Will Spirit Of Steam Get Any Dlc Or Has It Been Abandoned?

Completely agree with this, I thought at the time something like the Fairford Branch would have been the logical choice to start with. Or something like Stainmore would have been adequate with just two loco's and one rake of carriages and some wagons.

I hope DTG do have plans for DLC for SOS in the future otherwise it will for me turn out to be the most disappointing route in TSW and make me question whether it is worth investing in further steam period offerings if they aren't going to fulfill their potential.

 

Yes it would be great to see Matrix trains getting involved in TSW.

Some of his period 3 carriages and porthole stock would be great to see, alongside the BMG black 5 maybe and the 5mt Mogul. They would really add something to the SOS route.

 

Of course it’s not just SoS which has suffered this fate. Several other DLC, notably Clinchfield, got high profile super hyped launches but never any follow up content.

 

As a saw SoS as being a ‘must buy’ route, it being my local route more than it being steam at first, and later the pleasure of having a steam loco or two in TSW was huge, it has been a source of great disappointment after the novelty wore off.

Now that the steam generation is not as good as it was at first and the fact that the huge number of operational bugs are still not fixed, these issues are more disappointing than the lack of a DLC loco. There is very little I can do with any confidence on the route at present. I’d need to see a significant improvement in many aspects of the route and steam generation behaviour before I spent any more money on SoS.

I’m not convinced the route could handle another loco on it in any case. The limitations of the rolling stock consists, where the timber cargo doesn’t even show on PS5, the one livery on the coaches, the resource hungry scenery in parts of the route indicate that. The dispatcher and signalling can’t cope with the level of traffic it currently has either so I can’t see anything being added that would make these issues worse.

One day it may become playable again and maybe if core optimisation improves there could be one more loco added but the route is nowhere near the standard it needs to be to add anything right now. Any dreams players have of a fully populated Crewe station or bustling yards can be forgotten about as that is never going to happen.

 

SoS is the only DLC which I hate wholeheartedly. And I don´t even own it.

It has written "DTG" all over: Great ideas, pompous launches, poor realizations.

In their amateurish attempt to fix derail issues on SoS they screwed up the whole TSW2. And it remains as a monumental abandonware ever since. Bloody amateurs of the most expensive kind.

 

I am not worried about a fully populated Crewe station or even yards jam packed full of wagons, although they would be nice.

A realistic timetable and one or two new loco's to add a bit of variety, to a route set in a period where you would have had possibly a dozen different classes of steam engine (if not more) in the area is all I want.

I personally haven't really had any problems with the running of the route myself, although I rarely play it at the moment as it depresses me.

 

Rivet beat DTG for amateurism, which makes DTG look professional.

IMO DTG have just produced one of the best routes in Rhinestrecke and Rivet the worst in WCL.

 

Sure, but Rivet can´t [Edited] up the Core game, as hard as they might try. But exactly that happened to TSW2.

 

True. I recently returned to Clinchfield and had a delightful run on the mainline. The potential is there (if the banking comm/consists issues are ever resolved) but it lacks attention and some more old diesels.

 

Both are very capable the IOW is a lovely route, routes like Cross City and Tharanter Rampe are both very good routes. I get the feeling with DTG they have strict budgets so routes seem to consist of as little as they can get away with. Rivet have been very forward thinking with their content in many ways, yes WCL is disappointing, personally they should have left it to a time where going to Plymouth is vaiable. However the other Rivit routes in general are decent, Luzerne is very nice despite its flaws.

 

I totally agree with your post. I'd say this seems to be more of a wider issue across a lot of newer TSW routes in general regardless of the era. Why have the first West Midlands Railway route featuring the UK's busiest station outside London - New Street - with one train. With E-G, the new Scottish route should have been either a quieter route or branch line, or alternately from Glasgow Central at least so to have more of the existing 314 etc instead of an empty Waverley etc.

For TSW, the key for any new routes is to have a few smaller, quieter routes first with a few different types of rolling stock, then have busier routes - the same applies for any steam routes to avoid emptier timetables like SOS. London Commuter is a great example - it's epic timetable is only because ECW, SEHS and GWE etc (plus loco DLC like the 313 and 465) all came beforehand.

Apologies to go off-topic and not mention steam hardly.

 

Not at all and it is a good point relative to steam too. Two or three branch or secondary lines could each have released with one or two locos which would then have layered nicely into a more extensive project to add variety.

