Gospel Oak To Barking Riverside Preview Stream Thoughts - An Actual Solid Dtg Route?

They shot themselves in the foot, for sure. Better to have £22.50 in the bank now than £12.50 (maybe) in the Christmas sale.

 

That's completely arbitrary! I suspect that most people who say they would have paid £22.50 but won't pay £25 are more interested in making some kind of point rather than pleading issues of personal affordability for what is an entirely discretionary purchase.

 

I could afford it several times over... Just do not see it as value for money. At all. End of.

 

Same here, It's not a case of £25 being too much for me to afford. It's that I don't think this route is worth £25. It's lacking in replayability/variety, and as such I don't think the value is there for £25. I literally pre ordered fife for £27 instead lol.

 

Come on you O’s

 

Fair enough but I doubt that it's worth £22.50 to you either then. That's also my point.

 

Everyone has their own view. I think it is worth it and will be buying it tomorrow.

 

£22.50 is more borderline for me personally. If it had been £20 I would have instantly bought it, £22.50 I likely would have bought it after the preview, £25 I'm waiting for a sale.

 

Agreed, very much looking forward to making my purchase tomorrow.

 

Just been watching the British Ace video on YT and it’s looking very good. It’ll be a purchase for me.

 

Same here. While I appreciate that many TSW players will be relatively young and haven't grasped the concept of inflation.

The usual full price for DLC has gone up from £25 to £30 over the last 5 years. That's an increase of 20%.
In the same period for comparison;

Council Tax up 25%
Mortgage up 25%
Energy Bills up 104%
Gallon of Diesel up 20%
Pint of milk up 45%

Is anyone spotting a trend there?
Do we think that the cost to DTG of running a company with employees who all need the above might have gone up by a similar amount?

 

Rather unnecessary, condescending & assuming comment to make. It’s abit like me saying you’re too old to grasp the point that’s being made.

This route at 13 miles is £25. Fife Circle at 52 miles is £27 with the pre-order discount. That’s the problem people are pointing out.

Sure you could say that other routes are priced too cheaply, but that’s a whole conversation on its own. I just wanted to point out your comment was crass & not needed at all, never mind a poor take on the discussion.

Regardless of being 15/30/50/80 years old, you’re allowed to think the price is off. Ageism doesn’t need to come into it.

 

Imo glossop should have been £15, goblin should be £20 and longer routes like Fife are fine at £30

 

Hi Doug.

 

This. And, watching the Matt & Alex stream last week, the scenery looked very impressive. I’ve lived in the area and the Victorian houses looked well developed, plus extended for a long way beyond the track.

That takes time (thus: money) to build. Otherwise you end up with something like Maintalbahn, from what I’m hearing. So, yes, short route. But also visually impressive route. So cost per mile goes up.

You can’t have it both ways. I’d rather pay more for a better route, because we know once a route is done it’s really hard to get it enhanced. The price is entirely fair IMO, and is literally twice it costs me to get to work and back on public transport for a single day. But for many more hours of value.

 

Excellent and valid point. Everything has gone up the last few years. These days £25 can’t buy you much. I will be looking forward to buying this tomorrow on PlayStation and I am sure many others will as well.

 

With all the complaints being about the pricing I figured I’d check out the route… and I have to say it looks pretty well done.

I’ll take 13 miles and 40 minutes of pretty well done over 50 miles and one hour of slop any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

That said, I’m waiting for a sale because as a personal policy, I never pay full retail on anything these days. Everything is up 20% except my salary, so I’m just not doing it.

 

Exactly. Entertainment software is always optional and not subject to the same price gouging we are seeing on energy and food etc. DVD’s, Blu-rays and 4K movies and TV shows have remained relatively static for the last several years, apart from the odd Collector’s edition or similar to command a premium price. And there is nothing about the Goblin Line that commands a premium price. It should have been £20 at most, with a preorder of £18.

 

Imo Goblin is good value and as I've already stated, I look forward to making my purchase tomorrow.

 

I’d rather pay £25 for a DTG route than £27 for a Rivet route. The value of the work of a DTG is £25 against the value of a Rivet route which would not even be worth a tenner for me.

Compare a DTG route to a Rivet route and DTG will come out top everytime IMO. Pay £27 for a Rivet route if you want and you will soon be complaining. If Rivet can portray the Forth Bridge which looks good in their video, then why can they not put the same standard of work into their other poor offerings especially WCL

 

This is basically the point really, it’s all relative.

The quality of scenery on Goblin may be good, but is it as good as the experience something like BPO can offer at a similar cost?

Sure, WCL isn’t worth what it’s priced at either, but that doesn’t mean that Goblin is. The pricing in TSW goes both ways, it’s either good value or it’s poor value, sometimes the static pricing of DLC works in our favour & other times it doesn’t.

