What Is The Future Of Tsw On Consoles?

That one is probably irks me the most; paying the same price for less product than what others are getting.

 

Isn't it annoying to pay less for a console than a PC? I guess we need to be consistent.

 

No. Its the only platform I can play on. I'm not going to stop buying DLC for it just because you say so.

 

Thats a choice but if it will fix the problems i will doubt that

 

Consoles are the major playerbase here, they will support also those machines, and say stop buy dlcs to console players like me, won't change anything

 

Sorry but consoles are the biggest group of users but also the group with biggest issues. Vote with youre wallet is a clear sign. Waiting and only written here on the forums doesn't work at all and the DTG team is moving to discord over the time so they did not take any responseble actions!

 

Fine, so you'll be happy for console players to pay less for a DLC than PC players will because you get extra services.

 

Why should console players pay less? They've already saved on the hardware. So the average price should be made up for by the cost of content. It's entirely fair, That console gamers who buy weak hardware a priori end up getting results that match the price they paid for it, despite the software costing the same.

 

The game was fine on consoles before TSW5, and could handle basically any route. I imagine that was when they magically turned into "weak hardware".

 

That is a truly bizarre thought process....

I assume therefore that if you paid less for your car than I did, you're happy to pay more for petrol in order to even things up? After all, you've "saved on the hardware. So the average price should be made up for by the cost of content. It's entirely fair.".

 

There is a vast difference between the cost between console and PC and many people just can't afford a PC that is powerful enough to run a game like TSW and its various DLCs.

So, if a DLC is released and PC has an extra 200 services (for example) because Console can't cope with it, why should Console users pay the same amount as PC players for less.

If you want more people to purchase a PC then I'm sure you'll be first in line to donate enough money so they can purchase one.

 

PC's for similar spec often actually costs less than a comparable console, only reason you're gonna pay vastly more is if you're building a absurdly high end machine. Which a lot of people seem to forget isn't the case for most, lot of people only have $500 to work with.

 

Why should pc players get better sales then?

 

I was thinking of moving from Xbox to PC this year but with the amount of DLC I already own being the thing holding me back. All this news though of a new Xbox/PC hybrid potentially being released next year sounds pretty exciting tbh. Multiple store fronts including Steam etc, better sales and possibly the ability to play TSC has me thinking there could be a bright future for the game on console?

 

What a bizarre analogy. Speaking of gas and cars, the console owners didn't even buy a Honda Civic, but rented one, and they go to the gas station, and there the owners who bought Mercedes fill up with the same gasoline at the same price. And the same gasoline allows their cars to go faster, they can go wherever they want (they don’t have restrictions like a rental agreement) and in general they can do whatever they want with the car. At the same time, everyone pays the same price for gasoline (routes), but gets different results at the end.

 

Bleak.

 

Look at it this way: you've got the basic route. Nothing more, nothing less. Premium platform owners get additional options.

 

I gave the analogy above. I have a Kia that costs about $30,000 and can reach 200 km/h. The owner of a Porsche that costs $150,000 and can reach 300 km/h is the same We arrived at the same gas station. Should I ask for a discount on gas, since I can't drive 300 km/h even if I wanted to?

 

Better than what?

 

That's a horrible analogy when as noted before, PC's vary, and Steam's for all of them, not just the $1000 dollar machines. For that matter by the same logic PS5 Pro, Series X, and Switch 2 owners should also pay less than their cheaper counterparts, but they don't.

The real reason for the cheaper prices on Steam is just down to the fact they have actual competition they need to fend off. They screw up Epic or GoG could easily offer more competitive sales, and as you can install any store on PC that's a actual threat. In comparison console players tend to be more locked in, you can't just download the Nintendo eShop for your PlayStation, once you're locked in its a non-issue for the console makers. This is further shown by the fact physical games are easier to deal hunt for, because more like PC retailers like Walmart & Amazon are competing with each other for your sale.

 

Sweet glad we agree, PC owners should pay more for the additional content. Thank you for proving my point, though I don't think you meant to.

 

Do you even read? It doesn't matter what kind of car you have (PC, console), the price of gas (and games) is the same for everyone. How the car drives doesn't really matter anymore, it's all about what you paid.

 

Someone needs to do a study on this forum & find out why its users have a compulsion to come up with the most ridiculous analogies.

 

It's a plague. It seems that people compete with each other to see who can post the most absurd analogies.

And these silly comparisons are often part of a pointless argument like the one between PC and console above.

 

Honestly, I don't expect my console version to play like a high end PC version, or have all the bells and whistles.

You pay what you pay, for the convenience of having a 'plug and play' device.

