The ironic thing here is that most of the stock included in the route is recycled or reused. The 182 and112 are just slightly modified versions of stock already present in TSW. So I'm supposed to be understanding of the fact that the time wasn't there to develop the high door dostos when none of the other stock in the route is completely new either? Maybe if two or three entirely new trains were introduced as part of the route I'd be more understanding to the time excuse for not developing the correct dostos.
I feel exactly the same. And while there's also plenty of UK routes available, at least the UK content comes with more variety, different eras, different train operators, and even a heritage line. But Germany, all we have is modern electric traction on double tracked passenger routes, and it doesn't help that most of the trains are red :P Although I can quite enjoy German routes, I don't really see a point in expanding my collection of modern German electric passenger routes. Unfortunately though, it seems I'm in a minority and modern German content still sells pretty well, supposedly better than an older German route would do.
Ok so I’m ok with the same locos and wagons, but what I’m not ok with is the wrong dostos, and they even acknowledged that. How dare dovetail games do this to us- it’s a killer
I wonder if the time wasn't there to do high level dostos because they spent too long making the route itself - I'd not be surprised if they took time away from making the stock to focus on the scenery given the criticism of South Eastern.
My understanding is that scenery and train artists are completely different, requiring different skills.
I made a couple pictures of the Dostos in the HL preview and the same in MSB. We can compare the height difference (to the platform). MSB: HL preview:
Even just one new freight car would have been nice, is this the first route with recycling like this?
Not likely, because apparently scenery artists and rolling stock artists are two entirely different groups of people.
I myself never understood it either. At this point they should know how much time a certain task usually takes. If they know this is not enough time to finish the route properly, then give it more time. You don't have to postpone it half a year, just a month or two at max! Give the devs time to make the correct passenger cars, and that extra time also gives the route builders a chance to do some extra polishing. It's ridiculous that the community keeps telling them to take their time to polish stuff, as we know very well they could do so much better, yet they keep rushing releases. Then they tell us to vote with our vallets... Why? Do they not want money? Why tell people to vote with their vallets? Make the product so people will want to spend on it, not "vote against" it by not buying. Rushing things is the worst practice in software development. They should really realize this by now and give themselves a bit more time.
The problem is that giving it more time means you need to give it more budget. You then also need to be pretty certain you'll make enough extra sales to cover the extra expenses made. But they may be sharing the same budget. Or the train artists were required for another project.
I’ve never understood the vote with your wallet comments. As a business, DTG should be wanting people to buy everything they release (I know this isn’t likely to happen), but to release half-arsed content and then just come out with the buy it or don’t comment is not the way to run a successful business. At some point, you’ll have fewer customers buying your content and then it’s curtains.
No need for a petition. DTG won't listen anyways. Don't buy the route if you think the recycled content isn't worth it. I certainly won't be getting it
Lets be realistic, how many of the entire playerbase, would be really obecting those slightly wrong dostos? We at the forums here are just a very vocal minority. DTG probably knows this route would sell anyways, and it wouldn't be worth spending extra resources in developing the right dostos. There simply wouldn't be enough people going from a "no buy" to a "buy". Voting with our wallet is the only thing we can do, to let DTG know which stuff we like, and which stuff we do not like. And it's the most powerful thing, if enough people do it. I doubt that happens though. I expect the majority of players not even noticing the difference in the dostos, or not careing enough to decide not to purchase the DLC for this reason.
"Vote with your wallet" to me can also be interpreted as "like it or lump it". Which, personally I don't find to be a particularly professional approach from a business who's sole purpose is to part you from your money.
The problem with that assertion is that we can't let DTG take it too literally. Okay, so the majority of the player base likely won't make their purchasing decisions on the height of the doors on a dosto. However, that can be a slippery slope. I would argue the majority of the player base doesn't know what trains realistically run on certain routes. Does that mean we would let DTG use unrealistic stock on routes to avoid developing new trains? And then there's sounds. The majority of the player base probably couldn't tell you if a given train had accurate sounds or not within the game. Does that mean DTG should stop investing in obtaining accurate true to life sounds for the trains? Before you know it TSW would no longer be a sim but just a game where you drive random trains on random routes in an unrealistic fashion
It didn't work particularly well for Gerald Ratner, who famously said that his jewellery stores were able to sell stuff cheap "because it's total cr@p!" The company lost £500m from it's value immediately after that speech.
