The law of large numbers wins. That's what it is to me, a mixed experience. While being awesome at times, bugs like non working wipers, lowered pantographs, open doors on the 377, no rain on the windshield, timetable deadlocks and bad cab camera presets can completely ruin the experience. Timetables are complex, but at least Zusi has a feature to remove a train causing a deadlock while playing. And Zusi has an adjustable Chaos factor which leads to a different experience, different routing, on the same service each time if you want, because its dispatcher is the closest to real life you can get. It's not looking that great, but it's reliable and immersive if you're into the core simming aspect of railroading. As is Run 8.
I think I found it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1040730/ZUSI_3__Aerosoft_Edition/ Gameplay may be fun, but graphics look dated like TSC.
It's the most accurate simulation for german railroading. No DLC, it is a modular network system (no single routes) that gets expanded constantly for free, all the safety systems (Indusi, PZB90, LZB, ETCS) are prototypical, the rail network is reproduced meticulously (the devs are rivet counters!), features realistic and fictional timetables of different eras, random delays, editors and a seperate tool called ZusiDisplay. A working EBuLa display (enter your train number and your timetable is loaded), passenger announcements, working diagnostic displays, realistic PZB/LZB setup using a simulated interface of these computers to enter train data, super easy timetable editor and so forth. Currently it features 17,353 services, and to find what you want to play due to the large amount of timetables there's a dedicated website, http://zusidatenbank.de/ It's used and sold for real driver training, developed by a small team (basically one man, Carsten Hoelscher) and people working on it in their free time, mostly or all of them with a real railroad background. It teaches you much about the operational side of railroading that is not simulated or heavily simplified in other simulations. It's more Simulator than Game.
Boiling down reviews I've read from steam, Xbox, ambassadors etc, in a single sentence, the overriding feeling is. "It's ok, but no where near worthy of being a new game"
Zusi has one big drawback - no save function so if you want to do a longer run you need to find time to do it one go.
No, you can use the autopilot and accelerated time. Lets say you play a service starting at 19:00. At 19:30 you have to stop playing. You can do the following: Select the service again, use the autopilot and time acceleration, or select a service starting closest to the time you finished, 19:30. From there you can jump to any other service currently spawned and take over the train you left on the fly. There is no missions or medals anyway as it's not a game that needs you to achieve anything - it's purely about driving trains. As timetables are not a trivial thing, it's better to have them generated as they unfold than to use a savegame which will always screw something up, especially with these huge timetables and huge network, it's not a single 40 miles route. (To be specific any timetable has a set of modules, that are 20-30 kms long, defined from all those available to form a timetable "route".) Basically your "savegame" would be just to note the service number and time you stopped playing on a piece of paper and spawn in there again another day to resume. I do this the same way in TSW3, never used the Save feature again after it screwed a long run on SPG. The best thing is you're only paying once and there's no DLC. Hoelscher makes most of his money with professional customers, training centres, and manufacturing complete control stands for Zusi which provides all interfaces like input APIs and of course, all realistic displays simulated using ZusiDisplay software. Here's a nice little german TV documentary clip on Zusi and its developer.
Individual customers are entitled to their reviews/opinion on the game at the time of purchase. I havent left a review myself. The game has great new features and its fair share of issues. Not sure why it should bother anyone else.
I don't get it either. Most of the reviews I have looked at seemed fine. Just because you disagree with them, it does not make them bad reviews.
They are mixed now. I think people have a right to give whatever review they like as it is a fact that this is basically a core update which a lot of gaming devs would provide for free. Yes we get 3 new routes which is quite good value if you want them. Probably the fact that they have cashed-in on this in under a year has gone against DTG, and it's hard to argue against that being a cash grab, unless you are a fanboy of course. I've bought it and am quite enjoying it, but then I should do as I'm going to be rebuying it every year it seems....
This was a pure top level marketing decision, technically there was no reason for a new game, it could have been an update only. Apparently the number of games sold is raised, which might play an important role here.
Not allowed to talk about that. No seriously, there is no technical reason at all to not have TSW4 pushed as an update instead of a new app and the inevitable entitlement transfers. Even just updating each DLC in place would have caused less havoc. And it is an incentive to have all of their three new routes sold right at release - cashflow is rising immediately - and attract new players. People initially will think it's a game that's new (release date), rather than buying a now almost seven years old game. The first public beta TS2Prototype was released in December 2016. (Which wasn't even really public, you had to buy the TS2017 Pioneer's Edition to be entitled to use the TSW beta CSX:Heavy Haul, if I remember correctly.)
i meant the numbers of sales, since steamcharts dont show its doing better so far. but its hard to tell
I don't really care as I'm not the Financial Officer at DTG, and Steam sales are just a fraction of the overall sales including MS Store, Epic and Sony. Afaik there's more console than PC players.
then why did you say in your earlier post that sales had risen. im just confused how you would know? especially since like you said most people are on console
I said cashflow which is immediately available money that was going to DTG as soon as the preorder started.
I don't remember that - seems like I was able to buy CSX-Heavy Haul with no pre-requisite. But I did have TSC at the time, so maybe I had that Pioneers Edition and just didn't realize it.
I'm talking about the "public" beta, found the info screen . They had even locked a beta for a brand new game behind a paywall. Why would you not want to make that accessible to everyone to gather feedback and attract customers? Again immediate cash was more important than anything else...
Thank you for the information about Zusi, Spikee. I heard of it before but since I'm quite new to train simulators in comparison to you I had no chance exploring the benefits of Zusi in comparison to TSW. The graphics are obviously worse than TSW, but the functionality is no joke worlds better than TSW. You said about the modular system and the adding of new content for free, which I wasn't aware of and to be honest is a big big plus for me. If I could literally drive on any german route this could be so satisfying and I even would overlook the worse graphics. Thanks for time you took for the explanation.
Be aware it doesn't come with any tutorials. There's a free demo version available though which is a tutorial. Here's the actual network map. https://www.zusi-sk.eu/
