Farming Games

So, I have a friend who really enjoys Farming Games. Of course it's a girl and she pointed out immediately to me how TCGs were an equally pointless and time wasters. Of course I pointed out to her how at least what I played had competitions.

Now, I'm not one to Judge, unless you think any (main) Final Fantasy after X was decent, then you're a naive twat with no sense of good storytelling and gameplay who only has a hard on for graphics. But, I would say that TCGs are significantly more interesting than farming games.

Farming games generally are purely single player with no interaction where you plant, plant, plant, log. Then you come back four hours later, see your crops grow and click harvest, harvest, harvest, sell, sell, sell, plant, plant, plant, log. But this cycle is the same, constantly.

It's the equivalent of playing Rage of Bahamut for the quests. Nobody is going to sit there running 4-4 over and over again as an entire game.

Maybe somebody can explain it to me, but I don't see why anybody would want to play a farming game. There is no depth, no events, no competition. Your competition is literally who can grow the most wheat? The sheer premise of a farming game standing on its own is absurd to me.

How we can make "farming" work

Now, I'm not anti-farming. I'm just anti-farming as an ENTIRE GAME. If in Rage of Bahamut I could plant seeds that grow HP for me, I would do it, and I think that's the key to farming in games.

I feel that farming makes a lot of sense when you are farming for a resource you can use. It also gives players something extra to do during there downtime. The biggest problem with farming games is you're farming for the sake of farming. You get wheat to sell to buy seeds to get more wheat to sell.

But if your Guild in Rage of Bahamut had a communal farm where players could daily come and plant and tend for a communal HP or something, that would be interesting. Is this a perfect idea? No. But it's a start, and I'm sure several people are already intrigued at the concept.

World of Warcraft even introduced the farming aspect of their game in Mists of Pandaria. Overall, the idea of merging the 'farm' aspect of games into another, makes both types of game a bit stronger. Ultimately, Rage of Bahamut (as well as other mobile games) could benefit greatly by absorbing other concepts into themselves.