We do need some healthy competition in the market place to stir things up a bit. Competition and rivalry always brings things forward.
Although I believe SimRail will be PC only so it's not going to help those on consoles, and as the PC market for TSW is the smallest market, I doubt DTG are too concerned about it impacting on their monopoly too much.
This is all correct. But on the other hand, the streams are intended for the more dedicated (or obsessive) part of the community- roughly us, the forum participants., And yet here we have, in a stream, the senior developer telling us, in effect, "sure, it's wrong, but we don't think it is worth the trouble to get it right" is rather disenheartening. It smacks of the attitude of the makers of watery, tasteless American commercial beer like Budweiser- "The public are too dumb to know the difference, so we won't bother."
PC might be the smallest market, but it's also the most vocal. PC players are more likely to care about "minor" things like the dosto door heights.
Yeh which is unfortunate but at least it gives pc players more options. I don't see simrail coming to console. PC players are more vocal anyways.
Yes, and it may be useful feedback, in case a product doesn't sell well, DTG knows why. I agree it's disenheartening, especially since I considered Matt a train enthousiast who *should* care about such a thing. But in the end, there's money to be made, and they're simply weighing extra investment vs. extra revenue. And they're not hiding it. But I agree it would've been nice to see Matt a tad more disenheartened by the decision not to invest in the correct dostos. Personally, I don't think the wrong type of dostos would really effect my purchase behaviour. I never checked wether the other routes had appropiate trains for them. I like trains, but I'm not a real train nut. A DB train on a German route looks OK to me. Especially for a route I'm not personally familiar with. Might be different if I knew the route and knew what kind of stuff would be realistic. So I can imagine Germans being slightly more upset than a silly Dutch guy like me. :P I have other reasons I'm not interested in this particular route. It's not the dostos... not for me anyways.
Unfortunately we are seeing danger signs it's heading that way already, the BR Blue pack on a modern GWE, wrong DOSTO's, wrong Classes on certain German routes, our German friends would be able to say more on that one as I'm not fully knowledgeable on German routes.
That certainly is valid, and goodness knows I have taken exception to various posts where users who are apparently unaware of business realities have demanded DTG do something financially unfeasible. However, HBL seems to represent a step change- never before to my knowledge have DTG offered a route without a single new piece of rolling stock, not even a freight wagon. This strikes me as going far beyond "This project's budget has to stay within projected revenue" to something closer to "how cheap can we go and get away with it?" Now, I hope this is not a harbinger for the future. The circumstances which brought about DLGW (the gameplay team had uncommitted time, but the routebuilders and rolling stock builders were fully occupied) suggests that over this winter/spring the latter group were heavily engaged doing something. I suspect it was Clinchfield, which came with an abundance of locos and wagons. So perhaps- perhaps - HBL is an outlier and DTG will get back to offering non-castrated routes in the future.
Since DTG brought the game to consoles they are obviously getting much higher revenue and returns on any given DLC, yet it seems like DLC is only getting more skimpy with their routes. GWE released when the game was PC only and included 3 completely new trains plus various wagons. Now that DTG has much higher revenue with the game being on consoles, why are routes consisting of less new stock? Shouldn't routes be getting better with time? One thing that has changed is the frequency of DLC. It's clear that with the additional revenue that DTG have opted for more quantity over more quality.
If it was just looks,okay maybe only the vocal minority cares but during the stream it was obvious is affects the ai and the player itself getting of and on the train. That's not just aesthetics, that's breaking gameplay.
My personal impression from what we have seen so far from the route in the preview and the screenshots is that you can literally see that the route suffers from management-driven cuts and it feels like the devs want to make more out of it but they cant because the management wants that DLC out. And this is just a shame. We have seen that the devs can do awesome stuff in TSW if they get the time for it. When you watch a preview you can really feel how Matt is annoyed by the fact that he has to sell inaccurate stuff which is so obviously wrong. At least that was my impression and it is a shame that we are currently in a quantity-priority-phase because TSW can do better. By far. HMA and CRR are proof of that.
