Enough Is Enough!!! The Ongoing Saga!!! It's Almost The 3 Year Anniversary

None of these games serve a niche as small as train operations. All of these games are able to support more developers to produce more content on a year-by-year basis. TSW doesn't have that player base or developer count. Find a game with sales near TSW sales that comes out yearly, and then compare properly. It's not fair to compare without mentioning that because money is the largest factor in how much can be put into games.

Also Farming Simulator games don't come out every year for PC, it comes out every other year at most. Farming Sim 22 is the next edition after Farming Sim 19. The mobile games is a different product sharing the same name, and should not be directly compared to the PC/Xbox/PS series.

I understand this this comparison is a bit unfair as it doesn't take DLC into consideration, but I don't think it's typical for people to buy many DLC in this game.


TSW 4


F1 23


FC 24


Farming Simulator 22


COD: MW3 (Campaign)

 

Each Farming Simulator game is more advanced then the jump from TSW2 to 3 or 3 to 4. Fifa is something different and at least does have some kind of new features each year. Besides the content itself is different, like for F1 games, same is for COD. So Fifa and F1 games are the "nearest" here.

Also as far as I remember (I'm not a COD fan) COD is now more like a "base game / platform" for free with the MW3 campaign for example more acting like a DLC of some kind.

EDIT: For comparsion also, TSW3 had the new TOD 4 lightning system, but only for the new routes for example. Where a new Fifa game does have all new mechanics all over the game, like a new graphics update or overhaul. When F1 does get new physics it applies to all cars, not only to the SOME of them, same for an engine update, VR, mode etc. etc.

When TSW3 for example would have had ALL routes updated to TOD4 and TSW4 would bring the new suspension system to ALL rail vehicles etc. it would be something different. But we only get marginal changes and SOME new content. We don't get a basically "overhauled" game. We can discuss about how much overhauled a new Fifa or F1 game is, but it at least applies always to any content in the game when their are changes or new additions.

 

Yeah and if you look at the simulation/arcade racing community it feels larger and better supported (at least here in NA). You can find racing wheels on store shelves, for example. There is a lot of variety in games you can play in that genre as well from GT7 to Forza to iRacing to Mario Kart (kinda).

Some people don't understand that games like this only exist because people are passionate about the subject matter and want to create the games, and not because they want to become instant millionaires cashing in on the popular trends. The routes and game are expensive because they have to be. That being said I agree with the general sentiment of this thread that some of the passion for this project has gone in recent years, and I hope to see it improve as much as any one else.

 

And these simulators advance more and more over time, sound, graphics, physics of the cars, weather, even 3d scanned racing tracks, getting more and more realistic, while TSW is "stuck" on the simulation side since years. The new suspension systems seems (at least what we have and have seen for now) more like random working instead of using track data for example. Their is no total overhaul of systems like having to fight with failures of the rail vehicle or anything of this sort. No dynamic events, nothing.

And if their is something new it only applies to new content, their is no addition of new features to the whole content / older content. We are stuck with what we have. In F1 2023 it doesn't matter if you drive a Haas or a Red Bull, both are using the same physics engine for example. in TSW the features of a loco depend on when it has been released not if I use it in TSW2 or TSW4, at least for most of them.

 

Im not complaining about everything. As it goes for TSW content DTG and Rivet do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to content features and quality, there are bugs that are 2 years old that still havent been addressed . Im not expecting Simrail quality in TSW if I wanted that I would play Simrail. All i want is an good quality route not an average one. How old is the ECML and from day one it came out bugs were reported about the 801. The numbering, sounds, door animations, vigilance going off when in neutral, 801/1 tail lights not turning off when coupled (you cannot even turn it off yourself it stays on) and the list goes on. And DTG have addressed one of the bugs, pushed a fix that didnt even fix it. That to me is bare minimum. Theres no excuse for not fixing a NEW DLC maybe a 2 year old one we can sweep that under the rug but a recent one? One that was used to intice people to buy TSW4 nah sah. Features like suspension which were one of the main ones promised for TSW4 is now a winter 'core' update. When will DTG stop doing the bare minimum and give us what we pay for? The TSW3 - TSW4 update is not justified at all. TSW4 is a glorified TSW3. Only change ive noticed is being able to turn off track monitor . They need to do it how TSC is. £40 is nothing per year but for what you get or in this case dont, its not worth it . DTG are taking the P I S S.

 

Don't know what game you're playing but there's plenty of high quality stuff in TSW.

