Is The Game Getting Worse?

I spent some time away from the game recently after becoming a bit jaded with it but I always planned on jumping back in with the release of the North London Line. First of all I have massive respect for the fact that one person created the route from a creative and technical standpoint the work done by one person is amazing.......BUT.......the route is absolutely plagued by technical core issues that DTG are either incapable or unwilling to fix. There is a certain arrogance there to release a route that suffers from terrible frame rates ( constantly dipping below 25fps even on PS5 PRO) , Memory Leaks , and unfinished old audio (none of this i would blame on the developer btw) these are issues that are becoming more and more prevalent in the DLC releases (especially TSW 5 Era stuff) i have been playing since the original TSW was release on PS4 , and now on PS5 PRO and I can't see where the progress is from a technical standpoint. The game is becoming more and more unstable and i would like to know why after so many years of development the CORE game seems to be in decline. What's everyone else's thoughts on this? And again this is not a cheap shot aimed at the sole developer who worked on the North London line I just think the draw backs in the core game has more or less rendered his fantastic work futile.

 

Well it’s more expensive, the quality is worse, QA seems to be the current victim of DTG’s cost cutting measures, routes are getting cut off at silly destinations & communication with DTG has essentially boiled down to “we’re aware of the issue”, while they flood new content with said issues.

 

100% agree with you. I can only speak from an xbox point of view (series x) Like the op, I've played since the original tsw on the Xbox one. Here we are mid way through TSW 5. We still have, blurry textures, popping audio, Z-fighting decals in many cabs. It was said that the team hand a handle on Z-fighting, and that the stock that released with tsw 5 would be fixed. Not only has that not happened, but content is still being released with the exact same issues.

Personally, Goblin was the last thing I purchased on sale back just before tsw 5 released. I'm sorry, but I won't be purchasing anything else until the team can commit to some proper core fixes. I really like tsw, and want to enjoy it, but it's so hard at times. I tend to step away for a while and check back in from time to time to see if any progress has been made. In the mean time, I find myself playing the older routes more (like TVL) They may not have TOD 4, but they run much better than the newer stuff.

 

I can't believe someone tested this on console and thought it was stable enough for release. Yes it's a demanding route to run and you accept the odd frame drops in memory intensive areas but it's border line unplayable in some areas and the texturing issues are so off-putting for a game that's meant to immerse you. It's incredibly poor on DTG's part to allow the same issues to persist for this long.

 

Yeah I was excited about Cardiff and the Dutch route but I have absolutely no faith left that they will release in acceptable conditions. The only decent routes seem to come from the guys at Just Trains these days they don't seem to have the same level of issues with releases as everyone else.

 

I would really like to get the Welsh route, and the new overground route for that matter. If and when the issues are sorted, I will happily purchase snd enjoy. JT's Blackpool route unfortunately does suffer from both Z-fighting (both pacer and class 47) and also audio popping on the class 47.

 

Is it getting worse?
Yes. 100% in my view. Despite the really good third party content we've had the core is just a total mess at the moment. Since we updated from TSW2 the core has seemed to just get worse every year.

TSW5 has been the poorest state of the game for ages now. Every update seems to make performance worse and old routes like Gwe shouldn't be lagging at all but since updates on series X it has been. And to top it all off the disconnect between DTG and the community is at an all time high. Serious important questions aren't being answered consistently and things are getting swept under the rug all the time.

Which is a real shame because I want this game to succeed like many others. It has so much potential! But I do miss the days when DTG and Sam weren't afraid to come out and level with the community and just admit where they messed up.

 

No.

 

I was more or less satisfied with TSW up to and including the Rush Hour routes. It wasn't perfect but the future looked pretty good.

Since then there's been a sea change: shorter routes, shrinking timetables, simpler trains and fewer of them, performance issues and the release of unfinished product.

Add to those deficits the absence of steam, freight and future US content and I don't know where we go from here with the current management and business plan.

 

Yes

 

Is this a console specific problem, or across all platforms?

 

Is worse still possible ?

