For the longest time now, the passenger system in tsw has been all but broken. Flying passengers, passengers not boarding trains, passengers not leaving before depots, no passengers on busy routes (lirr is notorious for this), passengers colliding, invisible passengers; the list is endless. 5 years ago, the Rush Hour update was meant to overhaul the system, but all it did was increase the number of passengers on a few routes (i believe these routes have nearly all lost RH passengers one way or another), without actually improving their intelligence. In 2026 it seems strange that passengers still despawn in the door compartment of a train, then respawn instantly in a seat- especially since the sitting down animation exists for places like benches. the whole system has been in need of a significant overhaul for years now, and tsw7 should be time for this to happen. it’s such an immersion killer and it spoils so many good routes.
Something that I believe they were going to attempt to fix, and haven't announced anything since then.
There have been multiple threads about passengers. DTG hasn't made any improvements and I doubt they will anytime soon
I don't need animated passengers at all. I find them more creepy than immersive. To me it'd be fine if they just appeared on trains and sat/stood around stations without "walking" at all. But to each their own. I'd suspect that if this is like other games, "errors" are rarely just a single factor. For example if the scripting for a passenger so they don't walk off a platform depends on that platform being defined by the route creator, then even a perfectly working NPC could "logically" walk off the platform if the scripting allows it in the route. Likewise, if there's some invisible "hole" in the platform coding they might fall into it. Then there's connectivity and processor issues and loical depenencies...(how things spawn in for example) There's an interaction between route, trains, and passengers, perhaps other things that complicates straight forward "fixes." I've noticed better behavior by NPCs in some places, trains, routes than others and I think that it may be a lot of factors involved. Can we get a few reproduced examples that happen over and over on a specific route/place for DTG to look into with a set circumstance? For example, if every time you stop at X station on Y route the passengers jump in front of the train at this point.... then we could get them to try to look into what is causing that? Just saying "they gotta be better" doesn't really help solve anything. I haven't run into enough NCP "events" to reproduce them, but if someone is unlucky enough to have run into them enough, could you post one here or somewhere on the forum to investigate? Maybe see if more of us could reproduce it too?
I agree. I was playing the Suffragette Line and when I pulled into Woodgrange Park, there were two passengers on the tracks as I was pulling into the station. I honked the horn and applied the emergency brakes. Absolutely ridiculous I played NY-Trenton as a conductor one time as well but quit not long after due to the fact that there were zero passengers on the train when I opened the doors at New York Penn Station and was mostly empty through the journey so there were hardly any tickets to collect. It was a rush hour service to Trenton and that train would be busy in real life. The bad passenger system is why I hardly use the conductor mode
Make them disappear at the end of a service or on an ECS move. Just that, to start with. Then, of course, we could imagine something much more complex... deserted train platforms when no train is scheduled for half an hour, then no one at all after the train has passed (for example). But given how messed up things are in their current state, we're not there yet.
because it’s broken. if something doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for a long time, then people need to shout about it over and over again until it gets fixed, and that isn’t happening
Given it can cause real distress when someone irl is hit by a train (to everyone involved including the driver), I can't imagine they'd be very happy.
Or It's on the list of things they're working on but at the moment can't provide an update for. Or They're busy working on making the core more stable because that's the biggest issue and you have to prioritise these things because that's what happens in a busy workplace. Seriously, some of you are in for a shock when you get a full-time job and realise that there are only so many hours in the day.
It’s been five years since ‘Rush Hour’ and they still can’t provide an update? That just sounds like it’s something they simply don’t care about. But if what you’re saying is true then they need more staff, simple.
i don’t know how you can defend dtg when the core is getting worse; they’ve been ‘busy’ fixing it for 2 years, it’s perfectly reasonable that many of us are losing patience
dtg must have paid you a substantial amount because i can tell you that it hasn’t improved at all, let alone ‘significantly’. texture blurring is no better, the game still crashes, stuttering is still just as bad, load times haven’t improved- please do tell me what has improved because there’s absolutely nothing you can use to evidence your claim
I went to check my wallet. Nothing. There are no payments from DTG in my banking app either. I should probably email them. Never had them. Although I'm lying, sometimes it happens for a whole second when loading a route. That's all. Yes, it happens. However, it only happens once every 30 or so game launches. I can't even remember the last time it happened. The issue still exists, but it practically disappears after a few trips along the route. I even almost never see FPS below 50 on ultra settings with the Jetwash mod. This is where the growth really starts. TSW 5 took about 1.5 minutes to load, while TSW 6 takes about 40 seconds, despite having about 7GB of mods in my DLC folder. And more routes have been added.
Hi Wodka#2734 What you're saying is partly true, but that's only on PC. All console players have a lot of problems that we don't have, and that shouldn't be the case. And this thread is about the passengers! The passengers are really poorly implemented on all platforms. But DTG never addresses the issue of passengers anyway, which to me means that it's good enough for DTG. And unfortunately, it's far from good enough.
<angry> Hold on a minute, gentlemen! For two years, DtG has been publishing surveys asking players what we would like to get first in the next version of TSW. And if I remember correctly, you didn't consider passengers to be particularly important (similar to the lack of AI train guards and CCTV, which is probably the second biggest disappointment in the game). <spiteful> Plush dinosaurs to collect on platforms are still much more important and exciting to you than the proper simulation of passenger behaviour. And you wrote yourselves that you don't pay attention to passengers anyway, which is no surprise when you're more busy taking nice photos of trains than driving them. </spiteful> </angry>
@J.T. How do you know what users ticked in the surveys, or what improvements they wanted? Ever since I started playing TSW, these passengers have annoyed me, so I definitely didn't say in the survey that the passengers were fine.
it seems you play on PC so you don’t get the short end of the stick like the majority of us do. performance of tsw6 ought to be measured on consoles, given we have it worst
I agree with the strange behavior of passengers, I agree that they stand like pillars after leaving the train and go with you to the depot. But!I've never encountered passengers running across the tracks right in front of a train. It's happened with cars, I agree. But the worst thing my passengers did was stand too close to the edge of the platform while the train was passing by. They also rolled a suitcase on wheels. They were still running dangerously down the slope, hurrying to the train.
When you make a firm statement, make notes on what you are playing. And this is a thread about passengers, not about console performance, which is rife on the forum, and it's impossible to read any thread without complaints about performance. Even if this thread isn't about that at all.
I was wandering around Reading at about 0800 and hopped onto a Redhill-bound DMU to see how far it went before running out of the scenery. I couldn't get a seat - both carriages were fully occupied (as they might well have been IRL), so I had to take the second man's position.
