A month ago, we chittered excitedly about the fact that Farm Together 2, the sequel to the seriously underrated multiplayer-optional cozy game Farm Together, was finally headed to early access, and this week, Milkstone Studios made good on that promise.
As we noted, Farm Together 2 is meant to expand on its predecessor’s cozy farming mechanics with NPC town and shop areas, a much more detailed housing system, ridable horses, and minigames, and terraforming, though not all of those are actually in this early access build. And the monetization is the same too: It’s buy-to-play with themed DLC – and nothing else.
Reviews are clocking in the “very positive” range so far, and the game saw a peak concurrency of 3754 people ahead of the weekend (it’s at 3609 right now as I type this, so it’s going to blow past that). That’s already a higher peak concurrency than the original Farm Together ever saw on Steam, so Milkstone is surely happy with that.
But do note that the few negative reviews have some fair points – chiefly, that there isn’t much of a graphical upgrade over the original and that the sequel is missing a huge number of features than the original offered, which makes sense as it’s an early access title and will stay in early access for as long as a year, whereas the original is six years old and had 16 DLC under its belt. If you’re craving a finished game, maybe hold out for the full launch – or just play the original, which still holds up.
The six-person team at Milkstone has already released three updates for the early access build with a range of bug fixes and quality-of-life adjustments to things like farm search tools, ponds, cameras, quest acquisition, fuel consumption, and so forth. The studio has also reversed course on its original plans to avoid weather-related gameplay effects; players have begged for the restoration of rain effects, so that’s now en route. A full roadmap is expected “by next week.”