 

I’m not one to whinge in the forums but all this is spot on. For me at least, TSW 4 was a very stable core and had very few issues, but TSW 5 has frankly been a mess and if anything has got more unstable since launch.

Find the whole situation very disheartening and now that we’re presumably heading towards the last few months before the inevitable TSW 6 launch, I’ve got to question is it worth investing any more in new content and the answer is no.

Was looking forward to Mildmay and Cardiff but with Mildmay’s memory leak/blurry textures and the fact that apparently someone just forgot to put achievements in the Xbox version, I really see little point in getting it. The botched core has really done Johannes a massive disservice here.

 

Similar thread here…
https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/are-we-screaming-into-the-void-dtg.89781/
My comments there refer.

Hello DTG, anyone home? Time to read the room, not put a corporate towel over your heads or stick them in the sand.

 

As a PS5 player I have to say 100% yes. It’s worse now than it ever was. The blurred textures came in TSW4, but were fixed in a patch mid-April 2024. Early August 2024 another patch brought the blurred textures back. Mainly on ECML, Hamburg-Lübeck, Salzburg-Rosenheim and playing the Expert 101 on Nahverkehr Dresden. With the TSW5 introduction it has spread almost out of control. Frankfurt Fulda has not really worked since launch almost half a year ago. I wait with purchases niw until I know the route performs well. The sad thing is, I was really looking forward to the North London Line, but I know I won’t enjoy it in the condition it’s in. I wonder how things like the Köln-Aachen Timetable, GWE Remaster or new routes like Frankfurt S-Bahn will be affected. ThingsI should be hyped for, but now think “I hope they will work”

 

One thing to remember when comparing older vs. newer DLC is that many routes nowadays have more impact on performance than older ones, may that be because of enhanced scenery (quality or quanity of it) or more traffic.

Frankfurt for example has both. DTG said that Frankfurt would be difficult to do because of performance before it was even planned to do, yet they did it because the demand for Frankfurt were so high. People were happy to get it. But as soon as it were out, people started complaining that performance would be that bad.

The same goes for routes like Mildmay which just like Frankfurt has a lot of traffic and you can see big parts of the city and the skyscrapers in the outside camera from the distance.

Quality in this regard comes always at the cost of performance.

Also features have been added to the core in the meantime, which newer DLCs need to support, however might as well have an impact on performance.

You want routes that perform better? Okay, let them scrap half the scenery, half the traffic, go back to ToD3/ToD2 and make routes like LGV Mediterranea again, which indeed perform better however severly lack of the capabilities and quality which newer DLCs try to offer.

 

Perhaps it's time to retire the towel and, instead, fast forward to the 'Alex Ferguson hair dryer'?

 

Explain then why routes like GWE and LIRR are stuttering along with the rest of them. Or BML on PS5? Nothing to do with potato hardware it's the broken core.

 

I find myself playing it a lot less now. Not only that, but with the exception of the Preston-Carlisle route, I've not bought anything on first day for a while because every route (even the JT one) has had issues on day one.

The most frustrating thing is I've reported errors on the 3 Scottish Routes (DTG & Rivet) and none of the issues I found have ever been fixed. DTG acknowledged but then did nothing, while Rivet just ignored them.

A lot of the issues with TSW lie in the core game, but rather than fix them and turn it into something special, it seems to be to be all about the next version, shiny new features which invariably break the game in other ways.

You eventually get to the point where if developers don't care, why should we?

Something needs to change.

 

Yeah the standards have dropped since TSW4 imo. Seems very little focus on resolving things like passenger behaviour etc. and new routes(can only give my view on UK ones) have become very meh, with random end points etc.

Fixes seem few and far between, pretty much first patch or never for the majority of issues, with only a very select few third parties genuinely pushing boundaries and evidently caring of making their products the best they can be.

 

Stuttering was and will always be in every DLC and will never be fixed because that's simply how routes do work. Tiles and scenery are streamed in during runtime and this even not very smoothly because a bunch of tiles and scenery are streamed in simultanously at once (not just one by one smoothly). If you open up routes in the Editor or work on our own map, this concept gets a lot more clear as why we experience that many stuttering which other games don't.