We haven’t seen enough of Fife Circle to make a true comparison but since they’re releasing so close together, I used it as a general comparison. If you compare the gameplay alone though, Goblin comes off as a worse deal, but even then it depends if you like the contents of a DLC.

Push everything else aside though and the end result is that for an extra £2, you get 39 more miles, more service patterns & a busier route. When you make it black & white then one is objectively more value than another.

It’s not exactly something people should be getting so worked up over though, this route will hit £18 in a matter of weeks/months, just as all the £25 packs do.

 

Why thank you, I'm glad you picked up on my not-so-subtle nuance. Sometimes a supercilious point is necessary to balance out some pretty hysterical rants about something that's not essential to life. Perhaps you can explain in detail (like I did) why I've failed to grasp your opinion and agree with it wholeheartedly.

Prices go up. That's life. My first train simulator cost £15. I've had 30 years of inflationary prices of PC games, maybe it's something you get used to and accept.

 

Yes, this is fair. I don't particularly enjoy BPO. I don't know why, I just don't. I can appreciate the effort that has gone into it but it's simply not my cup of tea for some unknown reason. Therefore, it doesn't represent good value for money for me but I don't feel ripped off, I don't feel any enmity towards Just Trains or the many people who love the route, it's just not for me. The world has not ended, so all is well.

 

Rivets only fall is their sounds their modelling of scenery and trains is top tier whereas DTG slops in modelling of trains and scenery aswell as sounds. DTG is just the bigger party

 

The increase itself seems to be okay if 'you' felt TSW was reasonable priced before that.

It was not, it is not and if im comparing all of my Gaming collection (many of which running with a lot of DLC collections) TSW is still by far the worst money for product. And thats just the content. Whereas other developers pushing for updates to make their games simply better (and not just ignoring it to a point where its all forgotten, steam anyone ?)

I could go on .. for me the princing was, is and probably will be to high.

If the price is good for you then of course feel free to purchase whatever you like.

 

I guess the overarching point is about what is being offered at the price point. You can pick up London Commuter for $30 and that has way more content. Fife Circle will cost more but will have way more replayability than this.

Compared to non- tsw content, I can pick up TML Studios The Bus which cost $35 which has several lines and buses in 1:1 recreation of Berlin. Compare that to the Suffragette Line which comes with 1 train and services that run every 15 minutes.

Now I will say that it does look like a good route and I will be getting it. But since I got a $100 Xbox Gift Card as a gift, I won't be spending out of pocket for this although I wouldn't have necessarily mind to have paid $30 for this since I do like metro style routes. But when you compare this to other routes or games in terms of replayability value, it doesn't have much replayability or much to offer for those not interested in this style of route. After watching the stream, it felt like DTG were focusing on other things to compensate for the fact that this route doesn't have much to do.

Sure people can bang on about inflation and the cost of living in the U.K, but that isn't the customers problem. Not every player lives in Britain. The pricing structure in this game overall doesn't make sense when some routes cost $30 which offers more content but a route like this cost $30 but offers less for those that are not a fan of these style of routes. Especially compared to other games in the vehicle sim genre

 

See how good DTG’s route compares.

 

Kind of a useless video if the route hasnt released yet...

 

Hi JK

 

Rivet didn't do that well in modelling Cornwalls scenery though, the route feels a bit lacking except for the section to St Ives which has a realistic Cornish coast feel.

 

Well a few people familiar with the area have said St Ives looks most unlike how it is in reality.

And they messed up a speed restriction in the Up direction where line speed of 30 MPH should resume after passing over a foot crossing just outside St Ives but remains at 20 MPH all the way to St Erth.

 

I was sitting on the fence after watching the preview stream, I found it an unusually irritating stream, they are usually relaxing. I did question whether I thought it was worth £25.

Having watched British Ace's first drive I am going to purchase it after all. I did wonder if I thought I would wait to get it a bit cheaper, however I do like these sort of routes and from what I can see it is one of the most detailed DTG routes. Over time it will get plenty of use.

It is easy to make our own judgments regarding value and that is personal to each of us, but with the level of detail and a brand new train it feels like it is worth the money to me despite its shorter length. DTG obviously feel the four months work (I think that is how long they said it took to build) is worth £25.

 

Exactly, even there there are issues which is why I think the route needs a total revamp like West Somerset(which tbh was a pretty solid route even before they updated it)

 

Tbh entertainment has gone up where there’s demand (there’s huge demand in gaming). There’s no demand in blueray/dvd/physical media. The demand is with cable/internet subscription and streaming platforms, all who have been raising prices where I’m from.

And if we look at the gaming industry… I see a lot of “meh” dlc for that $29 amount, especially among the triple A’s who are renowned for rolling out slop. They try to capitalize on initial hype. That’s sort of stuff we see going for like 12 bucks on a holiday sale.

