Game Plan for 2024

The last months of 2023 have seen little from me on the gaming front. This is not because I haven’t been gaming although I have hit a bit of a roadblock. Let me explain…

Euro Truck Simulator and American Truck Simulator have been using almost all of my gaming time hence the choice of the word ‘Roadblock’. My last Farming Simulator report from Bure Valley Farm was posted back on 17/10/2023. Since then I’ve just about done a ‘month’ of work in Osada – halfway towards the high summer post from that map. I’ve barely looked at hunting, My start in Baldur’s Gate 3 has stalled and so has play in a number of other mini projects I was looking at. I would like to be saying something like ‘New Year – New Activity’ or something along those lines. But here’s the rub. The amount of in-game activity and releases for the SCS Software Truck Sims has been huge…

Pink October Event for Breast Cancer Awareness
October 19th – Release of West Balkans DLC: Associated event announced and new achievements in Steam.
October 23rd – Happy Hauloween Event begins – More deliveries to be done whilst still working on the Balkans event
November 30th – Kansas DLC Release: Associated event and Steam achievements – event ongoing
December 14th – Annual Christmas Event begins – More deliveries to be done whilst still working on the Kansas event – also ongoing.

There have also been a lot of additional items added to the games in the form of paid and free DLC’s. The issue is that when SCS Software are busy, so is the community!

The Kansas event is now due to finish on February 5th but we’re still 7.5 million miles away from the community target of 125m miles driven so there’s still a ways to go in 20 days if we’re to complete the task. And it’s fair to say that most members of the community including myself and my trucking friends see getting the job done as paramount – failure is not an option.

What about the future – there’s got to be a period of calm now we’re into the next year hasn’t there? Well, I don’t think so. We’re expecting updated areas of some older maps to be released probably in early March (Switzerland and parts of California). But, before that and hot on the heels of the Kansas Event we’ll have the annual Valentines event. Will it never ease off?

I don’t need a crystal ball as all I have to do is look at the announcements on Steam – The future is there to see. A string of upcoming map DLC’s…

Arkansas
Greece
Nebraska
Missouri

I think these are all planned for release during 2024 and each of these will have an associated event and more achievements to collect. Then there will be the usual annual events as well. In other words, SCS Software will be keeping us very busy!

Where does that leave my other games? I think I will be able to fit in some play on a few of them but I’ll need to be setting strict gaming times – an hour here and an hour there. The only one where I want to get fully back into something resembling past playing levels is Farming Simulator. But there will need to be change. Unfortunately I will have to cut back to just a single map to consolidate my farming effort. I have given this a bit of thought and I will be pressing on with my English farm in the Bure Valley. Osada will have to ‘Lie Fallow’. I can tell you that I had made the decision of my next steps in that Polish map – I was going to work towards earning the €300k I needed to buy a replacement harvester. So, in some ways it would have been a period of consolidation on the farm with no expansion. Bure Valley is still a young project with many decisions still to be taken, so I’ll focus there and hope to restart posts later this month.

I hope that’s explained what’s been going on in my virtual worlds 🙄😅