You will be able to control Thomas and his friends in the cab, but there will also be simpler controls available when you start the game.
I always wondered what the "drivers" did in the Thomas world. If the engines just drive themselves, what are they paid to do? Babysit? =-)
When you say “simpler controls” do you mean simpler controls as in the simplified level of the previous Thomas DLC? Will there be a higher difficulty, closer to the TSW base game?
Will using these controls cause the locomotive to hold speed closer to the steam trains in tsw as one of the main issues I had with the Thomas controls was that to keep speed I had to constantly accelerate and would like it to hold the speed I stop interacting with it obviously gradients will affect this
