Why A New Game Instead Of A Core Update?

Seems like TSW3 could’ve have gotten a core update and a name change and ran fine…but nope here we are spending $40 for no reason

 

Another cheeky move by DTG.

 

Im not buying so no worries. I haven't seen ANYTHING that justifies to moving up a version.

 

Editor. Yes. This changes things.

 

The editor that was promised to come for the first game many years ago?

 

Because they’re a business who’s goal is to make money?

 

When they said "Master the Machine" they were referring to the machine for extracting heretofore inconceivable volumes of urine.

 

I don't get it. This is what I expect from a version update. Sure you can't please everyone but this sounds like worthy version 4

 

Would you do your job for free if your company weren't charging anyone any money?

 

If you have no interest in the routes there is literally nothing here worth paying money for. Very very disappointing.

 

Because we all love paying money for quality of life, basic updates! (according to DTG). Sometimes i wonder why they even bother having these forums if they're just gonna blatantly ignore what the entire playerbase wants.

 

Only thing that peaked my interest was the Preston to Blackpool route, but it doesn't justify having to buy a completely new game in order to play it.

 

Exactly. I wonder how JT feel about their debut route being put behind a paywall? You’re looking at an absolute minimum of £60 to be able to play that route.

Not a chance in hell.

 

I’d also add that I was critical of TSW3 as I felt there wasn’t enough there to justify calling it a new game over TSW2.

TSW3 looks a step forward of monumentally epic proportions compared to TSW4.

 

Since TSW3 is soon becoming abandonware, buying the TSW 2->3 upgrade clearly wasn't worth it. May as well skip TSW4 and wait for TSW5 or beyond.

 

My thoughts exactly, I can't see why the JT route can't be released for TSW3 when it was 1) announced for TSW3 and 2) there is nothing in terms on engine upgrades stopping it from being backwards compatible. The only thing stopping it is DTG greed and putting it behind yet another paywall. I didn't go into the stream with high expectations so I'm not surprised DTG has done this, but I can be positive that TSW5 will release September next year.

 

At least they had an excuse in the way the DLC ownership would change, and it was 2 years after TSW2's release. Here there is just no reason at all.

 

Editor ?

 

I guess it's 3 routes for £40 rather than the usual £90 but they could have done that with a Rush Hour style season pass.

Presumably they've been tracking sales over time and realised they get a bump whenever a new version is released so that's their focus.

Bad for the Game Pass crowd though, TSW3 leaves at the start of September and TSW4 is not going to be on Game Pass.

 

TSW4 has a boat (train?) load of features and tbqh it's far more value for money than TSW3:

TSW3:

• Dynamic Weather (very basic)
• Training Centre (good)
• New Clouds (cool)
• New Lighting (cool)
• 2 New routes and a rework of SEHS

TSW4:

• Photo Mode (requested)
• Scenario Planner 2.0 (Heavily requested)
• Livery Designer 2.0 (Heavily requested)
• Creators Club finally updated
• Editor (heavily requested for like, 5 years - hell, people even started making their own)*
• Three new routes, one reworked
• Two loco DLCs at launch

Now, not only does TSW4 have more to offer than TSW3 - the stuff it does offer is a lot more gamechanging. There's also stuff I haven't listed.

If you think TSW3 was justified as a game and TSW4 isn't, please do try and justify that logic (I've been needing a laugh today).

 

Quite easily. As I said, routes are completely irrelevant.

TSW3 introduced;

- TOD4
- Training Centre
- A completely new UI
- Dynamic Weather
- A second engine ‘upgrade’ (sort of, kinda)
- Livery designer
- Scenario Planner
- Creators Club
- New passenger types, clothes and features
- Various smaller things like snow kick up effects etc

TSW4 brings;

- Updates to a couple of those things
- Photo mode (I mean, really)
- Volumetric fog (the one good thing)
- God mode of sorts

The editor has nothing to do with TSW4 and is a completely separate download from the Epic store.

TSW3 was, looking back on it, much more of a new game than this will ever be. But if you like being taken for a mug then crack on. We’ll meet back here next year for TSW5, and you’ll no doubt be telling us all why paying for that is totally worth it and how TSW4 wasn’t much of an upgrade after all.

 

Hmm, that's a little harsh because I think the "2.0" stuff has improved the creativity side of things by quite some margin and the three routes are infinitely better than those that came with TSW3, so from an 'at face value' standpoint it does look like a pretty decent bundle for £32.

But in saying that, a couple of things really do stick in my throat.

Firstly, the editor. Not because they have it and we don't, but more to the fact that one half of the community have been given the tools to create and share content whilst the other half remains stuck in the never ending cycle of having purchasing extremely expensive 'official' DLC's to further their TSW adventure. I can't help but feel that DTG have bent over backwards to ensure their product remains at the forefront of much stiffer competition on PC, with console gamers being used to, well, make sure the money keeps rolling in.
Secondly, performance. The question I have to ask myself is; "do I really want to experience all these 'cool' new features in a game that presumably still suffers with terrible shadow/draw distances and dubious framerates?" That I'm afraid is a resounding "no".

