Farming Simulator 17 Sells A Dream
Fields, ploughs and big blue skies
The news is unbearable; I don't want to look at or even think about anything involving shooting people today. Combing through the wreckage of E3, I stumble across a CGI trailer for Farming Simulator 17 [official site]: a tranquil, unspoilt, not-actual-footage world of fields and ploughs and big blue skies, and it's like a window into a better world that isn't filled with horror.
Gloriously pretty, and well-soundtracked too. This is openly declared to be a CGI trailer, and as such sadly I am unconvinced that most of what we see there is anything like 100% representative of ye olde in-game-footage, but I suppose I am happy to imagine fields that realistically furrowed and grass that lush, even if it is not really to be. I imagine playing the game in that trailer and I feel ever so slightly better.
Farming Simulator is one of those games whose existence I'm grateful for but do not truly intend to play myself: the fond imagining of what it would be like is, I think, worth retaining, and not disrupting with reality. The same is true of actually working in the fields all day: for a man who sits at a keyboard all day, it's a beautiful dream, but of course doing it for real would involve endless repetition, coldness, dirt and anxiety about yields.
Bah.
Farming Simulator is due out by year's end.