Unfortunately… Well, find out in my review. A more cynical interpretation is that the Tending to Animals trailer was a last ditch effort to make it look like Farming Sim 19 would appeal to more varied players than the series is known for. Other trailers, such as the Farm and Furious one from November, as well as the original Gamescom reveal trailer, show a very different balance between animals and machines.Ī generous reading of this discrepancy in trailers would have been that the game is for everyone, that the player can find their own balance of industrial machinery and idyllic animal care within the gameplay. I found myself simultaneously intrigued and skeptical at this rather obvious effort on the marketing team’s behalf to make Farming Simulator 19 look like a game about riding around your farm to feed your livestock. In October, Focus Home released a Tending to Animals trailer ( Video Link | Twitter Thread), very girly, complete with a certain hipstery instagram aesthetic and cute indie music. In the middle of Gamescom FOMO and a deep appreciation of the positive reaction my Red Dead Redemption 2 Trailer Breakdown got a few days before, I made a little shot by shot analysis of the few seconds of horse footage on Twitter. I first caught wind of FS19’s equestrian intentions when they released their initial reveal trailer at Gamescom 2018. So when you have a well-implemented and functional new entry in a long-running game series that adds horses, that has to result in a pretty solid game at least… right? Meandering Marketing Messages After all, a game series so successful had to be an essentially good game at its core, right? It was never a series that particularly interested me as a player - but I supposed that was because the subject matter of realistic farming wasn’t particularly up my alley. The game’s original developers and Giants Software company founders Thomas Frey and Renzo Thönen were early alumni of the Game Design specialization at Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, from which I graduated as well.įrom what I see, the Swiss indie game scene regards the series with an odd mixture of national pride at its success, a little bit of envy at the piles of money it’s raking in, and a twinge of remorse that among all the beautiful, unique and artsy games our local industry produces, it’s Farming Simulator that is by far the most widely known and financially successful. I had never played one, but the series is something of a local phenomenon: To the best of my knowledge, it is by far the most profitable video game developed in my home country of Switzerland.

Before FS19 was released, I thought I had an idea of what to expect from a Farming Simulator game.

Mechanical horse simulator near me