Thankfully though, for me personally TSW4's release has landed right in the middle of The Crew: Motorfest and Forza Motorsport so any urge to break my run of not purchasing any TSW content (including TSW3...I got that free on gamepass) since Harlem Line isn't going to be there.

Good luck with the game and all that...but I think I'll wait and see what TSW5 brings to the table.

 

You seriously think features promised for the first version justify releasing a fourth?

Imagine failing at your job once, then asking for money over and over again until you finally finish your original assignment after 4 or 5 retries...

 

You are wrong with this one, as TSW3 did not introduce any of these. TSW3 routes did, as all of these features are route specific. So we could have simply stayed at TSW or TSW2, since every new feature is simply route specific. The re-release of the core game is completely pointless, as by itself it is not brining any improvements.

 

Sounds like R&D. Not my department

 

That’s absolutely fair.

 

Have they ever said that was a reason? also it only affects PC!

 

No. 3 runs on UE 4.26, just like 2RH.

 

You’re right. 2 was on 4.23 though right? I mis-remembered.

 

Take your complaint to Epic. It is they who make the Unreal Engine Toolbox and they who only ever developed it for PC.

Besides, the idea of trying to build a route with a bloody controller is like an unfiltered vision of Chthulhu: melt one's brain. It would be like Photoshop using an Atari joystick.

 

It's easy, just dont buy. I watched the stream in great disbelief and im definitely not gonna pay money for an update and routes im not interested in.

What i found absolutely amazing was that they told us that they have collected the feedback from this forum to decide what they wanna do with the game.

Of course it was not the case that they cant be bothered to fix the outstanding issues this whole community has made clear over the past 11 months, or even years considering the earlier releases, no they actually told us that "scoring" was one of the higher priorities *honk*

It is absolutely not the case that they are either not interested in fixing the big problems (which i do not believe) but rather that their competency is just not enough to cope with these bugs, clitches and problems. Sorry DTG you had more than enough time to show that you are able. To convince me into investing more money in TSW, you have to change your Game (quite literally). All i can see is the same old same old. Some updates and some features dont make a new Game, and paying for updates i dont really asked for isn't really an option for me. Of course this my humble personal opinion. But im honestly disappointed.

And just because i already see emotional discussion : ( if you like tsw4 than buy it, no reason to get mad at each other )

 

You know what the big issue here is? Editor was supposed to come out in the original TSW, LD/SP 2.0 were supposed to release soon after TSW2. Editor is now behind the FOURTH PAYWALL and minimalistic updates to LD/SP (which should have been there from the start) have made it behind their THIRD paywall. If this isn't absolutely ridiculous, I don't know what is. I personally remember giving LD/SP feedback weeks after they released and they didn't manifest in TSW2 as promised, they didn't come in TSW3 I got and now I have to get ANOTHER route for those few improvements. NO WAY!

 

I suspect that this isn’t the doing of DTG (in its original form), I believe that this is a Management decision by the powers that be at Focus Entertainment. This is what happens when the big boys get wind of a successful business. They smell the money and want it for themselves so they take them over. Two yearly paid updates? No, we’ll make it annual to rake in more and stop supporting the old version, even if it’s broken because it doesn’t make money.

 

The things in bold either came with or during the TSW2 lifecycle.

You are blatantly ignoring things for the sake of your narrative and frankly it's contemptuous.

 

This has been going on way before they got bought by Focus Entertainment. TSW2 and TSW3 were all pointless re-releases as well.

 

There is such a thing as a mouse + keyboard for consoles, you know!

 

But they were every 2 years. They also spent more time and resource fixing old content (though there is still plenty outstanding). The in between releases were bundles, such as Rush Hour, that you didn’t need to buy in order for future DLCs to work (at least until the next major release).

 

Seeing as you are so happy handing over your cash, why don't you set them up a Gofund me page? Go the whole hog?

 

DTG needs no big boys to show greediness in pure form anyway.

 

So all those game editors/publishers that give freebies quite often (and big ones, and quality ones, corrections for old parts of their games) are not making money ?
I would disagree as they are very popular, have very high community opinion, and a regularly updated products.
Oh and their big DLCs are overall very juicy and rather cheap for the content inside..

And they have at this moment 16000 players playing on Steam while TSW3 have exactly 363...Not bad for a light niche sim.