In theory, you should be able to relax, get comfy, fire up the machine and away you go, with no worries or issues to contend with.

But instead we get this!!!

 

Literally every other platform

 

Yeah, we don't get it good on Xbox at all!!

 

All I see are TSW players turning against each other because DTG haven't got their optimisation on consoles sorted out...

Instead of console players saying "PC players should pay more" and PC players telling console players that "you got what you paid for", redirect all that frustration towards *DTG for letting the game fall into that state in the first place and keep demanding they fix the console version of their game instead of your fellow players.

The game should never have gotten into this state on Gen9 in the first place.

*I feel I need to state this but I mean DTG as a business, don't go after individual staff members or do anything fringe like email the CEO directly.

 

If you got it on Xbox, you already have it available for PC mate. Just fire up the Xbox app and install it.

 

Personally my plan is to hold off on a Gen 10 console when they release, I don’t really encounter issues with game performance on 99% of my games with my Series X and going by speculative price tags not particularly looking to either cheap out on a lesser powerful model or pay upper triple number price tags just yet without good incentives, personally I think the series x lifespan could easily and reasonably be another 2-3 years at least, they just seem short and it doesn’t feel to me yet anyways that I need a new one or an improvement.

 

Agreed for 99% of games.

Unfortunately, TSW is not 99% of games and I do not see how any DLC going forward is really going to work very well on current consoles considering what we have seen recently.

Unless they suddenly drop some secret optimization patch they have been quietly working on and I will let you decide how likely that is.

 

I’ll be getting gen10 if for no other reason than to keep my console as advanced as I can, of course we’ll need to see what’s what but gen8 to gen9 was a huge jump in performance with most games being at least 60fps now & a good few getting to 120. I suspect the next leaps will be in ram size & upscaling software.

Now for TSW the quick fix will be more ram in consoles, however DTG made this mistake once already, with gen8 to gen9 they continued to not optimise enough & depended purely on the new consoles power. It will likely be the same thing with gen10 & eventually that limit will once again be reached.

In terms of TSW now, it really is on its own as a title that struggles to this extent on the consoles, though soon MSFS will be on even more of them & SCS are bringing their truck sims along too, so I guess those will be some test cases to see how much gen9 can handle.

 

MSFS is undeniably demanding, they're some of the only 9th gen only games that I don't think even give a 60fps option. But the SCS titles? Those honestly run on any random machine, even pretty low end ones. I have a pretty meh HP laptop that family got for a business trip, isn't powerful at all, but still runs ATS/ETS2 pretty decently. SnowRunner's in the same boat I believe, it's developed for mobile and Switch and actually runs well on the latter from my experience. I also have no clue how Farm Sim performs, but that's been on anything and everything for years, it's even been on 3DS I'm pretty sure. So I assume Farm Sim must also similarly be very scalable and run on a lot of hardware.

Honestly road sims in general unless they're really hardcore racing sims modeling literally every bump on the road by 3D scanning real tracks honestly ain't that demanding.

 

What is the future of TSW in general, what is the future of consoles and what is the future of gaming in general? Microsoft seems to shift to a more PC/Windows based Xbox with an expected price of atleast $1000 and the expected price for the PS6 is $799. Those prices are not gonna help a smooth and fast transition to next gen consoles and it most likely will also not help the gaming industry in general.

With those hardware prices, there is a chance gaming will become a hobby for less people, because of less value for money or people can't even afford it. Maybe people are gonna try other options for gaming, Switch 2, mobile gaming or gaming on an Apple TV for example. The quality of games is also decreasing, I don't have to explain the people on here what I mean with this. So in my opinion there is no bright future for gaming atm. But we have to wait and see how it will turn out.

 

TSC can run nicely on a half-decent gaming laptop tbf, although it'll struggle a bit on the most intensive routes.

 

Currently both laptops I have can’t run Doncaster works which is the route I use for testing

 

Due to the fact TSC's core is so outdated at a certain point newer hardware isn't even gaining you much. Most CPU performance boosts over older PC's comes from the multi-core side of things as opposed to just faster CPU's like back in the day. Many older games can't take full advantage of.it, and so you get weird cases where modern games with far more detail can outperform older tiles if they were very demanding.

TSC & FSX are probably the best (or worst) cases of this, the latter I think was because developers assuming that one or two core CPU's would continue to be the norm, Which is why that game struggled to perform well even on machines well into the 2010's, they evolved differently than expected. Notably a lot of Flight SIm specific machines at the time would even go for two core CPU's for that reason. Duo core chips tended to be clocked higher, meaning better performance for programs that didn't need extra cores, while also being way cheaper.

