Played Farthest Frontier
I heard sometime in the last few weeks that Farthest Frontier, a settlement sim, was the favorite recent game of someone in a game dev community I'm in. I realized I already owned it, but had bounced off after 15 minutes back when it was in earlier early-access. I decided to check it out again.
I am a sucker for settlement simulators, but there comes a point where the people making these games are competing for such fine slices of such an already-finely-sliced target audience that I do not understand why they're bothering to make the game at all.
I mean, I do know: it's because, with the right marketing, making "popular game, but easier" can make you a ton of money. Based on who made this game, how many Steam reviews it has, and how painfully similar it is to Banished, my guess is that this was the intention here.
Settlement Sims are a funny genre. They are remarkably same-y, despite tackling a topic - granular simulation of an entire community down to the level of citizens, housing, professions, and individual objects - that seems like it could invite many different perspectives. As a big settlement sim genre sicko, I'm often frustrated to find that most of these games have a surprising lack of perspective or opinion on what a settlement sim should even feel like. If it feels like Banished, but easier... to me, that's like being passionate about toast.
I won't bother graphing all my favorite ones on a cartesian coordinate system, but please, just imagine one in your head - there's an ocean of difference between simulationist, storytelling-focused stuff like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld, and traditionally cityscape-focused games like Foundation and Frostpunk. Despite the fact it's been copied so many times, Banished did have its own perspective; but so does Ostriv, Manor Lords, Timberborn, and Synergy, which I didn't even think was very good, but had such a different focus and preoccupation that it felt like breath of fresh air to me. So I do get very frustrated when I play games that just feel like an attempt to be a facelift on something I've seen before. There is a subgenre of games that seem to borrow from both Rimworld and Banished that particularly irritates me - partially because some of them are genuinely fun to play, to the point where I realize I'm playing a face-lifted thing-I've-played-before and get irritated with myself.
I think there's enormous room in this genre to have an opinion about what a town feels like. I think this is what made Banished special in the first place. But the genre is still, I'd guess, maybe eighty percent just games with a low-to-the-ground ambition - usually western-European themed, and usually starting with people founding a town in the middle of fucking nowhere, which seems decidedly untruthful to the western European peasant experience, doesn't it? If I could reach into the brain of everyone working in this genre, I'd love to stop them from making games with some of this stuff, and just see what happens when they do something else:
- Wood and stone collection, storehousing, stock-unit-tracking, and allocation. Free me from the first 3 hours of every game where all I'm doing is managing wood and stone stockpiles!
- The need to collect medicinal herbs to cure citizens of disease
- A UI that tells me who lives in which home
- A category of "luxury goods" which affects and is affected by citizen economic class
- Strict economic class categories which citizens can rise through over time
- A town where everyone immigrates in dumb as a fucking boulder and can only get smart by going to sit in a one-room schoolhouse
- Historically accurate production processes for medieval-tech-level goods
- A match that starts with a blank map, and 8-12 people riding in a cart!