about that comment.

I’ll be playing Pure Farming 2018 for a while longer it seems as I think we have another “No Man’s Sky rebound” on our hands. I hope anyway….

Pure Farming is on sale right now for $8.00 on Steam and I highly recommend it for that price.
Farm Sim 19 is only $35 but I can’t say the same for it in it’s current state, and that hurts to say as a hardcore fan of the franchise since 13.