EDIT: Seems like many players, especially those who installed TSW6 at launch, are still having to deal with the annoying “NEW” labels permanently showing up on every route. If any dev sees this, might be worth looking into it. I just wanted to quickly mention a very nice fix I noticed when I upgraded to TSW6 a few weeks ago. For many iterations — going as far back as TSW4 or possibly even TSW3 — there was a super annoying bug with the route selection screen in the main menu on PlayStation: No matter how much you played them, almost every route had a permanent brightly colored “NEW” label attached to it, obscuring the route art and making the overall appearance of the menu screen rather chaotic. On top of that, the sorting options didn’t work at all, so except for the route you last played, everything permanently appeared in the order it was installed in. This ironically meant that I always had to scroll down to the very bottom for the new core routes which were immediately installed when I purchased the games. With TSW6, all of this finally works as intended after many years: There are no unnecessary labels, and I can actually sort all of the routes by “recently played” now, which means I don’t have to scroll far to access the content I’m currently interested in. So… thanks to whoever finally fixed those bugs!
The fix wasn’t in TSW6 at launch and has only happened in a recent patch. I haven’t noticed the NEW banners going, so I’ll have to look for that next time I play (EDIT - I looked and they are still there), but the ‘recently played’ sorting working is nice to have at last.
That’s how it’s been since launch, so nothing has changed for you… or me, as you will see… I’ve just had a look on my PS5 and all the NEW banners are still there apart from the core bundle routes which never had them so nothing has changed for me there either. I’m guessing from the OP’s experience that this is now fixed for people getting TSW6 now but not for those of us who got it with the longstanding bug still a thing, who are still stuck with the NEW banners. Incidentally, the order everything was in before the fix for the “Recently Played” option was the last route played in position 1, followed by all routes with a NEW banner in alphabetical order, followed by all routes (all three of them) without a NEW banner in alphabetical order. TSW4 and TSW5 were the same. In TSW3 this was also the case until add-ons manager was added, at which point the core routes also gained a NEW banner, so everything was forever NEW and the recently played menu was identical to the A-Z option.
Wow, interesting to hear how different the experiences are from player to player, even on the same platform. Seems like it would be simple enough to code this… just show a “NEW” banner until anything has been achieved on the route (completed a service, scenario or even route task). Maybe the way they’re doing it now is too complicated and gets thrown off by things like the add-on manager. This could well be the case. Over the past few years, I always bought the new TSW games at/near launch or even pre-ordered them for early access. This year, I claimed the free starter pack in time but didn’t install it until about a month ago. I also installed all my DLCs at the same time, before launching TSW6 for the first time. This is in contrast to previous years, where I often first launched TSW with just the new core routes installed before then downloading all the other content — mostly because compatible content was unavailable during early access.
I found a workaround for that: install TSW6 on PC via Microsoft Store, touch every route and train, and the NEW banner will disappear when you launch the game on console.