 

The devs may be passionate. The actual decision-makers may not be.

 

To the people comparing TSW to other franchises and justifying the annual re-release, all I can say is;
Imagine if Sims 4 re-released every other year and add-on packs would only work with the most recent version. But that is not the case, instead Sims 4 has remained the same core game since 2014. Add-on packs get released, they add new content and features. Sometimes even the core gets upgraded for free and bugs get fixed free of charge, because the whole thing is financed by the price on add-ons. Interesting, isn't it?

Or again, the best example, Train Simulator Classic. Worked for TSC, yet it can't work for TSW? Sure.

No matter how one tries to justify it, the annual TSW re-releases has no reason or place to exist. It's all there just to rip off the customers with yet another paywall.

 

Dresden-Riesa, SEHS (Now), NTP, IOW 2022 ???

 

You give the answer yourself, the 2 year old DLC was also new once and had bugs and problems and it didn't get fixed. So in two years a current route is 2 years old as well and doesn't get fixed. If this is our point of view and we always just buy new stuff and say "nah it is okay that XYZ is not fixed, 2 year old content by now" then what DTG does is absolutely working perfectly.

Go buy new shiny stuff, don't look back please. It is exactly like the last roadmap update, tons of shiny new stuff, teaser here, teaser there, we are so great, you are so great and please be hyped and jump on our next DLC's. But don't ask any critical questions or for bugfixes of content which is 4+ month old. Because we hope you forget about that when our new shiny lollipop (DLC) arrives.

Same strategy for years now, and it totally works out for DTG and a lot of people are happy with it. For DTG it is fire and forget (release DLC), for us it is buy new and forget about the old stuff.

 

That is the reason it exists yes, to make more money. That's how most for profit business decisions are done. It's LOVE, but that's how business operate. I'd imagine focus buying DTG is probably directly tied to it going from every two years, to ever year. They seem pretty set on it though, so not really much we can do.

 

I'm not sure about this, Snow Runner is also published by Focus and can be described as one of the best lifetime service games, even with the yearly DLC passes. You get a lot of new stuff for the base game as well with patches pushing the game forward.

 

Could we stop with this "we are powerless against corporations, this is the way of life" bs? There is quite a lot you can do, from giving feedback (like us whining here) to simply refusing to buy. It is a hobby, not a neccessity. If they offer bad deals, then it is very easy to simply not buy into it.

Of course, if you like what you are being offered, then go ahead. I will also buy offers in the future if and when they are good enough. But for the love of god, stop acting like this is a one way deal. As a consumer, you have the right to demand quality, working products for your money.

 

Of course you have the right to demand it, and I definitely encourage that and all consumer advocacy. In some very rare cases it does work out (the recent Creative Assembly apology and refund for Total war being a great example) but 9 times out of 10, it does nothing because it isn't big enough to affect the overall profits of the product/ you have someone bull headed in charge.

I just buy the routes I'm interested in, which luckily for me was all three of the TSW4 routes, so for me it was an easy purchase. I do think TSW should just be a constantly updated core system like TSC though.

 

How am I meant to know the trains gonna have bugs when i purchase the route? I only got TSW4 for ECML and it turns out the 801 is broken systems wise. Nobody should be spending upwards of £30 on a route and not having the bugs fixed. Like i said before I can excuse a 2 year old route not having its bugs from day 1 fixex but a brand new one? Absolutely not

 

9

Dresden is an incredible route, SEHS too despite its bugs, never played IOW. However you have named 3 routes out of the dozens available. 3 amazing routes do not cover for the '20' crappy routes. If the routes are still being sold they should have their bugs fixed. DTG have had a few months to fix the ECML bugs, none of which have been succesfully fixed. BML 377 rear gangway door locking open has been a bug since day one and hasnt been addressed at all. It seems once DTG release something they have swept it under the rug and moved onto something else. Meanwhile sending AI generated replies to bug reports and never fixing them. Like I said before, as long as the product is being sold it should have its bugs fixed. If they took ECML off the market in TSW5 and said it wasnt supported anymore then fine leave it abandonned but charging people for a knowing faulty product is bs.

 

The fact new ones have been released and the current bugs not fixed tells enough, no?

 

you could do research on YouTube of people who already have said dlc on your respective platform or pretty much the only alternative is to find out the fun way by purchasing it, then “enjoying” the bugs you find.

