Although this is issue is only a small part of the original post, I don’t think I’ve ever read such utter drivel in all my life as that quote. Who are these people who feel they must be relentlessly represented in everything? So you want to represent women on the railways? Brilliant, but why not make a DLC that does just that, reflecting real life. Celebrate it properly. How about the Jubilee Line? I believe they have recruited many female drivers there. However, following the logic of that quote, once they make this DLC they’d need to replace some of the women with men to make sure everyone is represented. To attempt to re-write history in this way is not only dangerous (because it’s the thin end of the wedge), it’s patronising to women in general and specifically to the women that were brave enough and big enough to change attitudes and working practices over the decades. This sort of nonsense is just virtue signalling at it’s very worse (although the signalling in this case probably doesn’t work properly). Anyway, I don’t feel that Grand Theft Auto specifically represents me sufficiently. Who do I write to to change that?
So what next, to achieve full authenticity we're going to ban female gamers from using manual firing modes? Whoever knew pixels on a screen would cause this much political stir in a video game. My time is better spent crying for the introduction of the pacer into TSW.
So long as it's not like those stupid cooking games on the tablets where you have to throw together various ingredients in short order to serve an increasing line of customers... Whenever I've tried it, iPad has usually ended up the other side of the room, after checking SWMBO and the cat out the way of course!
So my takeaway from the stream: They did test the patch A freak accident happened so many bugs slipped through They will make sure this never happens again. I dont know what to think about that... What do you think?
Nobody is rewriting history. What is happening is DTG making a game that appeals to everyone, to played now in 2022, without the negative conventions of the past. In 1958, a considerable percentage of people would be smoking cigarettes or cigars or pipes but they won’t be in the game because it needs to be suitable for all ages. TSW2 is not a historical document nor is it a documentary, and although it is depicting the trains and routes from an era in the past it is actually existing as a form of entertainment for everybody today, and therefore does not have to restrict itself to the people of the past, or their exact ways of life. There are other ways to relive the full ‘warts and all’ history of everything but this game isn’t one of them. It’s not going to change either and nor should it. Imagine giving a young girl the chance to drive a virtual steam train alongside a woman firing the locomotive and not having her feeling upset when her dad explains that everyone depicted in the game is a man because that’s just how it was back then, and pitch it against a grown man crying like a young girl because the fireman is a woman and it just wasn’t how it was back then. One of those images is rather sad. The other is inclusive.
Well we can't just hide from the past. I don't see a problem with it to be honest because that's how it was at the time.
I can't say I agree. It's one thing simply not to show certain aspects of the past which are not presently acceptable, like widespread smoking - it simply isn't there - and quite another to introduce elements which are affirmatively false, like people talking on cellphones.
I don’t believe I meant having people with cellphones, as the clothing and such can still be period accurate, like the architecture and road vehicles, and I just meant that the time can be depicted without the negative aspects of behaviour and societal exclusion that doesn’t fit with today’s players.
stujoy You could argue that Steam Trains should not be depicted as they’re terribly polluting. This piece of software is either a simulator or it’s not. If you’re going to make era specific content then in my eyes it should be era specific, warts and all. Hiding young people away from the injustices of the past is not the correct way to ensure it doesn’t happen again. If someone wouldn’t play a game because the collection of pixels on screen doesn’t look exactly like them then they perhaps have other issues they need to deal with. I’ve yet to ever play a game with a protagonist that looks anything like me, and I’ve been gaming since the 80’s. “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Winston Churchill.
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Winston Churchill (doomed to repeat George Santayana)
I think young people are more aware of the injustices of the past than young people ever have been but they can escape from it while driving a train for entertainment. If they get into trains and want to learn the history of the people who drove them, they can read a book or search the web. Nobody is hiding it, they are just making the game more representative of the people playing it. In history books the reader is not actively participating but they are in a simulation game. That does make it different.
It is for that reason Matt has stated that DTG will never do such a route. Which is different from doing a 1930s German route with black-red-gold Bundesrepublik flags everywhere.
If they do a german route in another time period it should be the 90s with Minttürkis, Fernblau and Orientrot the liveries are just great. Driving an Orientrot loco with Minttürkis waggons. If you dont know how these colors look just google them
Cool are we making up fictional scenarios to justify things now... What about when that little girl writes a history exam paper 10 years later explaining how things have progressed for women and states categorically that women worked the footplate on steam railways in the 1950's, fails the exam, doesn't get her dream job due to lack of grades and ruins her life. See, I can make up silly propaganda too! You know what I teach my two girls... you see yourself represented in people's character and actions (the things they can control) NOT in their gender, skin colour, class and sexuality (the things they can't control). It's what we did in the olden days, before all of this divisive garbage that means you are only allowed see yourself in someone absolutely identical to you. My kids will be strong, accepting of anyone who isn't a jerk, and able to judge character. Sadly an art that is rapidly being lost due to the kind of nonsense you spew above. Kids are not the delicate little snowflakes they're being brainwashed to be - my kids are both adopted and the horrors they've lived through before they came to us you can't even begin to imagine (newsflash: due to easy abortions babies rarely get adopted anymore, it's almost solely kids taken from neglectful/abusive parents). But they don't need to see someone identical to them doing a thing to aspire to it - because they see past all of this over-done representation nonsense.
