It was clear that something was wrong. The amount of DLC released in such a short time was unprecedented. And now there's a complete silence, apparently. Unfortunately, I think the situation is quite difficult for the employees. I understand them; I too have been fired three (3) times due to company failures or reorganizations. It wasn't a pleasant experience.
I think Skyhook are working on another 158 pack (Northern), I suspect they’ll also do a TFW one sooner than later. It’ll be nice as we’ll finally get some Northern Diesel traction that can add & displace inappropriate layers, a TFW version should give much more realistic consists for long distance services that are currently layered by their local stock. I will admit though they really need to work on their patching game, but of course we don’t know how much of that is down to DTG. Their timetables have been much better than most third party options too, other than the FC on which is…poor. Rivet I will say did a great job with Riviera, probably one of the better routes we’ve ever had for TSW, though it’s suffered from some poorly QA’d updates. Their turbostar packs aren’t so bad either but they’re making promises regarding updates to those packs that they aren’t delivering, and they do indeed suffer from a huge backlog of really poor quality content.
Unfortunately it's always been a one-sided experience with DTG, when they want to sell you something they are everywhere, when they want to keep dangling the carrot they "encourage you to leave feedback, get involved in the forums, let us know what you think" and then when something goes wrong, or they actually do get constructive feedback they dissappear. Zilch. Nothing.
Honestly how many DLC of the Class 158 do Skyhook want to flog us at this stage, the Scotrail one was a year late and pretty tame. The Nuclear DLC has more bugs than a banana in a fruit fly convention. I'm aware that at this stage it's Adam, not really a team at Skyhook so scope is somewhat limited. Riviera was an easy win for Rivet, very little trackwork, lots of easy to populate countryside, but it does look great and plays smoothly and the timetable is decent.
WCMLS was rubbish and to some extent still is. Just look next time you go through a tunnel with the repeating wall textures displaying a diagonal black section every few yards. Riviera wasn't too bad but then I suspect DTG had slightly more oversight of the process.
Aside from the tunnels and DTG never releasing a fitting timetable what would you point out as being things you've seen on WCMLs you don't like?
AWS not set up properly is another issue, still get a few signals where you receive a horn vice a bell. The tunnel portals look nothing like the prototype either. Don't misunderstand me, it's not all bad and perhaps rubbish was too strong a word and some improvements were made after release. Plus the biggest problem is that it didn't go far enough - Northampton and/or Rugby would have been a much more suitable end point.
Going back to the 158, as much as I welcome it's inclusion, I have a couple of concerns with it. What does it even do? There's only MAC really, which apparently it isn't for I remember someone saying in the other thread in general discussion. Then there's the risk of Skyhook just becoming a company that just repeatedly releases 158s. I know it's only Adam (and maybe a couple of others) because TSW isn't their focus anymore, but will people generally appreciate another 158 pack...? Also, I wonder what will appear on the roadmap first, Northern 158, GWR 387 or the ScotRail HST?
What would be the point of a Northern 158 pack? It wouldn't even suit the MAC route which is the only modern day Northern route. ATW I guess could layer on to MAC (there is an ATW 158 that you can spawn in freeroam which appears to have come with MAC on the QT), I suppose it could layer onto Cardiff Network though I'm not sure how much they did down there. WCMLS isn't great but it's not the worst out there either, I suppose in my case being a PC user means I get the benefit of user made enhancements and fixes as well as a better timetable but I'm running Rivera in Vanilla and think its good enough.
I am not sure the division of labour was that clean. Procedural generation based on say OSM data would probably produce results not different to existing TSW routes!
tbf the rolling stock overall on MAC is a mess, AWC shouldn’t be there, the LNR 350’s, 323’s on diagrams they weren’t running & doing so in the wrong consist, the SR 158’s etc. I think a northern DMU would only make it better tbh. It’s clearly just a route that exists for the sake of being in Manchester in a modern era, not much more. Given it was removed from the roadmap at the last minute, I suspect we’re missing context behind the Northern 158; either it not being northern at all, for another route we don’t have or some sort of Rivet 484 style remodel of an existing route. In any case I think a TFW or GWR 158 would have been more valuable at this stage in TSW.
