English Countryside Sheep Breeding Hands-On Preview

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The meat and potatoes of the FarmVille English Countryside is, without a doubt, the Sheep breeding feature. This is the one thing that is completely unfamiliar in the world of virtual farming, as many of the other features within the English Countryside are expansions of what we know and love, such as harvesting, crafting, and the like. Sheep breeding, however, is unlike anything you have previously come across in the game. Of course, the initial set-up is what you have come to expect, as you will help Angus rebuild the Sheep Pen (this is not the final name, but rather what we have dubbed the new Sheep Building). Once you have done this by using your materials that the game is known for and located his prized Ram, you will be introduced to the Sheep breeding feature that completely blew us away.

We learned many cool things about this feature. In order to breed Sheep, you will need to house them within the Sheep Pen and coax them into mating; in a way, it’s a lot like an Axe body spray commercial, but for our woolly pals. You will pick out exactly which Ewe you wish to mate with which Ram, and you will have a shot at producing a Lamb from the two, which will be completely randomized from the looks of its two parents; your Lamb could turn into a Ewe or a Ram, and it could look like the mother, the father, or a mixture of both, providing new possibilities around every corner… and all the while over Barry White music. You can even showcase several of your Sheep in the Sheep Pen, similar to that of the Duck Pond, and the Sheep Pen holds up to 20 without expansion – and even more after expanding it a couple of times!

Once you have picked out the Ewe and Ram to mate, you can increase your chance at making a baby Lamb from the ordeal by utilizing a brand new item in the game: Love Potions. By using Love Potions, a new item in the same vein as the Watering Cans, you can up the chance of receiving a baby Lamb from the act of mating. Starting out with a 50% chance of creating a Lamb, by adding a single Love Potion to the mix, the percentage went up by 10% with every Love Potion used. You will also go from requiring 24 hours to breed to speeding up the process with these Love Potions, as well. By using five Love Potions, the developers had a 100% chance at receiving a Lamb. You can also mate your Sheep as often as you like, so don’t worry about a once-a-day game of chance, with a way to expand to more than a single mating room – think the Greenhouse, but for Sheep mating.

When the Lamb was born from a plain white Ewe that we’ve grown accustomed to and its blue and purple Ram, it had a light blue-ish purple tint. We learned that the father (Ram) is the one of the two that dictates the pattern of the Ewe. For example, if the Ram has a star pattern across its back and the Ewe has polka dots as its pattern, the Lamb will have a shot at growing up with the aforementioned star pattern instead of polka dots – the Ewe are passive in passing on their genetic patterns. Simply put, you can fiddle around with these combinations to truly tweak and customize all of your Ewe and Rams as they grow up.

Lambs can grow up into both Rams and Ewe, or can be outright kept as the adorable Lambs themselves, similar to the Ducklings in the Duck Pond. The Lambs can be named to whatever you desire and can be changed later on a whim, and can be adopted out to your Facebook feed or kept for yourself, if you’re greedy. You will not know exactly what your new Ram or Ewe will look like as an adult until it grows up; the periwinkle Lamb that we were shown grew up to look almost exactly like its father, the blue and purple Ram. Note that you can also try breeding the likes of red Rams with blue Ewes to create purple Lambs and so forth.

The craziest part of this, of course, is that it “almost” looked exactly like its father. You see, the game randomly generates the exact color patterns, and on the HDTV we were shown the game on, the colors were truly limitless. Due to this, we could tell that, when compared side-by-side, the father Ram and son Ram featured everything identically except the fact that the Son ram had a very slight color difference in the blues that covered its body. If you have ever played around with a color wheel in a painting program on the computer, you will know exactly what we’re talking about when we say that the color hues were off by a single shade of blue, something that could look identical to the naked eye or on a mediocre computer monitor. We were told that the possibilities were limited only to the quality of your screen, as the game can use more colors than we could possibly think of to generate brand new, never-before-seen combinations of Ewes and Rams.

In summation, the easiest way to put it is that the game can create brand new Sheep that no one else has on a whim, all thanks to your expertise in Sheep breeding. That’s right: there could, potentially, be millions upon millions of different Sheep, all completely unique from one to the next. This will allow the players to gain a brand new identity amongst their neighbors, as visitors to their English Countryside can take a look at what they have created and make requests for similar Ewe or Rams.

For instance, let’s say that I, Zoop, am an expert in creating periwinkle and sea green Ewe. Let’s say that one of my neighbors stumbles upon my English Countryside and witnesses all of my cool periwinkle/sea green combinations of Ewe and Rams, ranging from the star patterns to two-toned to polka dots, and they instantly fall in love with the type of Sheep I am making. They can message me on Facebook and tell me how much they love my Sheep, and I can breed two of the Sheep that they fell in love with, and then give them the Lamb that it creates. This will expand their collection, and possibly come back to benefit me. Who knows what they could create by breeding my periwinkle/sea green Ram with their crimson red/electric blue Ewe?

Zynga feels that this will add a new layer of individuality to FarmVille, and bring the community closer together. We are wholly in agreement, and would love to see this incredibly complex system of creativity and individuality reign supreme with other Animals in the future. We brought up the possibility of seeing an English Countryside decked out, completely comprised of nothing but a rainbow of different Sheep; stuff like this could be a simple reality for the dedicated Sheep breeder with a lot of friends to trade with, that much is 100% certain.

We will have more on Sheep breeding soon!

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