At any rate, spending $1200 on a general purpose PC is overkill, I don't know what a "reasonable" minimum spec would be for high-end TSC content. But certainly you can get decent machines for half the price at least that could still tackle TSC reasonably well all things considered. And mind you, that's enough that you could then potentially use that extra money to then buy a PS6 alongside it as well.

 

The problem with the console where tsw is concerned, is that as tsw puts on more weight and becomes more power hungry, your stuck with out of date hardware that just can't carry the weight anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the console. The problem is dtg. This stems back to the train simulator days. When it first arrived I could play it on some pretty weak hardware and get good performance. But as dtg made routes bigger and more traffic was added, and higher resolution textures were added and they started pushing the engine to it's limits, plus the enhancement packs and so on, that hardware I was using was obsolete! But it wasn't a problem (if you could afford it) a few upgrades and good performance was back again. Unfortunately you just can't do that with a console.

From what I've seen over the years tsw is going in the same direction. I've gone from a gtx 1050 to a 1660 then a rtx 2060 to a 3070 to a 4080 just to keep up. That's 5 graphics cards compared to the 2 generations of consoles. And I haven't even gone into CPU and memory upgrades!

I would hazard a guess that dtg are making tsw on hardware that's far superior to gen 9 let alone gen 8 so as they are building routes and they run great. Then comes the time to make it work on gen 8 oops it don't work on that anymore. Then oh even gen 9 hasn't got enough memory to do that now! Let's lower a texture here and there, reduce draw distance to reduce memory usage etc. and look what you are left with.

Forget optimization, from what I've been reading about unreal engine. Optimization, at this point in the game is a mammoth task, so much it would be quicker and easier to make a new game.

Hopefully dtg are making a new game because tsw at this point is dead. And I really can't see dtg putting the income of cash on hold to try and fix either.

 

A question from a PC owner: what settings do the console versions have over level of detail? On PC I can tweak the different settings for shadow quality, view distance and so on, but I don’t see any references to turning down settings on console.

 

Only settings are HD or 4K, motion blur on or off and volumetric clouds on or off

 

Exactly this.

We have very little we can do.

 

And this is very common for console games too, lot of games only have a performance and quality mode, quality at 30fps with high resolution and better quality settings and performance mode with lower res and settings at 60FPS. Sometimes there is a mode in between, which can varies per game, but sometimes 40fps when your console is connected to a screen with 120hz option.

 

Yes, because most console games are built to work on consoles, or at least optimized for consoles if they are ports from PC!

TSW is the only game I have ever played on Xbox were I get frustrated that it doesn't work properly graphically. The only one.

 

Thanks. I wonder if TSW ought to have performance and quality modes then.

 

The older routes from TSW1 and TSW2 I can play on 4K mode, even on Series S. However since TSW3 with TOD4, 4K is not an option anymore because of stutters, lag and low FPS. This is not not only the case for TSW, those newer graphic features like volumatric skies and fog can become to much for consoles, causing games having lower resolution and/or lover FPS. Then we even didn't talk about Ray Tracing, but this also depends very much on the engine used and the developer. For example, Watch Dogs Legion with Ray Tracing reflections, runs fine on Series S at 30fps and with Ray Tracing disabled at 60fps. But in general, games look worse with those new features, because they cut quality on other parts, like resolution and the use of upscalers. TSW uses TAA, which make the game not looking sharp in HD mode, creates ghosting, artifacts and so on.

So issues are not exclusive to TSW, games in general look worse now then they did around 2015 - 2020. Maybe lighting is better, but the overall quality is not. The named Watch Dog game, that Batman game of (I think) 2015 and Need for Speed 2015, do look better then games of today.

 

I think you can call the HD mode the performance mode and 4K the quality one, however there is no FPS limiter in place, so without VRR it will stutter anyway. Also 4K mode nowadays has to many issues, like blurred textures.

 

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Do you think the 4k mode vs HD makes any difference?

I have tried both extensively and they seem exactly the same performance wise.

 

On Series S the HD mode has a much better performance, but I can imagine this is less a thing on Series X and PS5. However the blurry textures seems to be more a thing on 4K.

 

OK, that's DTG's fault. They could easily include those settings; there's nothing about a console which prevents it.

I would however HIGHLY recommend turning off 4k. Even mid-upper range PCs can't run it.

 

It's not common for console games having those settings implemented. On console it's more lile you get the best settings possible for the hardware, well if they implement this correct. 4K is possible on console, as I already mentioned even on Series S with the old routes. But I really wish there was a 2K option and/or a better HD mode.