MAC was a tricky one as it is missing a lot of core rolling stock regardless of when it is/was set, the 323s were always around though in this they are subbing for either 319s or 331s - neither of which are in game, the 150/153 is subbing for either the 175 or 197, again neither are in game (the 158s did also drop on Airport - Wales runs as the 175s were being phased out). I think the 158s were hired in to cover the 195s which had not yet been delivered, but they were not in Northern livery. Obviously you have the AWC and XC units too... The other problem with the route was if they set it just a year or two earlier they'd be missing 142s, 150s & 156s on top of everything else. Ideally to get the most out of it, it'd have been set either in the mid-late 90s or early 2000s, sure the 156s would be missing but all of the other units and loco hauled stuff would be there but that's just my wishful thinking
Yeah that’s why I think the NT 158’s wouldn’t be an issue, they’d if anything just help it look more like the route is supposed to & less like a cursed scenario planner party. In any case it’ll be nice to get some more NT stock into the game, I just hope it will have good gameplay value unlike some other things.
If we’re talking about failed DTG titles, both TSW Tycoon and the New York VR title seem to be getting little to no discussion in their respective forum sections. So I guess it’s safe to assume neither was a rip roaring success. Seems to me, DTG need to overhaul the brainstorming department when it comes to devising new original titles!
New York VR was released only for Meta. If this game had been released on PSVR2, sales would definitely have been better.
Train Simulator 2014 had some great looking routes in that era so I'd say it's a disservice to compare TSW VR to it. The graphics in TSW VR were unforgivable, and it doesn't fill me with much hope for the Nintendo Switch port of Wonders of Sodor.
The problem with VR is you can either aim for the mass market potato hardware or the high end enthusiast hardware. Making a game scalable to both is not unheard of, the Riven remake does it adequately, but the potato version is never really going to give people a true impression of what it could look like. But usually, you need to make compromises. Using TSW as the basis would mean needing a costly beast of a rig similar to what I use and have indeed played TSW in VR on, and significantly cut back the potential customer base..
It's kind of insulting to blame the VR hardware when there's aspects on display that don't even pass the standards set by MSTS in several ways. The lack of animated switches particularly is baffling when that game figured out how to pull it off on specs likely weaker than your average alarm clock nowadays. Derail Valley does not have these issues, despite also being a game made for VR, I've always felt it was still a decent looking title despite being very reserved graphically, which just isn't the case with TSW: VR. It's no different from how people try to blame UE4 for TSW's issue, when TSC having a in-house engine frankly shares a lot of similar issues despite being on a different engine.
From a reply to Nat's post sounds like they knew it was probably going to be cancelled awhile ago. As the reply states the writing was on the wall for a long time.
Is Ken a part of DTG in someway? Because my first thought when reading that would just be that they're referring to the lack of enthusiasm around the project outside the DTG inner circle.
He worked on WOS. And was a DTG employee from Jul 23 to Aug 25. So even Thomas was way into development before we got any wind of it. So people at DTG thought MR was going to blow up before we even heard of it if he left in August.
Yeah probably, but it's still incredibly niche. I don't think driving trains lends itself to VR. What are you going to do? Look around flicking switches? GT and VRider are great on PSVR2. It makes sense. You need to face the apex of a corner as you navigate the vehicle around it. A symbiotic relationship between game and user. There's no hardware cluttering the experience. Well, not much. Downgrading visuals for no apparent reason seems counter-productive to me.
I disagree. Now I can only look at the locomotive. With VR I can sit in that locomotive. But that's another topic for another discussion.
I just caught a post on FB from Katie, their Social Media Manager, that she is also down the road from Tuesday. Wishing her the best of luck for the future but sorry to revive the thought this sort of thing does not bode at all well for the state of play currently at DTG. And who will be looking after their FB feed going forward.
Given she's worked for the business for 5 years one assumes she either gave, or received 4 weeks notice. So internally decisions were potentially made some time before we started to hear about peoples own personal struggles like Nat.
Well, more than that in TSW VR, since we can walk around. But yes, the whole point of traditional training simulators is that it's a physical recreation of the cab around you that you act inside while the screens act as windows. Playing a simulator in VR recreates this immersive experience. It's not "no apparent reason", it's the fact that the Quest hollds about 50% of the VR headset market share, while the likes of HTC have about 10%. The Quest is a standalone VR headset with 6GB of memory. Games are built to account for that. Premium VR headsets like my Vive Pro are designed for top of the line cutting edge gaming PCs, and basically need a system powerful enough to run the base game at a baseline of 120fps to even consider running it in VR. So, if you're working at a company wanting to release a profitable game, do you design it for 10% of the market without compromising it? Or do you target 50% of the market? A market which last I checked has about 60% the total install base of XBox, the current third place holder on units sold in the "console wars".
