When you think about the Farming Simulator series, the last thing that comes to mind is a story that reflects real farming families and communities worldwide. These games are serious simulation titles that allow you to feel what it’s like to run your own farm and ride in some of the planet’s biggest and most specific machines.
That’s exactly how I felt because there’s no way Farming Simulator can stand up to the deep stories you can uncover in indie titles with deep farming mechanics like Stardew Valley. But that was before I watched the opening cinematic for Farming Simulator 22.
This video goes hard almost immediately. It shows a gruff farmer walking around his shed as he prepares to hop in his tractor, get outside, and do some jobs around the acres and acres of land he looks after. But it switches between that point of view and his daughter’s. She wants to follow in his footsteps, and while she struggles at first, she eventually finds herself as the one getting up early, doing the small chores, and making it easier for her and her dad to get out and do the big jobs before the weather decides they can’t.
This cinematic alone is fantastic because it demonstrates the real joy that farmers find in their work. I grew up and live in a large farming community; many of my friends are farmers. They’re born into this life, and it’s what they go on to do, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have other options. They choose to remain on the family farm and work the land because it’s where they want to be and what they truly want to do with their lives.
When Farming Simulator 25 was announced with a cinematic trailer that shows how the franchise’s father-daughter duo was getting on, I lost my mind a bit.
Three years later, the pair are traveling the world together. They miss their transport and end up stumbling into a rice paddy, which gives them an idea for diversifying their farming back home. But that’s not the takeaway I want you to think about here.
The father and his daughter went backpacking together. Sure, they might have been visiting farms along the way. That’s what farmers do. But they chose to go with each other. This isn’t the dad leaving his daughter to run the farm while he scopes out new crops or the daughter going off to find herself. These two know who they are. They know they don’t want to do this sort of thing with anyone else, so they just took the chance in the off-season to get out there and see the world.
What this cinematic story says about farming families is why Giants Software gets farming simulation so right in its games. Yes, day-to-day farming is nothing but hard work. I know farmers who will spend the entire autumn getting up at 4 AM, getting 4 hours of sleep after a full day of combining, and going back to do it all again for weeks on end.
Farming families do this because they love it. It’s not that they just like their jobs; they are beyond passionate about them. But the through line here is that, just like in Farming Simulator 22 and 25‘s multiplayer mode, your friends and family are there for you. Everyone comes together to get the job done, and it’s that sense of community, harking back to the days when entire towns all took the summer off to help with the harvest that would support them through winter, that this franchise has absolutely nailed.
The most astonishing thing is that Giants Software has done it without any story mode for you to follow. But you can still see and feel it in the games when you pick up jobs for other farmers to help them out or hire in help for a field or two. We all pitch in, we all do the work, and we all benefit.
I don’t expect to see a story mode in Farming Simulator 25, but I already know the game’s going to be good because it’s got the precision simulation that’s made every past title so great and the knowledge of how real farmers live and breathe their work woven into the gaps between its code.