It is long past time we viewed people as individuals, not as mere avatars of some group identity. If we think a person is defined by skin color, how different are we from George Wallace?
You may have got the opposite understanding of what I meant. Being only allowed to see yourself in people identical to yourself is not happening here or more generally when people talk of being inclusive or of representation. That is exactly the opposite of what is meant. In the old days people were judged by their gender, skin colour, class etc. and excluded because of it, and NOT by their character and actions. That is exactly why there were no women driving trains in 1958. The paragraph you quoted was a nice little joke about all the grown men crying in here because they can see a woman in a train which was meant to show up people clinging on to those old attitudes and nothing more than that, I don’t think for one minute that the other scenario is ever going to happen. DTG are representing the current inclusive nature of today’s society and I just happen to agree with them that having women in the old trains is not an issue because it is today’s society that are playing a game, I’m certainly not saying that some agendas that you see played out online and in sensationalist news media are entirely healthy. I’m sure most people are teaching their children to have good values like you are.
DTG could easily have this as a non-issue by giving people the choice of having a male or female fireman like they do when you choose an avatar. I'm not convinced even if females were allowed to be a fireman at that time or indeed now there would be that many anyway but give us the choice DTG other games have had this issue as well and it ended a mess. Give people the choice. I remember after that Trainbow was introduced on the news it had some LGBT groups against it saying they were 'virtue signalling' and had no right to use their flag. There is always more than one opinion.
From this thread I'm getting the impression that many think that DTG is becoming a Woke company. Never a good sign.
Why not just give people the choice to choose what liveries and characters they want? I don't want to see any COVID, NHS, Ukraine, Taiwanese Independence, Thin Blue Line, BLM, Trump, Biden, Rainbow, Black Square, MAGA, or any other remotely political/social/ideological thing when I play. I want to be left the hell alone and be able to enjoy trains, neutrally, without some agenda/social issue/political angle/ideology/current event/etc. being shoved in my face. I want to escape into an ideal simulated world of neutral machines and neutral, uninteresting, and unimposing people. I didn't buy this game for the people or the posters on the walls, or to show "solidarity" with such-and-such a group, I bought it for the trains. If you like ideological things, add them on with a mod. A lot of people design them, and that's great. I thought trains would be one of the few things I could enjoy without someone needing to drag his political or ideological agenda into the mix. Another thing to consider: taking advantage of a captive audience and forcing your views on them doesn't create converts, it creates resentment towards you and whatever it is you're trying to promote. No one in the world has ever had his mind changed by a bumper sticker or a placard. (What if Run8 started putting MAGA or Brexit stuff all over everything? I'm sure a lot of people would be turned off by it, even if they supported those things in principle.)
The fact a that this fireman thing is being turned into a social/political reason for a small scale civil war is bloody nuts, it's just a harmless piece of code that isn't going to affect anyone, kill anyone or turn them into zombies of any related factions they think is at play here, people with a clear rationale mind can see it truly for what it is a harmless piece of software nothing more or nothing less........
Well then I guess DTG should also add Trump 2020 liveries, Brexit liveries, Nazi symbols, and the confederate flag as liveries to trains. Maybe they should make passengers wear BLM hats or Trump 2020 hats and shirts. After all it would just be a harmless piece of code, right?
We are probably getting off the original purpose of the thread by highlighting the fire(wo)man etc thing again and need to be careful as the last thread about it got locked by our Orwellian hosts (or is it the Nightwatch from Babylon 5?). That said, I haven’t seen anything similar in the new MSFS or the SCS truck sims for that matter, so it must be a DTG thing. Ultimately we just want them to focus on giving us a decent bug free game and not waste developer time attaching all this extra baggage.
I don't think we portrayed it as a freak accident. We tested it, but it caused knock-ins in places we weren't expecting (when we retest new things, we do something called 'regression testing', which is fairly common in the games industry, where you test based on areas you think will be impacted by making a change), so hadn't subsequently retested those areas which became apparent when the patch went live. Adam said that we'll include a further round of 'overall route' testing as part of the process, to try to pick up on some of these in future.
