Everyone is hung up on the number of services, it seems. BML has 1,400 driveable apparently, this one has 61 (driveable?). But a lot depends on variety. How many of those BML services are unique? And most are with one train. So, you may end up driving from London to Brighton 500 times (eventually in your sleep). This route, however, may have lots of unique trips, for all we know. Plus it has freight runs! I'll take a dozen different journeys over a hundred runs from A to B any time.
You get 6! freight runs. Wow, what a number. 6. I am really sorry but that doesnt sound like we get a varied timetable here.
That's between 25-50% off. That's a huge percentage. I do agree, variety is the spice of life. However with Arosa no variety was demonstrated (the freight wagon didn't even make an appearance!). The fact there's only six freight runs means shunting etc is unlikely, meaning they won't offer much variety. As we have no High Speed services, the stoppers will do just that and stop at all stations nearly every time.
How should a small 3rd party studio develop even another loco and give it away like it's for free? If anyone expects quality, another shunting loco in addition to what will be delivered would be a very bad idea. So route and/or the other trains wouldn't be half as good as their state now. And (at least speaking of scenery) their quality standards are already not exemly high. But that's for the moment the only way a small studio can survive - by trying so stay on the green economic path. Of coure rivet could (and maybe should) try to up their standards. But this could also break their necks, especially when people always just buy at sales. Costumers want quality - me too. But even when quality is delivered and many people only buy at sales, that company will at some point not be able to get enough profit to balance the loss made with sales. Which means on the next product the quality is probably even lower because there is less money to balance the development costs. And then: less quality --> less costumers --> less quality etc. etc. etc. At the end neither the development studio nor the costumers are happy. And the studio is probably bankrupt at some point. So maybe we should demand more quality - yes. But at the same time we should keep our expectations realistically and maybe be a little bit forgiving when a house or a tree is missplaced, as long as there are no game breaking bugs like Arosa had one. Which was fixed, btw. Yeah the timetable is still pretty weird and the passenger coaches really sound aweful. The distant scenery isn't even worth mentioning. But all in all the DLC was okay. Not the best. But still had some hours of fun with the loco.
Like with the 37 (which at best will have a new livery), including a 08 wouldn't actually require any developing as they'll be using existing stock.
Who said that they had to develop/include a shunter? If they wanted to do one, at most they'd just need to reskin an already existing one.
You kind of left the route, and stations, and signalling (and timetable and scenarios...) out of your calculations there... Trains aren't the only things people need to build to have a railway
But to be correctly: The shunters are from DTG. Yeah, the 37 as well. But just because Rivet is allowed to use the 37 it doesn't mean they can just use any other loco from DTG. But of course they could have built a layer for the 08.
DTG probably wouldn't mind that considering both Cane Creek loco are clearly based on the DTG counterparts.
At a stretch they could have utilised the Class 47 and Mark 2 coaches from NTP to add in loco hauled Cross Country services, even if left in blue/grey to avoid issues with Virgin licencing, depending on the exact era.
I agree. With GWE I have always said they should of done it before or after the electrification not during it as they are now stuck in that Era which was one of the complaints/excuses with the diesel legends.
It really depends how much licence they are prepared to take. I would be quite happy to accept B/G as a representation for Cross Country services, makes more sense than the 37/5 "freight" which by and large wouldn't be seen west of Burngullow. The oil tanks to Penzance would more than likely be hauled by a 47 as would any engineering trains, again depending on precise era and EWS taking over the infra jobs.
On the subject of the timetable for Cornwall, here's the 1992 timetable: Services marked "IC" are intercity and would be either a HST or 47 and air con mk2s. Without either, 61 services sounds about right. Stops with an x in them (eg 12x13 means that stop is a request stop, and the train departs at, in this case, 12:13). Times in italics are connecting trains.