DTG use to show multiple platforms for previews, well PC usually gets the best quality so they ain’t going to show the other ones bugs…

and unless you want to watch flickering textures and audio issues for about an 1hr and 30mins DTG probably ain’t going to showcase Xbox’s…

 

TSW4 is the first time there's been an annual gap. It's not an annual release schedule yet, despite what the hyperbolists would like people to believe. If a TSW5 comes out this fall, then they'll have a point.

 

HyPeRbOlIsTs

 

I'm Bamboozled how this reached 53 Pages... This gotta be a world record or something

 

If TSW5 is not coming out in 2024, then it sure will in 2025. Of course, I would very much like to be proven wrong. But I highly doubt they will backpedal into less frequent releases when they see people keep buying anyway. I mean clearly some people bought TSW4 only one year after TSW3 released. So why wouldn't they try the same thing again?

 

The Midland Mainline - Skyhook Feedback thread made 58 pages, 2872 replies and 167,471 views before JD shut it down so there's still a way to go!

 

Hyperbolists vs Apologists - it has a tendency to wobble up and down in the middle because the uh - screw's loose

 

2025 would at least be a two-year gap. People did buy 4 anyway, but enough to justify the release? Especially with one selling feature (suspension) still not implemented and the editor seemingly not ready for prime time. This release seems to have made clear (at least from this end) that their staff is being asked to deliver more than they possibly can.

 

I'm gonna leave this here

 

after watching the above video, the obvious advice is to vote with your wallet to either force a change or to let the game die.
At least on the more transparent PC side of TSW, as on the consoles, TSW is the only game in its genre.

 

Broadly speaking, ever since the start of videogaming back in the arcade era, there have basically been six kinds, in the mainstream: games where you jump over something, shoot something, punch something, fly something, drive something on a road, or do something with a ball. A little later, devs combined shooting and flying (air combat) and shooting and driving (GTA etc). What is markedly NOT there is "drive something on rails." We are a niche.

 

I mean I bought it because I wanted all three routes, and both Locos. It was good value for all of those which I would have bought individually anyway. So from that point of view it was a huge discount.

 

This game can hardly be called a game. It is an experience launcher for 10-60 min experiences. The player has very little control over what he can do (tho this changed a bit with free play which is still very limiting). The game holds your hand at every point even in their "hard" experiences.

And by that I don't mean to have an economic simulation in the game, just having a large, connected world (would be perfect to have one for USA/UK/GER) with a job creator for freight (which requires refueling and maintenance) would go a long way in transforming it to a game with meaning. Starting from the depot for passenger services (which again require refueling and maintenance which is tracked so not every time) would also make it much more meaningful. There are already mastery challenges in the game, which could be perfectly used as a goal for shipping tons of freight and passengers. Lets not talk about High-Speed trains, the routes they are on is a bad joke currently.

By that I don´t mean trading the physics to arcade ones, far from it. People love realistic vehicular games. I still enjoy the experience, but it is pretty clear why this game has a small following. I don't think any realistic train game is very good at being a game.

How Maintalbahn did not expand Main-Spessart bahn is lazy, probably because it would require updating something on it.

 

Same problem as why on Earth MSB and KWG are not connected even though there's a ton of traffic going between each other. Even when they could relatively easily get away from that A-to-B formula, they just don't... New York area could be a bustling train megamap if routes were up to date and connected (and optimized, but that's probably a swearword at DTG...). SR is running two connected routes with hundreds of kms in MP and it is fairly stable. And they're adding to it.

 

How right you are. They need to make it work and enough with the excuses.

Frankly I can see 2024 as being the year I step away from TSW. The announced forthcoming routes are mediocre and once again standalone A to B jobs with little innovation. SimRail as stated is advancing nicely and will be getting its first DLC soon. Railroader offers hours of entertainment. The JR East series of simulators is beckoning. Then there is the Hakodate tram sim coming out too. For the first time I don’t see any of my money going to DTG in the Xmas sale.

 

Stepping away from the actual seriousness of the thread, this is probably one of the largest and most widely discussed threads I think I have ever seen on these forums, you could probably make an entire book, just out of this one thread

 

All of those games you mention are as good as new games when they are released. FIFA has to do it because the teams in the leagues change as do the players every summer. Call of Duty is totally new content each time as are the other two games. When TSW rereleases it's basically just the same game with a few extra bells and whistles and some dlc packaged with it. Definitely not the same thing. should come out as a free core update once a year without dlc bundled with it, but rather give the player the option of buying what dlc they want. You can't keep asking players to pay for the same game over and over.

