Farthest Frontier is something like a gloomy Anno in the Middle Ages. At the same time, it could solve one annoying little thing much better than its big role model.
Life was hard in the old days. There were no simple office jobs, the majority of the population still worked hard. It was still common to push goods to their destination by handcart. And the most annoying thing that could happen to a person back then: zigzag roads. There were many of them.
No, really, just play Anno 1404 or Anno 1800, where roads make many 90-degree turns and the brave city dwellers have to steer their packed carts to their destination under these circumstances. And everyone knows: Anno is a one hundred percent realistic representation of the past.
Is nonsense, of course. This is not what roads looked like in the past. And even apart from that, there’s a lot that goes into building and managing a city that doesn’t play any role at all in Anno. Different disease patterns, for example. Or seasons – or which fields should be cultivated at which time of year.
But why miss out on something like that? Farthest Frontier will be a new building game in which exactly all this has to be considered. At its core, it is very reminiscent of Anno, but with an even greater demand for simulation. And Farthest Frontier does not even stop at the streets, because there will be no zigzags here.
On the occasion of the gameplay reveal, we spoke exclusively with studio founder and lead designer Arthur Bruno about this fascinating construction game.
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What was Farthest Frontier again?
Surely some are thinking now: Wait, Farthest Frontier doesn’t ring a bell! And that is not surprising. This building game is not at the top of the list of the most popular new games of 2022, but fans of the genre in particular should have it on their radar. We’ve written about Farthest Frontiert in detail before, only that was over a year ago.
Even then, Arthur Bruno explained in great detail what he envisioned for his game, which, by the way, is based on an idea Bruno already carried around before Banished and which is very similar to this setup tip.
Farthest Frontier is supposed to show the hardship of life in a medieval settlement. With everything that goes with it. Unlike in Anno, however, we don’t just pray to the all-dominant deities of growth and efficiency, but have to protect our subjects from death by hunger, disease or cold.
This is no easy task, after all Farthest Frontier has a high simulation claim. Inhabitants and goods are simulated individually, and it is also necessary to pay attention to the laws of agriculture. Water levels, fertility, which vegetables like which weather and which animals steal which vegetables – all important for success. Even diseases can come in different varieties and have various causes. From fever caused by rat bites to diarrhoea caused by contaminated groundwater, it’s all there.
Natural streets despite grid
Completely joyless, however, Farthest Frontier does not become so. After all, the greatest joy of the construction fan is building! And we can indulge in that here in similar detail as in Anno. Although no metropolises with thousands of inhabitants are planned, somewhat larger small towns are certainly conceivable.
For this, houses are aligned according to a classic grid. In other words, we can rotate buildings, but not place them completely randomly. Instead, each building site is aligned with a chessboard pattern. Just like in Anno. Even if these restrictions are not always to everyone’s liking, such a design has its reasons, as Bruno himself points out:
We tried the free placement of buildings, but I honestly find it a bit annoying sometimes. It’s often unclear how close together buildings can be so that people and carts can fit past them. So that you can build a road somewhere. […] Sometimes you have to make sure you don’t hurt players with too much freedom
Anno also relies on a fixed grid and pretty, organic cities are still possible with it. At least until the roads are to be laid diagonally. In Anno, for example, roads cannot make curves, but must align themselves with the rectangular grid. Which at some point leads to inevitable roads, for which you should actually shoot the master builder to the neighbouring island.
Farthest Frontier is supposed to offer an alternative in this respect. Combining the best of both worlds, as Bruno says. Roads can make real curves here, for which a so-called spline system is used. That is, the possibility of connecting two points with a line and placing a point over the middle, which then bends the line.
In the beginning we didn’t have that. So you had to build diagonal roads in zigzags. Which is a bit crazy and looks quite strange. So at some point we put in the spline road system. […] I always try to make my cities look a bit more natural and then build curvy roads, even though I know that later I’ll have to fill the empty spaces somehow. But that can also be fun and gives the city some character.
While Bruno is talking, the inclined Anno fan and friends of organic cities can probably only nod their heads knowingly. All true words spoken by the man. Let’s just hope that the construction of roads doesn’t become too fiddly. That is, after all, an underestimated construction virtue where a lot can go wrong.
Farthest Frontier now has a story
The bendy roads have not just been put in over the last year. When we last spoke, this nice little feature just hadn’t come up yet. The background story is a different story. A year ago, Arthur Bruno was unable to give a more precise reason for why people in Farthest Frontier build a city in the middle of nowhere and expose themselves to cold or hunger.
Now Bruno went into more detail and talked about a story trailer that will be released in the next few weeks. This will certainly not be a narrative masterpiece full of twists and turns that will bring tears to our eyes. But it is much easier to understand what exactly it is about now.
