Yesterday I decided to stream a first look of TSW2 following its release on Thursday with a review of the game as it stands. In this post, I am going to collate all my feedback from the stream into one as there's a lot of things I would like to mention. Overall, I do enjoy the game and look forward to seeing new content come out for it as well, I think DTG have made a good job here in keeping us in the loop about the upcoming releases to the game and the stages of these by use of the roadmap, and I also thing the Community Q&A streams have been a welcome addition to the stream patterns and I hope they continue. So, for the game, here is my feedback on the various points I came across. User Interface / Main Menu The User Interface is really nice and is much cleaner in comparison to TSW2020, so I applaud the dev team on this. It's much easier to load into different routes from the menu that previously. Despite this, where items are placed in the menu are a bit strange. First and foremost, when you load into a route, it gives you a screen which has "Start a New Journey", "Explore" and "Tools". This was very confusing for me to navigate as the labels themselves didn't quite make it clear enough to know what was in either option. The screen which should load, in my opinion, is that which is under the "Explore" option with the Timetable, Scenarios, etc, with the "Start a New Journey" option on the top of that page. The tools should, really, be on the main menu where the route selection screen is as there's no reason, from what I can see, for the Livery an Scenario Editors to be nested within the routes themselves (Especially the livery editor as you have to select the loco after entering it anyway, and you are able to open the livery editor from East Coastway which doesn't have support for it anyway). Having these tools in the respected routes just makes it confusing, in my opinion, so I think they should be taken out and just be placed in the main menu of the game. The in game HUD, however, is really nice and much cleaner than the old TSW2020 HUD, which I'm very pleased about, whilst it also shows more valuable information to players. A great design choice, in my opinion. In Game Graphics are pretty good for the game, in my opinion, akin to Unreal Engine made games in general. I'm very happy with the detail of the routes themselves. I have heard a lot of people having issues with passenger numbers but I don't really see an issue on my end. It could be more dense but I see quite a lot of passengers when I arrive at stations so I, personally, don't have much of an issue myself (I am playing on the high preset though which may be a contributing factor to this). Bakerloo Line passengers do tend to have some interesting behaviours, but, I'll be honest (minus them walking on the tracks) I'm ok with it because it's actually really funny to see the passengers being thrown up to the sky. I also noticed on one scenario on Bakerloo where the weather was raining and, part way through the scenario, rain stopped appearing on the windows which seemed a bit strange. Another odd issue was with the motion blur where, despite me having it turned off in the settings, when I loaded into the Bakerloo Line after opening the game, the Motion Blur turned itself on again, meaning I had to turn it off with Ctrl+F2. That was more a minor inconvenience than anything though so nothing too major. Otherwise, I think the routes are really good actually. I had a go at Bakerloo and Koln-Aachen and they both played very nicely without too many issues. Nothing which make the routes unplayable at least, but a few minor things I noticed during gameplay I think would be nice to be fixed at some stage. Scenario Planner The scenario planner is a good addition to the game overall. I do like we are now able to make new scenarios, and with this being a new feature I have low expectations at the moment with new things being added at a later stage. I would like to make some suggestions for this too: Make it easier to enable "Off the Rails" mode. This isn't an option until after you create a scenario then edit the details. There really should be an option to enable this at creation, in my opinion. The stations list is a bit confusing to navigate. The order should really be in the order of the route itself (say on ECW, you have Brighton at the top, moving down in route order to Seaford and Eastbourne). Likewise, adding the station labels on the map would be a great addition as well as the option to click stations on the map too instead of having to find stations in the list. More platforms for stations. When making a service going to Eastbourne (for example) you can only path trains into Platform 3, so if you wanted an AI service in front of you going to Eastbourne whilst you were also going to Eastbourne, it would not be possible to path both trains in as they'd be occupying the same platform. More control over priorities / pathing. Yesterday, I wanted to see a train leave Platform 1 Lewes before I could depart Platform 3, but I had no control over this. I think more control over this would be really good to add. Timetabling Information. It was quite difficult, without trial and error, to figure out exactly what time AI services should arrive and depart certain stations as there's no timing points to know where trains are at any given time. As such, adding AI and figuring out when they should start revolved around a lot of guess-work, which wasn't very good. When I was doing this yesterday, I had an AI train in Lewes P3 I wanted to leave as I was arriving, and wanted it to depart whilst I was on the approach, but without knowing the timing points, initially I had the AI service departing 10 minutes after I arrived at a red