 

Yes but supposing you didn't want those routes? The point is the player should have the choice of dlc, not be forced to buy it because he/she knows that if they don't then their version of the game will become unsupported and die. It's basically blackmail.

 

Because real-life driver's DON'T get to decide where to go. They are governed by the timetable. TSW has never claimed to be a railroad-management game.

Oh, dear, the L-word. I don't think you understand the amount of complexity and work grafting a new route to an old one represents; if it was feasible (by which I mean, could be done within an economically viable budget), RSN and RRO would have been linked years ago.

 

All this could be fixed by implementing FSR2/ 3, DLSS, XeSS as been asking for the past six ( almost 7 years )

 

Well this is an interesting find. I thought TSW3 was put back on the various marketplaces as a need so that patches could be released for it. But now TSW2 is back? Seems kind of desperate no? Putting the game back on the market after a year+ of removing it? Is DTG that hard up for cash? I doubt this is a signal that they would backtrack on their big lie and release the "completed but waiting for a release window" TSW2 patch(es).

 

We've covered some topics for sure

 

They can release this at TSW 5 and say it's the super galactic new thing, and it was only possible now in TSW 5.

In another world... https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/train-simulator-unreal-engine-5.76804/

They could have continued the sales without removal, but now I assume desperation caught up with them.

A friend bought the TSW 2, he have the TSW 2020, he likes the menu when choosing the locomotives with their sounds.

 

And that means what exactly?

 

This is really the point, isn't it. The Goblin Line seems to be very much in the way of BCC and Glossop. Does anyone believe that it will be in any way innovative with some startling new features?

I fear that 2024 will see a succession of routes that do not advance the game in any substantial way. I hope I'm wrong but nothing has been said to alter that prediction to this point.

Actually, I've kind of given up on UK electric with its pretty colored joystick emus sometimes with just a peep hole to drive by.

I'm thinking more about US freight and passenger, especially freight. And I'm wondering if we've come any distance since SPG. I don't know what the upcoming US route will be and why it's such a mystery. But it might be my last throw of the dice for TSW.
.

 

To call them lazy is just insulting. People here seem to forget that to us, this is a hobby (albeit a passionate one). To the designers this is how they put food on the table.

 

This is exactly the essence of most of this thread, and you've said it in the most clear and polite way I've seen. Think of the difference if 6 or even 7 new DLC were offered at the end of the Aug-Sept Blackout, rather than the same core re-packaged and then the same response from the community.

 

Or perhaps... it could've been done the way SEHS Extended was made... you know, build the same route they did... with MSB in the files (and probably slightly updated). KWG could've been built with MSB in it. Have the route slightly discounted for the owners of the original MSB and you're good to go. There are technical problems with linking routes and probably even with doing it this way (the whole layering mess where original MSB is needed for half of the German routes), but that's something THEY need to solve themselves and frankly DLC linking should've been solved for years by now, it's embarrassing that it isn't. By ignoring it and churning out boring short A-B routes they're not going to fix it.

 

Lazy might not be the right word but there seems to be a lack of “moxie”, maybe innovation in both the decision making and execution of the content we are getting right now. I’m sure there are individuals who are conscientious and doing the best they can but are let down by management decisions such as picking short not very entertaining routes with boring trains, or putting the fear of fire under developers to meet a deadline. And as I alluded to earlier either in this thread or one of the other product threads in Off Topic… TSW is frankly getting stale. It needs some new ideas and a new direction, be that better gameplay ideas, expanding the country base (yes I want to see some Japanese routes with a bit of the Densha de Go style entertainment attached) or starting to create networks. In short it got boring and even BPO, for all its high quality I am struggling to go back to.

 

Same here but swap Densha etc for N gauge. Blackpool is great but let down by the non existing dispatching system. Locking up because the simulation can't multi task ie route one train then another never mind alter platforms or sidings. TSW is just eye candy without a proper ops system behind it. I just don't think DTG get it. Probably see no money from me until the 104 appears. Even then it will be spoiled by the problems I mentioned earlier.

 

Same here. Class 104 likely to be my next purchase.

 

The sheer amount of supposition and conjecture in this thread is staggeringly arrogant but also amusing. Attributing motives and motivations to people and organisations the vast majority of us do not know is pointless, beyond creating an echo chamber in which everyone can get worked up. If it really is this bad, why are people investing so much money and emotional energy into DTG and its work product? Stop buying the games, stop playing the games and do something more healthy with your lives before you do yourselves some real damage.

 

Did you read the 53 others pages ? It would answer all your questions !