Here's something I'd like to suggest, and it stems from the old batman games, arkham asylum, city, and Knight. Origins too if you want to count that. When roaming any route to find collectibles, sometimes it gets really annoying for me to be able to find everything. This is stemming from my current play of Cane Creek. I don't usually play freight railroads, but I have it on my game, and at some point I will have needed to get to it anyway. What's bugging me is the Vest and hammer collectibles. They are sometimes really hard to see and it bugs me that i can't always see them. This brings me to my suggestion. In the batman arkham games, at a certain point, you get a map in game to show you where the different collectibles are. They give you an approximate location for them. I think something similar is in order for the game, but I'll be honest, I don't expect this to be taken seriously, as I am probably the only one who really wants such a thing. Basically, my idea is when you load a route for the first time, such a map is locked until you find a certain number of collectibles. I think about 60% would be fine. Then once you find that amount of collectibles, when you open the map, in game, not on the pause menu, each location where a collectible that has not been found will be marked by a blue circle. The circle is not so small, that it tells you exactly where the collectible is, but it's a larger circle, designed to give you an approximate location of the collectible you missed. For someone like me, who needs to constantly look up guides to finding collectibles, and who doesn't always have hours of free time to be going on a big savenger hunt for collectibles, I think this would be a big time saver in my opinion. But like I said earlier, the player has to do some work before such a guide would be shown. But I don't expect this to ever show up in game. Why? because I feel like I'm the only one who would actually want it and make use of it. I expect the developers to see this thread, read it, laugh at the ridiculous insanity of such a suggestion, then throw it out, never to be seen again. I post this anyway in the hope I'm wrong, and they actually believe it's a good idea. I highly doubt it though.
I agree with you. Especially useful for freight routes since it gets tedious trying to look for everything since it's not like a passenger where there are stations which makes finding collectables easier. I just want to get collectables out of the way without spending an eternity looking for one
The routes are getting bigger and longer and that makes it harder to collect everything without some form of help. On shorter routes it is possible to walk the whole distance and search around but it is a long process. There is a point where it ceases to be enjoyable so a map of approximate locations would be helpful. Maps of any kind in TSW have proven to be, how can I say it, not a strong point so how this would pan out is questionable. There could be a toggle for pointers to collectibles like the objective marker bubbles if they wanted to keep it in the game world rather than a map. They could pop up when you are around half a mile away and take you to within a hundred yards or so, then disappear for that final manual search.
Something to do other than driving the train The thing that is supposed to set TSW apart from the old TSC is that you're a driver so you can stand up, walk away from the train etc In TSC you are essentially the train itself as you can't do this