I want to ask on the next Roadmap Q&A about the issue of wrong builds being pushed out particularly on consoles, but I thought it would be useful to compile a list of instances of this happening to show a pattern of this happening more often since the end of last year. Without trawling through dozens of forum threads, from the top of my head I can recall: 1. December 2024 WCMLS improvement patch - wrong builds leading to the timetable enhancements not appearing properly 2. July 2025 Manchester Airport Commuter had the wrong build on release (the one with the giant ballast cone in front of a bridge. This even made it onto the preview stream.) 3. September 2025 TSW 6 launch - several wrong builds on XBox but I think there was an issue on Playstation too. 4. Today (October 2025) Birmingham to Crewe launch - we are still waiting for the correct build to be received for XBox and PS5 players. If there are more you can remember please do add them to this thread.
It's really embarassing I know DTG will never acknowledge or reply, but does anyone here work in games publishing or have any experience in it? Can you ELI5 how it happens? Why are older builds even still "active" in their system or whatever? I work in accounting and to me it would be like filing the wrong year's tax return or paying a huge bill for the wrong client or something. As in, something you'd MAYBE not get fired for if it only happened once, but four times? Five? Am i being uncharitable?
I'm not expecting them to publicly throw any employees under the bus or anything like that as that would be equally unprofessional. But it would be nice to have an acknowledgement of something like 'we are reviewing how this has occurred and are in the process of implementing new systems to avoid any repeat of this occurring'. At the moment it seems to be treated as some kind of occupational hazard of the gaming industry which it really isn't. At least from experience of other games, but others might have more experience.
It's been going on for years. The launch of TSW2: Rush Hour had the wrong build of the London Commuter route, which included a placeholder building at Reigate. https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/london-commuter-update-7th-october-11-10-bst.46447/
Interesting. At least in that post there is a more thorough explanation by JD of the process. The other thing is that in the case of MAC and Birmingham-Crewe you should have less of an issue with multiple builds as both were Gen 9 only routes. Maybe they just need to consider staggering the releases on different platforms if they can't manage the workload.
Has the right build for the ps5 crewe-brum been released yet. It is a tad embarresing. More embarressing than the comments posted by rattenreich, and thats saying something
I just think the whole operation is being run like amateur hour. Perhaps we need less of the silly pink headphones and more attention to detail. I had come round to buying Birmingham to Crewe later on and was quite looking forward to it (Steam/PC) but unless the early adopters report a drastically different experience to the console players, then I will pass for now and save my money. Not as if this stuff is cheap, at £30 a hit I expect a bit of professionalism. If TSW is getting too much for DTG to manage then they either need to call it a day or bring in a management team that can run the show properly. Not hating on AABS but some of the issues we are seeing with the new route, like the missing timetable, should have been thrown back to the developer as not good enough and if need be the release date pushed back until they got it right. Sadly it seems the spirit of Gordon Gecko prevails at DTG and “greed is good”, 90% done is good enough to call “Gold” and push out to patch later (maybe).
Exactly, and at £30 a dlc they should be consistent. Each one having the same features. The missing arrival times should 100% have been sorted before release. That's just basic.
Yes it does seem that the current management team is guilty of poor decision making and an unsteady hand on the tiller. Bringing out a $40 route with multiple layer requirements to populate it just 3 weeks after an expensive new game launch smacks of too much " ka-ching " in the business plan.
It’s absolutely ridiculous that the same thing is happening over and over again, and the worst thing is it hasn’t come to anyone’s surprise that the same thing has happened again. I was so excited for this route, it looks stunning especially for a third party’s first route, but now I’m doubting whether I should actually buy it in this state.
I would like to make a distinction between it being a AAS issue and a DTG issue.... This is clearly a DTG issue that has happened with several DLCs regardless of the developer now. Pretty shambolic to have happened on several occasions now and no lessons have been learned. But I don't think it would be fair to tar AAS studios with any brush when they aren't responsible for this mishap.
I remember, was it last year or the year before, we had that great meltdown from Jasper from Rivet Games where he blamed all of their substandard work on us and the conditions that he worked in. Did we get an answer about Rivet and their substandard work? In a way we did but compared to DTG at the moment, at least Rivet stepped forward and held their hand up and gave somewhat of an acknowledgement that they messed up After West Cornwall Local dropped, one of the DTG team at the time even stepped forward ON STREAM after the mess that was that route and they said that that wouldn't stand and they would do everything in their power not to push out shoddy work again. How quickly people forget that statement, how the people quickly forget. Well it seems that shoddy work still does stand and until this is fixed, this route if going NOWHERE near my console or my YouTube channel And if they cannot be bothered to even so much as explain themselves and even apologise for the mess that this has created, the people responsible need to take a long hard look in the mirror because we as customers will not stand for shoddy work, we as customers will not stand for substandard work and we are customers will not pay £30/$40 etc. for this garbage
Not entirely. It is AABS who must bear responsibility for not setting up the timetable properly, stuffing the route with assets and layers without stopping to consider if it would be too much for consoles and lesser PC's to deal with. But yes, DTG oversight should have stamped on that before even agreeing to a release window.