 

Funnily enough on the subject of steam I was at the Bluebell railway all day today two full runs up and down the line and haven't heard a single safety valve go off all day

Plus they even ran a Buffet car

 

Here's another sore point i'm not sure it was mentioned yet.No matter what type of loaded wagons you try to place with scenario planner from SOS there always empty.always.

 

I did notice that a Jubilee with 7 on would flatern the Runcorn climb. Not plod along at 30mph with low boiler pressure.
The main errors I get are when starting from, or arriving at Crewe. Most timetables that have Crewe in them usually ends in a blue screen, saying an error has occurred. Even when taking an engine to the sheds the fireman is flat out lol.

 

The other bugbear for me is the fireman, I mean the fireperson, shoveling coal on like their life depends on it whilst the train is standing in a station

 

Yes the fireperson is very fit, even when the engine is ready for disposal they can't stop. There must be a huge coal bill for those sheds. It would be almost impossible to loose boiler pressure when climbing, with such an overactive fireperson, but somehow that still happens. Over firing or firing in the wrong areas could also deplete the boiler quicker. Even with a Duchesses, and ignoring the speed restrictions, some of those schedules would be impossible to keep,

 

The steam physics patch to correct the lacklustre performance of the locos can't come soon enough. The climb out of Liverpool Lime Street with a Jubilee pulling 10 coaches now manages ~13 mph, whereas it managed 19-20 mph in TSW2. Also for the upcoming Peak Forest route, if the Jubilee and 8F are struggling with poor steaming, then the 4F, which has a substantially smaller boiler operating at lower pressure (175 psi), is going to be very anaemic, even more so for a route with continuous steep gradients.

Spirit of Steam really could do with a Black 5 or 2-6-4T for handling semi-fast/stopping passenger services.

 

But what can a Jubilee + 10 achieve up that bank in real life? Surely that’s the question, not what it could achieve in TSW2.

I completely agree on the need for a suitable loco for stopping services, though. It’s been the number one request since SoS was released, so it’s very surprising that the new route won’t address that gap.

 

The new route is going to have services missing as well, or certainly will out of the box, unless the knock up something completely unrealistic, although sadly that is possible.

I half expect the 4F to layer in on SOS in some way I just hope they don't layer it in on the stopping services as that would be pretty unrealistic.

 

I'm scared they're going to try putting a Jubilee with a couple of coaches on the stopping services! We've been crying out for a tank engine or something "Suitable" for stopping services!

Although I understand they can't really release much while SOS is in such a state you would've thought more would be done a bit quicker to fix it and getting it to the standard you could have more dlc

 

Yes I agree. Although even the Jubilee with some mark 1's on the stopping services as a "placeholder" whilst some DLC is developed would have been better than nothing I suppose.

 

Regardless of TSW2, the steaming at the moment does seem a bit poor, in TSW3 currently the Jubilee with 10 coaches even when being somewhat stringent with the regulator and cutoff, the pressure quickly tanks to ~ 90-100 psi and takes a long time to recover even to ~150 psi.

There is evidence that Jubilees have been known to pull more than the 10 coaches represented in SoS, albeit uncommon:


45562 takes 12 coaches over Shap unassisted

https://railphotoprints.uk/p964471272/h36945D9D#h36945d9d
45698 hauling 11 coaches unassisted over Shap. 1965

https://www.rail-online.co.uk/p490104537/h9224F294#h9224f294
45606 hauling 11 coaches unassisted over Shap. 1950s

 

I have to say that DTG need to do something using SOS and peak forest BUT before they do they need to fix so many broken issues.

After ignoring the route since moving to TSW3 I made a decision to run the 4.30am (ish) 8F service from edge hill sheds to exhibition sidings… at which point the vans jumped off the rails (grrrrr)…. So I restarted the service from exhibition and ran out of steam at Ditton (with full pressure on the gauge and the firewoman working like a navvie)… double grrr…. Then resorted to running a jubilee into lime street, which was fine until it came to uncoupling for the next service and the game kept telling me I needed to uncouple…. Even though I had….

ENOUGH!!! I switched off

 

In my view it needs to go something like this:

1) Fix steam physics
2) Introduce manual firing
3) Fix timetable on Spirit of Steam
4) Then introduce either a loco DLC or second route that layers back onto SoS to fill out the missing content

Fix the fundamentals and then introduce new content. Otherwise there will be a rat's nest of issues stretching back in time over multiple DLC meaning that they are less and less likely to be fixed in the future as the scope of fixing the features becomes unmanageable.