The fact that I have already paid most of the rolling stock once, the route is hardly worth 20€ or even less. The 112 is a recycled 143 and a black MRCE skin does not make the Taurus a whole new loco. I don't even want to mention the wrong Dostos because they are an unparalleled impertinence. All I can consider "new" is the 143 conversion to 112 and the route itself, whereby the 143 conversion was for sure 80%+ copy & paste. With all love, but this mishap should be in the price range between Diesel Legends and WSR or IOW to be justified.
Sam's team was created to address the issues with routes and rolling stock. The flow seems to be: - Matt's team releases the route at a bare minimum level, maybe one notch more from time to time but never a completely polished product - Sam's team gets assigned with the most urgent fixes and if there aren't such, the route gets attention within a year, maybe more to touch on some of the issues In this way, Matt's team can move on and work on a different project to keep the sales going. By this logic, if DTG was a public transport company it would prioritize efficiency over comfort. All busses and trains arriving at stations will be packed with people in order to minimize costs, rather than arriving at convenient (shorter) intervals in order to ensure a pleasant ride. I guess we should be thankful they are not in the public transport business...
Arosa is not bad into my opnion. Clinchfield is not great, SEH is not great either. I will not judge Hamburg-Lübeck. For it just is not interesting. Münich-Augsburg is quite good
Maybe they've just done like a lot of other companies. Contracted it out to China who can make a similar looking product a lot cheaper, but the quality just isn't quite there!
Problem is that with this logic, you get less sales because the release quality is worse, but then work on it anway later, pretty much for free. So at the end it's the same amount of work on the route, but you got less sales from it. Makes no sense at all.
I agree with you! There is another element that comes into play. The way people work is if they get told enough times that a thing is fine, they will eventually believe it is fine. This is nicely called marketing. This is why, in my opinion, the business model I described is working for them. Of course, there is the part of customers who knows that no matter how you wrap up a rotten tomato, it still remains a rotten tomato.
I mean, isn't that what the airlines do anyway? Putting less and less legroom on a plane to maximize passengers on a given flight
After München - Augsburg I had good expectations for Hamburg - Lubeck route looks okay but reusable stock is not okay for paying customers. We need more than what they offering atm. I guess Hamburg - Lubeck will sell well unfortunately, so the problems will persistent on upcoming routes. I do like the modern German routes but reusable stock is a put off massively. Then to top it off Matt falls between train and Platform like cmon.
I have to sincerely thank DTG for putting out such lazy junk lately. It's saving me a nice chunk of money. I refuse to reward these poor practices by purchasing stuff like this. If DTG isn't interested in putting out a good product, I am not interested in giving them any more of my money. Looking forward to seeing what SimRail has to offer as I'm really done with the same mistakes and lack of care in their work combined with Matt's disingenuous excuses for why they cut so many corners.
My wallet has voted. Not for me thanks. Personally, I don’t have a problem with the wrong Dostos (I prefer Paprika flavour) as I wouldn’t have known the difference. What I do have a problem with is that the community have constantly stated that authenticity is important (and from a time long before the Hamburg-Lubeck screenshots were published) but they consistently ignore this. They should have enough brain cells to realise that the wrong train would not be acceptable. Best business practice would surely be to produce the correct train which would almost certainly generate more sales.
When we have paid £25 for a route and new trains in the past I resent £25 and reused ones , maybe we’re due another route with the class 101 and class 43 as the main trains. Idea for Cornwall route perhaps, maybe sell the trains a twelfth time to us on the basis the livery editor and cargo will be added as an update to them after release
I don't know it's so much a case of recycling stock but to be perfectly blunt and I know I hark on about the bygone era, but the prospect of yet another German route running double deckers (with or without the correct height step) I find uninspiring to say the least. This route could have been a showpiece for an earlier age of DB, with 216's, 218's or even 221's on Silverfish and UIC stock, maybe a Class 628 or similar DMU. But I have enough German routes in my collection running the type of train on offer and the route itself is nothing special scenery wise (maybe if it had gone to Puttgarden…).
I mean, that's not possible. The people that make trains aren't the same people who do scenery, so they can't just say "we'll spend less time on trains and more on scenery". They like to mention that themselves a lot as an explaination for why certain things aren't possible.