 

I do actually find that, and I am serious,

Spoiler

even if some people view or think of me as a hardcore overkill DTG hater that sees everything DTG as bad and tries to find anything bad by DTG, which I am none of these.
I do want to mention however about the negativity bias - humans tend to find/view/expect/etc. things more negatively the more negative stuff you see, find, pop up, etc, from/of/on a certain thing. For example, if a new game, from a company that has a more negative image than other companies, gets released, and you buy and play it, you tend to find and see more negative things in that game than for example, a game from a company you really like. It's strengthened even more through bad input, for example, if the game you buy and play is more negatively seen and rated by other people than that game from the company you really like, if you see criticism from others, get disappointed through a bad release, bugs, especially from external sources (other people) - each one of these automatically tunes that thing into more negative areas. So if I think, have experienced and seen things from a certain thing often negatively, your bias on that thing is more negative.
That doesn't excuse certain things you may do like finding stuff that isn't actually bad, sorry about that as I am guilty of that, but my intention wasn't to damage DTG in anyway. I have low expectations that's probably why.

TSW 4 is justified and actually worth the money, if the promised content and features hold up to, no more no less, just what the FAQ says, I don't expect anything more than what the FAQ says and promises. I was expecting a HUGE update/upgrade already because the current TSW3 version already is on a new UE engine editor project & codebase, and the old one is now almost certainly a compatibility layer, and the stuff I saw hinted towards the new features, but I did not progress enough to gather a definitive proof of it.

 

I didn't watch the announcement, but read the article and quite a few of the comments here. It's all quite sad - I'm back to 2 - that was the pinnacle of the game.

 

I don't see how it is seeing as though it will be a free download from the Epic Store....unless there's some kind of TSW4 ownership check to launch it. People will be making content using TSW1/2/3 assets as well which will not require TSW4 to load

 

Not sure how big a company JT is, but I would much rather see a dev group like this build their own sim rather than hitch themselves to a laughing stock company.

 

To answer the original question, as it was afaik answered in some of the streams.

Because releasing a new game is the most effective way how to attact new users. Seeing a game 1 year old is more attactive to the general public than seeing a game that is 5+ years old... Even though they are basically the same game...
The fact that it makes business sense for them to offer 3 routes for the price of one should be a pretty demostrantion about how effective it realy is.

That's why yearly refreshes were always the case with DTGs train sims. TSC got very similar threatments - new release, and rebrand each year. With a pack of routes offered for the price of a single route. Yes, in TSC everybody got an engine update and the rebrand. Now the question is, what changed?

My guess would be that consoles happened, and Sony and Microsoft do not allow such name changes. So DTG cannot do it on consoles. That is, they cannot just change the name of TSW 3 to TSW 4 (thus giving TSW 4 core to all existing customers), and also market the game as "new". Thus, TSW 4 needs to be a new release, and not just a rebrand (as it was previously in TSC)

 

Some of DTG TSC partners started working on SimRail content, perhaps there's a light at the end of the tunnel there. A US route from Searchlight is the first of such I think.

 

You could still release TSW4 as a new game, the "base bundle" being only the training center + core changes and being for free. It is definitely doable if there was a will. You could even attract new people as they could try the new 323 and 8f for free, then buy DLCs if they like them.

 

You can, if the changes are significant enough, create a upgrade using updates if the changes are big enough, Steam has the capabilities, I think even to migrate to a new game listing while keeping licenses and entitlements, user content like cloud saves and workshop stuff, but I do believe it is limited and maybe restricted. Steam content distribution and management uses Depots, Builds and Manifest (correct me if I called it wrong), you can create depots with entirely new content with branches and make it public as default, and you can release different versions of them. I may be wrong on some but afaik that's how it internally is structured

 

Steam 100% has, and Epic I think has, capabilities and functions for migrating, adding, handling and managing entitlements across different games, you can create actions on different triggers, events and so on that can do various stuff related to entitlements in general and on certain cases on certain users.

TSW 4 is 99% though based on a new codebase, current TSW 3 release version seems already to either use it or certain parts, or at the very least contain it, as everything related to the game UE project inside the executable have TSW3SUB as the UE project name, not TS2Prototype like before, it's now a component of the new base, certainly as the compatibility layer for pre-TSW4 content.

I do wonder though if TSW 4 also has TSW3SUB as the UE project name, if yes, I am really asking myself why not TSW4 as the name? Maybe TSW3 was rewritten and they forked the repo mid-way to make TSW4? Idk. I don't want to look and seem like I maliciously want to hurt DTG and the people there by making stuff up or spread FUD so I won't theorize and interpret it further. It's 99% confirmed, at least for me and maybe some others though, as everything is using that project name on anything that references the UE project.

 

That's not strictly true. The Crew 2 is (I think) 5 years old now and 2022 saw it's best year for unit sales...and despite it's age there's a very good reason why ETS2 isn't ETS6 or 7. Both of the above demonstrate completely different methods as to how it's more than possible to successfully support a game over a period of time without the need to fleece it's userbase through numbered reboots.