Heck, elden ring’s dlc is like 40 bucks. I don’t care how good it is, I’m not paying for dlc that’s more than half the price of the original game… especially when I can probably snag it for like half off in a year. I’ve got plenty of games to play, I’ll live without it.

And that’s why I do like you and just sit tight until the time comes. One good advantage TSW series has is that the content generally (I repeat generally) stays relevant even beyond that first big sale. Multiplayer games have a serious fomo that they tend to capitalize on.

Sorry for the novel, I just finished reading War and Peace

 

The route looks good, but like others have said, the A to B nature of the route and lack of diverse timetable means it will get boring quick. Think about the most popular TSW routes and what they have in common. Dresden-Riesa, Blackpool Branches, SEHS for example. They are routes that feel like a network with different service patterns and diversity within the timetable. They are more than just A to B and back.

I really wish DTG would have taken longer and added the North London Line (Richmond-Stratford). It would've added approximately 20 miles of track, 22 more stations, and another train (class 378). Combined with Goblin, that’s a little over 30 miles in total and still less stations than Brighton Mainline has. So very much within the bounds of what DTG is capable of doing in TSW. Plus, the combined NLL + Goblin would be worth the standard route price of $39.99. Not to mention, the NLL would mean switching between AC/DC power mid-journey, which I think is a feature that markets well. Let’s put it this way, during the stream they had to resort to marketing functional lifts, hidden goblin collectibles, and AI traffic over a bridge because even DTG know GOBLIN is boring on its own.

 

They could have at least extended to Willesden junction, I would have been very happy about that and it would have added an interesting scene at Willesden with the Bakerloo line. I think as compensation we need a reasonably priced Nlon line from Stratford to Clapham and Richmond, that would be better value if it was sold for 24.99

 

Captain KirK: "Put it on screen Mr. Spock, what are we looking at?" Mr. Spock: Captain, sensors would indicate it's a goblin in an elavater". The logical conclusion would be to perform evasive maneuvers or we will not live long and prosper". Captain Kirk: Red alert Mr. Sulu, lock on photon torpedoes". Oh I kid it's a Day 1 purchase for me. From teddy bears and chocolate bars on wonderful BCC to goblins and elavators. Awesome stuff!

 

Been anticipating this Route for a long time - looks great!

 

Yep its inflation folks so don't complain. in fact just charge anything you want. How about a 10 mile route for 35? I mean devs have to eat don't they?

 

Guess you feel like they don't? That's certainly a take. Do you live somewhere unaffected by inflation? I wanna move there lol!

What's the exact ratio of miles/$ that is fair though? I've always wondered because so many people are dead certain that route X is "objectively" worth more than route Y because it's longer.

BML is a fan-favorite and is about 50 miles. So if we use $30 as the price, that works out to 60 cents/mile.

By that measure, Suffragette is woeful, indeed, should only be like $8, right? Uh-oh!

But what about longer routes, do we "owe" DTG back for the "extra" miles? Oof!

Maybe they could keep a running tally of everything we've bought, and the total route mileage and either bill us or send us a refund as appropriate?

/s

 

My only thing personally is that for such a short route I feel like they had to get the scenery right and they had to get it spot on especially after the car crash that was their small German route. Because I think the scenery is the selling point for the route and if they got it wrong then there's not much else going for it?

I was just hoping there would be a little more meat on the dlc in all honesty. Because even the stream screamed they were scraping the bottom of the barrel somewhat. But I do think the main gripe is a lot of us UK fans have been waiting for a route and this ones a little niche and seems a strange choice?

But saying that I do hope the people who get it on release day do enjoy it.
Because they did nail the scenery

 

It's not about length. It's about replayability. The fact is that this route doesn't have much to do compared to other routes at a similar cost which will obviously make those not interested in routes like this wait for a sale or not get it at all.

 

There isnt and shouldnt be a price per mile scheme in place. That being said I will always stand by the fact that £25 for 13 miles with no branches + a new train is ridiculous when I can spend £30 and get 50? miles a whole loop + a new train.

Not to mention I will most likely get bored after 4 runs on it because the service pattern is exactly the same.

Its a shame really because I love commuter routes like BCC and the London Overground in general but this is a disappointment.

 

Wasn’t this supposed to release today?

 

Check back later. There's still 16 hours of the day left.

 

10 am consoles
4pm PC steam.

 

The section from St. Erth to St. Ives is absolutely awful. Having lived in the area most of my life it is insulting. Penzance scenery too. If Rivet produce a good job of replicating the Forth Bridge, then there is no excuse for not revamping the scenery in WCL to look like reality!!!

 

I think the main issue with WCL is the fact that is it quite clear it was meant to be a modern route, and then hurridly backdated due to licence issues rather than completely abandoned.

 

It'll be odd only seeing freight running with EWS and DB without any GBRF or freightliner which are usually very common to see.
Would of also been great to have a new freight wagon to make it better value for money.

 

Nice to see, but licencing rears it's ugly head again