https://blog.scssoft.com/2025/05/next-stop-ets2.html I see a fair amount of posts in here asking for bus titles, and between the various ones such as TheBus, FernBus, BusSim & OMSI, there are caveats with all of them, weather it’s quality or complexity. It’s far to say ETS & ATS have a great foundation for driving in general, so in my opinion I think we’re about to see a real contender for the best bus simulation since OMSI, at least for coach/intercity driving.
Well, that's Fernbus probably done then isn't it, at least on PC. Driving in that doesn't hold a candle to ETS, neither does the map.
Well if this comes to fruition, absolutely fantastic news. Day One for me. Edit: Let’s hope it has some sort of structured timetable or schedule system, not random A to B runs at any old time of day.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will it be like bus tours or intercity coach journeys? Aren't they introducing pickup trucks in ATS so you can have roadtrips?
I suspect it will be a gradual rollout. There has definitely been an increase in infrastructure for local busses, all the recent reworks and last couple of DLC’s have seen multiple bus stops around cities. I think initially it would be A-B. That being said there is a demand which SCS has noted for multi drop & regional gameplay on the truck side of things, I would put my money on that tying into future development with busses. As above they’ve only shown off coaches so I’d say it’s intercity only for now, but the infrastructure is seemingly being put in place already for more local urban transit. Overall I’m not entirely sure how much potential local busses are, as ETS cities typically consist of only a few roads. With ATS indeed getting smaller & non commercial vehicles, SCS are definitely laying the groundwork for a wide genre driving simulator.
It’s easy to compete against Fernbus, at least on PC. I won’t ever comment about the forever beta The Bus game… It’s great to see ETS2 switching to bus mode slowly, as it was heavily requested by the community, I’m hopping for a ETS3 on consoles. There’s also CTS: Tram who just announced today, that they’re releasing CTS: Bus too next week for PC and September for consoles. Maybe later they’ll focus on intercity/long distance coaches.
How is CTS? Never really looked into it since trams aren’t my thing & what I did see of it looked like the usual UE city with poor detail, bad performance & lifelessness.
Well… you guessed it lol. The fictional city feels really empty and I’m questioning myself why such a small town have just a big tram network. Performance isn’t great, I’m on PS5 and it stutters sometimes and on some areas I have a big FPS drops. Traffic is almost non existant and it gets really boring quickly. I’ll finish on this, graphics makes you feel you’re playing a 2018 games, some buildings are really low quality and yeah globally it lacks detailing. I’m really curious how it’ll turns out for their new bus content.
How predictable. Amazes me how all the bus sim titles fall into the same traps, if you can’t get a decent urban scenery going along with some semblance of life, why bother? OMSI was cooked up by 2 devs, yes these days it’s third parties keeping the title going, but I find it laughable that no one has taken what OMSI does & smooths it out. It’s the same for ATS & ETS, SCS have the market boxed off, simply because other devs just don’t bother with making a good foundation to build their sim on.
I don't see SCS announcing a new game just for consoles. I feel like after they finish working on core stuff and rebuilds of the maps, they'll port over ETS 2 and ATS onto consoles. (IIRC, some SCS forum members over there think the same thing)
Can’t wait for this. More of an ATS enjoyer but this will give me more reason to get acquainted with ETS
Oh cool then if they port these two games onto consoles, there’s really no good enough truck simulation like ETS at the moment. I know there’s one which looks promising but still no information on it, it’s this one:
The PC demo is out for this, I haven’t tried it myself but based on this discussion it’s not looking great. https://www.reddit.com/r/trucksim/s/tZ88ym8DaY
I noticed a few negative reviews on Steam. Looks like the physics implementation is somewhat lacking. I say that not having tried the demo myself, but as it coincided with me getting Roadcraft working and now firmly embedded in the first side mission on Map 2 where you need to ferry endless dump truck loads of sand to remake a supply route, I decided to leave it alone. Phew that was a wall of a sentence.
Ah bummer it looked good on the pictures but you don’t judge a book by its cover. I watched some videos, it was nice visually but it feels dead. I know it’s supposed to recreate the monotonous and long Aussie truck trips but I don’t know it looks unfinished, unpolished especially on the physics side. I hope they’ll sort out these issues but my skeptical side tells me the opposite, it’s a very small team but we’ll see… I saw you many times mentioning Roadcraft and honestly I’m getting that game this month, it looks fun and well made.
Definitely. Thus far I would say it is slightly more linear based than Snowrunner, where you basically got the map, found the missions and company contracts and could do pretty much in what order you liked. But there’s something incredibly zen about turning a dusty and muddy trail into a decent road.
It's not complete garbage but it's not great either. The problem for this game is that ATS/ETS exist on PC, and those cover such a wide array of truck-related stuff... so it's never going to take time away from either of those unless it taps into a very specific niche of a niche like the mud/snowrunner games.
ETS2 had the killer combination of being a great game that went well above and beyond in a genre where it basically had no real competition. Meaning that everyone moved to it very quickly, and SCS had time to develop tons of expansion and updates to it. That just can't happen for anyone in a post-ETS2 world, I'm not even convinced SCS would succeed in making a ETS3. I just don't think SCS could develop enough content out the gate at a cheap enough price to convince people to upgrade from ETS2. Honestly I think the only real shot anyone would have of taking down ETS2 would be a AAA company willing to put in a insane budget to develop a utterly massive and detailed truck sim that's optimized for consoles. And frankly the only company where I think truck sims would even be on their radar to compete with is maybe Microsoft, due to them doing Forza and MSFS. And even then I'm not convinced they could win against SCS, they certainly couldn't afford "Microsoft Truck Simulator" to have the same launch issues its flight sim counterpart had out the gate if they wanted to win people over.
Yeah I don’t think anything would dethrone ETS/ATS at this point either. Most the work now I suspect will continue into map development, gameplay development & engine/performance updates. A good example of something similar is LOTUS, which was designed to be the successor to OMSI2, from one of the same devs & it flopped spectacularly & is now just a means to make money through meh DLC.
The one thing that could rival the SCS games would be a new road transport sim that offered 1:1 mapping.
Yes but I think the reality of the industry means it’s a pipe dream to get anything like it. MSFS24 seems like it was a laboured breath of a dying genre. The only thing we seem to get from sims now is UE slop.
The smaller map is a plus for a lot of players though, a lot of casual players would actually hate having to spend literal days to go from coast to coast. ETS2 & ATS's maps have the advantage of being big enough to feel huge, while being compacted down enough to keep things interesting. Way I see it's similar to how the flood of open-world games have ironically made certain groups long for shorter, more linear experiences. I think that would be especially true if the 1 to 1 scale world isn't as tightly crafted as SCS' worlds are.
Oh I know. In fact on more than one occasion I've advocated that DTG should try some sort of condensed mapping as the only way to replicate longer journeys - Euston to Glasgow or Chicago to Denver in a 1:10 or 1:15 map.
I guess The Bus did Berlin on a 1:1 scale which is honestly an incredible achievement. Reviews don’t look too hot though. Has anyone tried The Bus and enjoyed it? Might be a good pickup on a steep discount.
I was playing it earlier and I enjoy it. I had an update and found they'd added a new route. I quite like it - world feels alive, buses have good variety and are easy to control. Yes - there are lots of things missing but they are on the roadmap and the game does get updated. People may disagree but I like it.