signal outside the station. If these timing points were in the scenario planner prior to playing them, it would make it much easier to plan services. Overall, I do like the scenario planner and I think it's a great addition to the game, and I know DTG are looking for suggestions so there's just a list of my thoughts when I was playing it yesterday. Livery Editor Like the scenario planner, the livery editor is also a very good addition and, as well with it being a first version, it's not going to be perfect right away. When I used it yesterday, there were many things which jumped out at me straight away which I've listed below: Mouse Support. This is a massive issue I have with the livery editor as it doesn't make it very accessible when comparing it to using any other conventional image editing software. I know this isn't supposed to be quite that advanced, but making it only workable on keyboard makes it very clunky to use, especially for people already used to making Train Simulator reskins. A good thing about being able to edit images is the ability to use a combination of keyboard and mouse, and whilst I know mouse support is unlikely to be possible on console this shouldn't downgrade the experience on PC. A major missed opportunity there in my opinion. Scaling Layers. Until I asked this in a fans FB Group, I didn't know you had to press T to bring up disproportionate scaling, which wasn't clearly marked in the livery editor either which was a bit odd. That really should be labelled more clearly as it was confusing to find and is a feature which makes livery making much easier. Likewise, moving to the disproportionate scaling method removed the ability to move objects altogether, which is odd because those 2 features aren't even mapped to the same controls, so disproportionate scaling should also allow moving of objects in a layer. Rotating and Moving. Rotating objects and moving them can be quite a pain to get done properly. Firstly, getting the right angles on rotated objects is very difficult to do, even when holding down Ctrl to slow down the movement. A 45 or 90 degrees rotational snapping function would be very beneficial to this to make it easier to rotate object properly. The same with moving object, it can be quite difficult to place them in the right places even with the slow movement, a snap-to-grid function on this could also be beneficial. Mirroring Layers and Objects. Maybe I'm doing something wrong here but I can't seem to properly get both sides of a unit to be identical. I've heard people mentioning the projection tool and have tried copying layers, but this still makes things fairly difficult to place on both sides of units. In addition to this, a Flip Horizontal & Vertical feature would definitely be helpful when copying grouped layers to the other side of a unit as it would at least allow everything to be lined up properly whilst remaining identical to the opposite side. Object bleeding to other sides. This I found more a minor inconvenience and is probably me needing to take more care, but when I was putting some objects on the front of a train, it would bleed to the sides and give me a design I wasn't trying to make. When you can only edit one side at a time anyway, I don't see why the bleeding even happens, if I'm completely honest. Just seems a bit of a nuisance. Colour Picker. I know you can copy objects and place them independently and it keeps the same colours and everything, but say if you're adding a different shape to a unit and you want it to be the same colour as another object. Unless you go for pure white or black (unless you go for one of the put RGB colours by selecting the top right of the colour chart), it's very difficult to have the same colours as another object without trial and error. Some form of colour picker (even if it's just editable RGB values entered manually) would be very beneficial to the livery editor. So it's a big list here of things with regards to the livery editor, but it's just from my observation of using it. I wouldn't expect everything to be added straight away, of course, but some suggestions that I could think of which would be nice to see at some stage. I understand the livery editor is still early days so I'm not going to be too critical of it from the get go as I do like the feature, just a few nuances I think should be sorted out at some stage. Overall thoughts So, overall, I like the game, it's a good update to TSW and one which, I think, takes the game forward in a way that I would like to see it go. There's a few things I'd like to see made available in the game eventually, but I'm happy with what I've seen so far. There's nothing on my end which makes the game unplayable at all, I've played it for a few hours yesterday and everything mostly seems to work fine (other than things I've mentioned above) but I have yet to experience any crashes of any sort to the game or anything which resorts to the game being completely unplayable. I enjoyed playing the game yesterday and look forward to the future of the game too Anyone who's interested to watch my initial thoughts of the game, I've highlighted the stream and it can be found at the link below https://www.twitch.tv/videos/719004339
Not having anywhere else to put this, just wanted to say I noticed that the default units setting is Automatic (i.e. use km/h in Germany and mph elsewhere). I don't think it was there in TSW1, thanks for adding it
I completely forgot to mention that if I'm honest. I have set that on my end to be MPH Speeds, Celsius Temperatures and Ratio Gradients, and that is a feature I like as well actually. I don't think it was there on TSW2020, but my speeds rarely changed to KPH as I never used to play German routes all that much.