But it was an outdated build?, it wasn’t AABS planned release build hence why it was in alpha state on console. DTG upload the wrong build. this is just going off what’s been going around, can’t expect every early version of a route to have a proper timetable
This literally doesn't make any sense! DTG are the publisher and put out the wrong build- how can we judge AABS when nobody has actually played the real deal? Like you really think it's fair to criticize them for a build that never should have been released. That's like getting an F on a paper because the T/A gave the prof your rough draft instead of the final version you handed in- it's preposterous imo. Also now we're complaining that routes have too much content? This place is ridiculous!!!
Well let's see what the patch brings and indeed the Steam version. But frankly, given this was what we saw on stream, it is simply not good enough for £30.
Comment as above, remains to be seen if the timetables are correct in what should have been the final cut. However I stand by the optimisation view. You cannot just keep stuffing assets and detail into a route, you need to have an eye on optimisation. Okay TSW probably doesn't have the 1700 max objects on a 2km square tile that MSTS did but something they should have been monitoring. The catenary alone will add a huge poly load to the rendering.
I'd still argue that the underlying causes are a DTG core issues... I believe that 9th Gen stuff is perfectly capable of running large games, but poor optimisation from the core game is the problem. Further more the so called 'optimisation' core improvements we were promised as a selling point for TSW6 have not been talked about more then a few comments. I think that's the bigger issue for me, is DTG advertising something that there isn't a real firm plan around fixing that is affecting the overall game.
I think we are all fooling ourselves if we think this 'different build' is going to cure all the issues with this route. I would expect at best something like blurring would hit us slightly later in the run than it does right now. We have to face facts, DTG are a bunch of 3rd rate developers with no answers to any of the issues created by the sub standard development of TSW. So we will just get one lie after another to cover for poor work. The only thing we can do to force things to change at DTG is to stop buying their products
Well I set up this thread to address the particular issue of wrong builds and not other issues with the game or DLCs more generally. Unlike stuff like blurry textures and optimisation which are more of a technical challenge with this level of graphical fidelity and world scale, this seems more like an admin issue. Some people might be skilled artists or coders but admin may not be their thing. In which case you need someone as part of the process who can manage that well.
Listening to the release of this addon sounds a bit familiar, would it of hurt if they'd maybe spent another week polishing any minor bugs out to release the correct build
Completely agree. I look forward to playing the route once these issues are fixed and I don't put the blame on AABS here
I dont think the polygon amount is a problem tbh. Lots of assets are also not that big in polygon count and even less with proper lods.
Out of interest, what is this optimisation you’re talking of? People keep throwing this word about without ever explaining what they mean by it. Optimisation does not mean making the route less detailed. So what do you actually mean when you say it?
That’s up to the developers when they are building and testing. I don’t know enough about UE or the DTG editor as to what recommended upper asset limits are. But as we saw on Sherman Hill as an example, placing high poly grass way beyond the player POV completely tanked the frame rate.
i still have one dlc not loading on PC epic games ... The Boston Providence addon with a loc and service to Stoughton
Unless DTG towers are poisoned with pure incompetence, I really don't buy this "wrong build" garbage. Once or twice, maybe, but it's happened far too many times. Maybe, and its only a wild guess, Sony and Microsoft have a deadline for a build to be uploaded to the relevant store, ready for launch day. We know DTG don't like to alter release dates, so the best build they can find gets uploaded, ensuring the DLC can release on time. Only after release do the stores allow further build updates to fix errors, culminating in today's events. Its happened too many times to be user error. And if it is user error, who is allowing this to happen? It's becoming embarrassing for DTG and Focus should be watching. Shareholders will not put up with this for long without asking serious questions or making changes.
This is incorrect. Let's say we have 3 builds, sequentially built as A, B and C. A release date is set on each platform store. (Following dates are abitrary for sake of example) The "gold" build which is feature complete and playable is uploaded to the store (this is build A). Bugs may (and probably will) exist in this build. This upload is performed 2 weeks prior to release date. Build B is created that resolves some of these bugs. This is the "day 1 patch". It is uploaded some point between build A and the release date. This could be at any point - the next day, or 30 minutes before release. Depending on the platform, this may or may not be available the second that release date and time hits - depending on the platform pipeline (noting that there may be multiple products by different publishers going live at the same time) it may be a few minutes or a few hours after release time/date. Meanwhile, build C is being developed as (let's say) hotfix. This may go out a week or two later to correct issues that were not identified in build B (the day 1 patch). While the possibility of a "wrong" build can exist, as far as I know the backend for the stores will not allow publishing of builds that contain an earlier version of the last build uploaded (as long as the sequential, iterative build process has been followed by the publisher)
So that just points to either DTG making the mistake on what is the release build or All Aboard sending or mislabeling the wrong build for release. Either way it doesn't seem impossible that some kind of quality check process should be included where both sides verify a final build to be sent to be uploaded by the due date. Maybe some kind of checklist. Then there should be a fallback that if the check is not confirmed the release date must be delayed. Maybe there are checks or the there are more steps to the process that confuse things. It's not my industry. But the way it's communicated at the moment just makes it sound all a bit 'whoopsy daisy' rather than a commitment to a professional service.
With the launch of TSW4 it happened with Flying Scotsman. Somewhere back in my post history you can find a thread I made reporting how the loco launched with doors that didn't function and the sounds taken from the Jubilee rather than those heard in the preview days beforehand.