I'm really concerned by the general direction of development of steam content at the moment; it doesn't seem logical or likely to end up with a quality product at the end. Peak Forest looks visually promising but again there are good reasons to be sceptical of the quality of gameplay.

 

As we were discussing the other day, by 1963 the Buxton branch shuttle was worked by a BR&CW Class 104 DMU. Prior to that it was push/pull stock presumably with a MT tank loco of some description.

 

DTG have always been working like this. And they won't make promises anymore, remember how often Sam forced Matt to say "No" when he was saying stuff like "not at the moment, but we're thinking of..." in the Q&A streams.

As bad as it is - we have to remind ourselves that DTG are here for one reason - business. They sell a product and the only real chance to change their behaviour is to not buy it. They are not legally obliged to provide patches and fixes, and their word is also not legally binding. It works because there's no real competition (Trainz surely is not.)

Just look how SCS let's the users test new ATS/ETS2 builds using the Steam beta option. Everyone's free to test the new versions, then they collect bug reports - when they release the stable version there is hardly any bug to be found. That's the way to treat your customers. Not "we'd love to but we have no time" - a company working like that should be bankrupt rightfully.

I'm still hoping for a real competition because it's obvious DTG starts making the same mistakes they did on TSC. The first BR185 for example worked fine. Later releases suddenly have their lights on even if battery's off. NEC pantographs don't work - stuff that was already done gets broken. Turn on the disc headcode marker lights on the Class 40 and look at your locomotive and see what happens then.

And the people that work on this are everywhere but in Chatham. That's the problem. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. So obvious that I feel sorry for the Community Managers that can't hide they have no clue.

Sometimes it reminds me of the Challenger disaster in 1986. Engineers said No. Managers said Go. Boom. Of course that's a different thing. TSW is only a game.

And for the "Future of Train Simulation" it takes much, much more. Still TSW routes may look better because of UE4 shaders and rendering. From a construction point of view, they are simpler and have less varied assets than TSC. Lots of billboard trees in the distance - looking very ugly sometimes. Just compare them if you can.

My best steaming experience is the Bossman Stanier Black 5 on TSC. Just fantastic.

Hope for the best but expect the worst.

 

I agree...
3 things they lack / room for improvement -

1. Quality Control
2. Bidirectional communication with the community*
3. Competition

*Just realized that you can't type the word
p l a y e r b a s e

 

playerbase
( working when you type it separately )

 

Any chance of getting coal on the shovel too?

 

Or a fireman in the cab ( consistently )

 

Another question, will there be layers, new services / static stock added on crewe - liverpool with the release of peak forest? Im looking at the 4f and the new ici wagons.

Would be a good opportunity to enhance the rather empty sos route and bring fresh steam into it.

 

Going to stop you right there, SCS, while good, aren't the best at updating bugs and issues.
There are COUNTLESS issues where the GPS speedlimits don't match the roadsigns resulting in incorrect speeding fines and with rest areas that are bugged out and do not allow resting.

These are two very different games, two very different developers and cannot be fairly judged/ compared.

Bearing in mind that ETS & ATS are old games, the latter being 12 years or so old.

 

Also going to FMod completely trashed the default truck sounds, particularly in ETS2. Impossible to use without mods and even they can struggle with the sound system.

 

The point is you can test the beta. Stuff gets tested.

I just feel DTG's contractors that do the loco models are out of responsibility once DTG approves and releases them. That could be why seemingly easy fixes don't get through and DTG themselves are trying to fix issues on stuff they have not developed on their own.

 

Another loco this route could use is a Royal Scot. Had a drive with the Bossman one in TSC last night and it is a lovely bit of work. Stormed out of Lime Street up the bank, perfect sound even when running at speed, not the muffled roar the TSW steamers emanate. Very free steaming but again, unlike TSW, the safety valves popping did not overpower the rest of the sounds.
So essentially for SoS I would like to see:
Duchess/Coronation/Princess
Royal Scot
BR Standard Class 4 75xxx
2-6-4T either ex LMS or BR Standard.
0-6-0 Jinty.

A selection of catering vehicles including a RMB buffet car.
Mark One sleeping cars.
LMS P3 coaches.
LMS suburban stock.

