First of all I want to clarify one thing. I do understand this is a train simulator, not a full fledged character creator, but for some of us here the little details do matter. No matter how you look at it, you will always see the driver when viewing your locomotive from outside. So, the Driver Avatars - this is an area that was overlooked in TSW5 in my eyes. I do like to play with both, male and female avatars, but I believe the latter could use some tender touch in the future. I'm sorry to say, but the androgynous selection of female driver avatars currently in TSW5 are not only ugly as sin, but they lack variety. This also reflects to NPC passengers resulting a situation with identical faces everywhere over and over. Funny enough, whilst player avatars are extremely limited when it comes to hair, face and eye color variety, sometimes the NPC female drivers can be blessed with somewhat good RNG look compared to what you can choose from. See example... Spoiler Look at this German beauty from Oldenburg with a ponytail and everything, and then the pale flat headed ghost of mine who cannot even sit right... Yeah... please, give the ladies some love for TSW6. A few new hair styles and swappable face templates wouldn't hurt, thank you.
In this day and age there ought to be a means of inserting a “selfie” into the game and having the AI adapt it to your own player avatar. Or indeed bring in some custom mugshots to allow customisation of the random AI drivers that appear.
I really miss my avatar's hair from TSW2. It was a simple, no-nonsense cut that retained some length but didn't get in the way. But over the course of the various iterations she's been through the whole thing of the baldness being part of the uniform override on the TGV route, to TSW5 where she has some kind of buzz cut by default now.
It’s not a female avatar issue, it’s just a poor choice all round. I wouldn’t have chosen the bloke I have if had known he had one of those daft tiny pony tails that were fashionable for about ten minutes ten years ago. I think I had a choice between a chap with black hair and a chap with ginger hair and I could only see them from the front so no idea of the abomination round the back of the one with black hair. He looked normal from the front. The fact that you can’t keep the same player profile but change the avatar is a poor show too. I should be able to swap and change as often as I like but I’m stuck with Tarquin Latté III forever it seems unless I want to clear all progress and take another punt at finding a chap not modelled on the artist who drew him but a train driver.
The hairstyle that T posing woman belonged to one of the male avatars in TSW2. When TSW3 came out, my male avatar hair got swapped from that one above to a ponytail. I'm not sure if the hair swapping was intentional or a bug, you can never tell with TSW! I think some light customisation options wouldn't go amiss though.
I really want the ponytail back! I may often go around with a pair of them IRL, but for any kind of actual work where it would get in the way, I use a couple of sticks to pin my hair in a neat bun behind my head. The kind of thing I woud absolutely do for driving, and would like to see added as an option. A simple face/skin tone choice and hairstyle wheel should not be too hard to implement.
I would imagine Importing your old driver of yesteryear to a newer TSW might cause some issues visually not appearing the same, which is also a reason why we need more options in the character creation... When I first booted up TSW5 I had difficulties advancing because of the "overwhelming" selection of choices. There's some weird shenanigans going on. Right now you cannot even have alternative hair color other than dark brown. For research purposes I'm selecting this reddish, almost orange tint, but you'll end up with dark gray regardless, so I don't believe this is working correctly anyway which would explain a lot. Spoiler I can only wish for such a simple thing to be added. Here's to hoping.
The thing is, they've never to my knowledge knowingly updated the avatars. They're all the same ones from earlier editions. But between TSW2 and TSW3, that one hairstyle was swapped between the corresponding male and female avatars. Female NPC train crew still spawn with it as normal and do not seem to spawn with the swapped one.
I'd be down for more variety too. And the ability to make changes afterwards. Currently, my avatar looks very bland and I can't even do anything about it Some different body shapes, hair styles and colouring options would go a long way Here's a long shot: I'd also like for my avatar to correspond with my position. For example, if I'm leaning out of the right window on a platform, and go to picture mode, it would be great to see my avatar actually leaning out of the right window But I guess that might be rather hard to implement.
While I agree, that we need more variety of faces/characters in general, the fact that you sexualize NPCs that only drive a train is at least... worrying. There are so many things that should/could be fixed in TSW. This ain't one.
Who here has "sexualised" the train drivers in TSW? All I see are folks asking for some more options for making their characters look like them, or fixing a bug that TSW3 introduced.
I agree that there are many more pressing matters to attend to first, but I think it's good that this thing gets at least mentioned. Every little thing getting better helps the game as a whole And I agree with Princess Entrapta that no one here came across as to "sexualise" train drivers or even TSW NPC's in general. For my part, I'm just looking for a bit more customisation ability and variety.
Yeah, I'd like to have more performance first. Every little bit of added code to load is just going to increase system requirements. Although thinking about it... if there was a "no avatars" or "no NPCs" selection you could choose to improve performance that'd be useful too. Not sure how much difference a single driver makes, but a couple dozen animated passengers does have to be substantial.
Yeah there is no animation for that. It'd have to be all new art. It would have to probably be programmed into every train too just in case you want to use it. Yikes.
I'd like my driver to stop going bald everytime I drive the TGV. This is, a personal thing. It's very unlikely that it'll be implemented in any game, let alone TSW. But my biggest wish was for the ability to have headscarfs in games, so it feels a bit more personalized to myself IRL. Alas, I'd be happy to just have a slight bit more variety and the ability to change it without having to create a new account... would be quite awkward to have to switch identities when getting a haircut.
Seriously, I know of several famous women who can pull this look off. My TSW avatar is not among their number.
Perhaps we need something similar to the Mass Effect games where you can customise your appearance. Some people even managed to create celebrity lookalike codes which can be shared. Think I did a Jason Statham playthrough once!
Honestly the only time I really notice an avatar in the cab (since I'm usually just riding as the driver) is when in a US freight run and there's two people in the cab. They have that weird "uncanny valley" feeling and are kinda creepy. There's the passengers yes who are also NPCs but you don't sit next to them for a long time on a run (unless you're just riding in the coach car I guess) I dunno maybe it's just me but they're creepy. Passing trains usually are just zipping by before I even notice if they have a driver or not. Then again I don't usually take a lot of pictures in game so that makes a difference. =-)