The people try to escape poverty and violence in their homeland and build a better life in the wilderness. The trailer paints a picture of classic, medieval oppression. Where there is a tyrannical nobility that controls everything as well as subjects who till the land and from whom large shares of their earnings are collected by the nobles. Where people live in very harsh circumstances, barely able to support themselves despite their work
What has not changed is the motto of not becoming too historical, as Arthur Bruno calls it. None of this has an exact historical background, the world feels medieval, but with minor influences from later eras. Complete accuracy, according to Bruno, often runs the risk of being constricting, as certain technologies or resources might not appear at all.
This is the old song. Historical precision and realism are not always the best for the kind of game that is supposed to be created here. Which is not to say that Farthest Frontier’s backstory is only relevant on paper. It’s also supposed to become dangerous for us again later on, when the spurned nobility demands its share.
There is a point towards the end of the game when a different kind of attacker appears. So this is a foreign army, not specifically from the settlers’ homeland, but with a different style than before. They also have better weapons, armour and battering rams. […] They usually then make a demand, a tribute, which you can either pay or you have to fight them
This military aspect of Farthest Frontier is completely optional. If you don’t feel like being attacked by bandits, animals or the nobility, the endless game can be continued peacefully. A story mode with different missions is still not planned.
The AI as the biggest challenge
Actually, Farthest Frontier should have been released on Steam in Early Access last summer. That didn’t work out, the game just wasn’t ready yet. According to Bruno, Early Access is not meant for players to tell them about obvious bugs en masse. He and his team are mainly interested in whether they have achieved their goal and whether the actual gameplay is really fun.
This is the area they want to optimise with the information from Early Access. But to do that, the hard gameplay core has to work perfectly. The biggest challenge remains the resident AI. According to Bruno, because it is supposed to be much more complex than in most other construction games.
In games like Anno there is always a certain amount of abstraction, but in Farthest Frontier it is very detailed. And we had big problems during development to figure out what all is necessary and if we should abstract even more procedures. The more detailed it is, the more needs the inhabitants have to fulfil by running to different places. For example, fetching food, fetching water, storing firewood, simply transporting goods for the economy. But there are also other problems. Suddenly there is a fire, do people drop everything to put out the fire? What if it’s cold and someone freezes to death but has no firewood, who goes to get that?
Final, Bruno notes that they are now very happy with the outcome. The complexity is still there and they didn’t have to compromise too much. Even complicated areas like the different types of food fit well into the game and should organically add to the strategic challenge.
In fact, for a healthy, well-fed population, we need to provide different food options. After all, we don’t want to do them bean stew every day, so we’d rather expand the culinary selection to include bread, cheese, eggs, fish, nuts, salad or even swordfish. Here, too, there were problems with the AI in the beginning, because the people always ran from home individually for each food item. In the meantime, however, they have learned that they can go to different stations at once and put a colourful selection in their basket.
But the people in Farthest Frontier obviously don’t have a central marketplace for everything.
What happens next
The first game scenes, screenshots and Bruno’s comments show Farthest Frontier in a very good light. It all sounds like an exciting building game that, for once, isn’t called Anno and where we don’t have to keep wondering if it will ever be released. Bruno and his team seem to be making good progress, seem almost serene and have already proven themselves once with the action role-playing game Grim Dawn.
An Early Access release in 2022 seems realistic in any case. It will be exciting to see what kind of features they can get ready for the pre-release version. Bruno, for example, is talking about an end-game challenge reminiscent of the monuments from Anno 1800.
And then the big question remains: Is it fun? Above all, it remains to be seen how well the complex simulations actually turn out and whether there are any balance difficulties or even boredom.
We’ll know all that when we can play it. In any case, we are curious and hope to report on the first gameplay impressions as soon as possible.
Editorial conclusion
I wish I could finally play Farthest Frontier myself! Everything Arthur Bruno told me in our two conversations about his vision just sounds so enticing. Especially since the world of building games has also changed a bit since my last preview of Farthest Frontier. Either promising candidates are hanging in the air or have already disappointed in the run-up. At the same time, I’m incredibly keen on a real building game in the Middle Ages, like Banished. Farthest Frontier comes very close to that.
At least, if I take Bruno at his word. Because what I said last time is still true today: it won’t be a sure-fire success. For the developers at Crate Entertainment, this is their first farming game and they plan to make it as complex as possible right away. With numerous resources, multi-level commodity chains and a detailed simulation of the population. It all sounds great, but a lot can go wrong. I still have faith, but for a more precise assessment I’ll just have to play it.
And who knows, maybe then it will show its potential to be the construction hit of the year. After all, the 2022 build-up competition isn’t all that big at the moment.