The route extending to include Runcorn to Chester and Chester to Crewe.

Pink Floyd pig now flying over West Swindon…!

 

That would be an awesome network and would see a nice variety of trains, as you would have seen in the steam days. It gets boring knowing that the train approach is headed by one of two engines!

 

With regards to the original question from this thread’s title, I think DTG would hold off any Steam Individual loco add ons until a manual fireman and a few other essential things are done and working first. I think any such dlc would be overshadowed with reviews/comments to an extent it’s best to release a different loco.

 

Well they are building a complete new route with a new steam engine so surely they should have fixed the issues first, unless they plan to in the next month or two.

 

DTG is good at selling early demo, not mature products.
So it looks like a half-finished product.
Can you tell me which route is complete?

 

Depends on what you mean by complete mate.
I would say that SEHS, BML and even EDG were complete in my opinion as there aren't glaring things missing from them.

Yes I know that the 700 is missing but the routes seem busy enough to feel complete to me as I don't know them well enough in real life which would bring me back to what you mean by complete!

 

I am surprised you even use it as I haven't seen you write a positive thing about it! I know if TSW was causing me this much angst it would long be uninstalled.

There are plenty of good routes and some that feel like they need more adding to it, hence the title of this thread but it isn't intended as a bash DTG thread, I am sure you can make (another) one of them yourself!

 

Regarding SoS I feel like it was more of a trial and a predecessor to another steam route which has turned out to be Peak Forest and no DLC was ever intended for it and I find it highly likely there ever will be and anything 'new' on there will be layers from other steam routes which will be made after this one's initial popularity, which I don't blame them for really. I do feel it was there to just gauge the interest in steam to see if it was worth developing it further into the future.

Obviously I could be completely off the mark but I would have thought they would have done some dlc for SoS if it wasn't there just to gauge interest for steam in the future.

Also this was very clearly chosen as the route purely to appease Mr Paul Jackson which again I can't blame them for.

I tried to not venture to Peak Forest but I can't help myself so I just need to say that the route must get a gameplay pack or whatever they call it soon after release to bring the the more era accurate diesels to the route or they can forget my purchase.

 

Yes agree, too many "fire and forget" dlcs have been released and abadoned.
Thinking about the insane amount of time and effort is necessary to research a 1958 & 1963 route, to me it makes the impression of a huge missmanagement on the dev side, by only using 5% of the routes potential after creating all the nice scenery, track and signalling..

I can understand if the reason for holding back is manual firing etc., but dtg really should follow their "prestige example" sehs on the steam era front.

Loco packs, extensions, more loco dlcs with diesels for example, wagon dlcs..

Im really not expect anything for free, so what are you waiting for DTG?

 

Trainz, SimRail, Run8, Diesel Railcar Simulator, EEP, and a few others...

There *is* competition, in this niche market. But each competitor game seems to have their own list of shortcomings. Making rail sims isn't easy, and I think we have to admit that, regardless of its shortcomings, DTG isn't doing a bad job at all.

 

It's not really their work that we criticize. This is their way of managing their DLCs. Not at all attentive to enthusiasts. 3 countries, and always the same. They don't seem honest. They say a lot of talk, but nothing concrete. They respond here when you compliment them, but never if you talk about their bad attitude.
In short, it's DTG and I think we won't get better, for the moment, alas.

 

The biggest problem is that the blower is not working, cannot use the injectors manually, steam chest simulation is non-existent... I type it slowly: EVEN. TSC. CAN. DO. THIS. You know, a game released in 2009.

Future of Train Simulation. Come on...

Was the quickest refund in my life.

 

I hope that isn't the case. It is pretty pointless to bring what should be a busy route out and then leave the timetable half finished. If they aren't going to bother adding to it then I am certainly not going to bother purchasing Peak Forest which already feels like an incomplete route. At least SOS feels like a logical route.

If they are going to bring content out with potential then abandon it on a whim then why should anyone invest in it in the first place?

Perhaps Mr Jackson should pick up a 1958 LMR timetable and compare it with the timetable in the sim and maybe find some photos of a busy Liverpool Lime Street in the 1950's and see for himself whether this route really captures what he presumably dreamt of.

With DLC SOS would be a far more immersive route that Peak Forest in my opinion.

 

TSW uses physics simulation. TSC just uses black-boxed game physics. WAY easier.