My only thought was that it's strange that a final sanity/overall check wasn't done after everything was done and ready for release, but maybe this is standard in the gaming industry so I don't know. Trying the latest update right now. Fingers crossed the most outstanding issues are fixed.
LOL! I'm not reading this. This company has been around for a while and their business practices have not changed much since Railworks. Rush it; copy/paste it; jack the price; put it out broken; fix it later (up to 7 years like the Northeast Corridor for TSC) or never. LOL Instead of writing long letters hoping they'll change, why don't you do what people USED to do and vote with your wallet? I stopped buying addons myself, and have no intention on starting again. Spirit of Steam was the last straw (no manual mode, no changing colour of smoke? LMAOOOOO even MSTS mastered that!). I'm seeing a lot of consumer cuckoldry around this game. It's sad.
As for DTG's injecting politics in the game. Let's be honest. None of the companies flying rainbow flags in June actually care about LGBT. They're doing it for the money. But you know what they say "Get woke go broke".
And its DTG that injects politics here ? Now seeing that some people really dont like this stuff, maybe should they consider make this stuff optional. Now about bugs, they say that they will spend time on them, lets see how it plays in few months. Some are already corrected. Want to be a litlle optimistic.
I assumed he was being sarcastic with the "build back better" quote. DTG is a lot like Joe Biden in many ways, but I digress. The DSD on the class 313 is still broken. LOL You mean to tell me it's gonna take them over 8 months to add a beep.
They’re all scared witless that the moronic mobs that inhabit social media echo chambers (Twitter in particular) will pick up on the fact that they haven’t lost their minds in this regard and pile in on them. Next comes the gutter media who are desperate for anything that they can twist to be controversial so as to generate clicks and ad revenue to keep their pointless paper/website/whatever going. Companies will virtue signal about anything at any time to avoid being the next target of these idiots. Don’t believe this happens? Look at the furore generated in the UK at the weekend around the entirely innocent comments an elderly chap made on TV about something his Grandmother (probably born at the end of the 1800’s) said regarding foreign food. As I said, there are red flags everywhere in Western societies that we’re already well-on on a journey that won’t end well.
I think this is one of the instances where DTG's version of testing (which may be industry standard but that doesn't really help) and the consumer's version of testing (ie in ways you will not imagine when writing the software in the first place) are at odds. As someone else above commented. The very last, final, "nobody else does anything after this" check on any update must be the big check of every system. Better to release something that has been thoroughly checked with a list of "We know this texture here needs updating and we will do so after the next full thorough check" rather than releasing when you haven't checked everything. People may feel better about DTGs output if you check and check and check, even if you then say "hey, it's got a minor issue" because that's better than saying "Hey, this is great and marvellous" only to have it shoved in your face within ten minutes
If you read the Sun or the Mail "it's a furore". If you read anything else it wasn't mentioned... I only know it happened because it camew up on facebook
As I said, gutter press. Trust me though, try googling it….the Sun and Mail are the tip of the Iceberg. Anyway this issue is a small element of the OP’s ‘essay’, the crux of which (ie the many many basic issues with TSW and DTG in general) is getting lost in the noise.
A overall "lets look at it and drive one full servivce at least and see if the sounds work or if suddenly all passengers and DB logos glow" might be a good idea. Something like this should be industry standard. Just let one guy with a bit of passion for the game have a final look. He will probably find more issues in 30 minutes then 10 rounds of "regression testing" do.
Guys, there are lots and lots of websites out there if you want to talk politics. I come here to discuss trains and train simming. Please, take it outside! (Although DTG did to an extent ask for it, can't deny that. That's why I expressed the view some time ago that game companies should steer clear of politics).
I was going to dive into this shxx fest - and then I thought, why not go and hang out with my dog...so over and out...
Well at least this update didn't cause any new issues which is good. For the updated preserved routes at least. Can't comment on Steam. For future updates it would probably be a good idea to do a final test to make sure the update rolls out smoothly This just seems like the testing the company does doesn't really work when a issue could've been spotted by playing the route at least once even if this practice is common in the gaming industry.
It's not the testing company As with any "test" you will only get the answer to the question which is being asked. If the question is "I have altered the texture in the A end of a unit, has this caused any other issues in the A end of said unit" then there's nothing there which asks them to go look at the B end... The problem is that the thorough test was completed whilst dev was continuing and that dev caused issues which would have been caught by a thorough test. That's not on the testing company, but on whoever either asked for the test to be done before dev was complete, or who didn't ask for more testing after knowing further dev was undertaken
Ah I see. So then the testing should be done once a dev finishes his/her work rather than test whilst something is still in development. That would make sense