Now adding other factors like traffic and enhanced new features like improved whether to it, it does not get any better. More stutters, the more and better the scenery and traffic is. Better Performance, the less scenery and traffic.

But I'm also not saying that the core wouldn't have any issues or that the game couldn't be improved for performance. I'm just saying that a lot of people either forgot or simply don't know how level streaming is working so that they keep complaining about stuttering, which always was and will always be in this game. But there definitely is a relation between performance and scenery and traffic, and that's just what I pointed to point out for once.

Forget to mention, first time shader compilation when running the routes for the first time, where performance is even worse.

 

I certainly won’t be touching tsw6 if it comes out.

I haven’t bought fifa for years because it went down the same route with the same tired old problems.

Its really sad because TSW on its day can be a great sim.

 

My original point with GWE and other routes is that myself and others are getting frame rate drops where there were none before, with the only changes being recent updates. This was throughout the course of February where I played the game a lot and completed the mastery playing the same handful of routes over.

 

And I really do get tired of people making excuses for DTG. I can run Forza 4, Dirt Rally 2, Snowrunner and even MSFS 2020 on my PC with barely a stutter. Don't tell me these games don't have numerous calculations and iterations going on to keep track of other vehicles in the game. In the case of Forza and FS also talking to MP servers. TSW has to calculate progress of trains along fixed paths which removes most of the variables the other games must take into account.

 

The "game" be that the engine, or the technical skills of the developers, aren't getting "worse", they just can't keep up with the improvements that people expect, while keeping technical problems to a minimum.

At this point, there are two ways they can go, stop pushing for progress, and just tread water, like TSC does, or, deal with the issues that are holding them back.

I suspect that they don't want to do either though.

 

Or the technical talent they do have has already been deployed on writing whatever fluff they are planning for TSW6, leaving scant resources to fix 5!

 

If those routes are too much for the minimally required PC specs as stated on Steam, then DTG should increase those required specs. Because right now, people will expect the game to perform well, even on 'difficult' (to optimise?) routes such as Frankfurt.

They're kind of doing that with the newly announced Frankfurt S-Bahn, which will not be available on gen-8 consoles. I wonder if they will up the minimally required PC specs for that one, to give people a fair warning.

 

Well, if that's the case, I'm out of here and you all can go ahead with the thread. Just let my two cents where they were.

The fundamental problem is the used game engine still, Unreal Engine, which all of these others games don't have, paired with the concept of building a railway simulation into it, which per nature requires very large levels/maps, so large that they only can be streamed in. I'm not excusing anyone as I'm also saying that in terms of stuttering and performance, DTG should have chosen a different engine maybe from the start to not have dealt with the problems we're facing with the game. But its too late to change that decision unfortunately. We might get performance optimizations in the future, but it will never be like other games without stutters and such performance issues completely.

And sad but truth people either need to take the game as it is and have fun with it how it is or go on and play different ones. That's just the pure reality.

 

Then give fair warning. If TSW6 suddenly comes with a significant hardware increase that's one thing. But don't release TSW5 then turn round halfway through the life cycle and up the requirements. And in all honesty the newer routes don't really look any better than earlier versions. As I mentioned in another thread, if you start to create a game that only the hardware elite can play, a substantial section of your customers will leave it by the wayside.

 

DTG is a company with great employees and devs. But is just ruined by poor management and deadlines. And unfortunately, this game pays the price. It’s sad.


This is unfortunately how it is. This game will have ups and downs. Like many other games. And there’s nothing stopping that. This poor management will never change.


Devs would want this game to be as good as we would want it to be, but due to all this management. It’s next to impossible.

 

Guys this is Business Psychology, you cannot even blame DTG for this. This is how it goes, mostly in this century. The stupid war, Corona and so on accelerated this circle:
Worse Quality, higher prices and companies blaming the circumstances. It's the same with food, expensive and stupid quality cars. It will get worse, as long as we fanboys (me included) are just crying around and do not draw our consequences

 

However, since TSW3 I would say quality has been better. Despite its stumbles, it’s grown a lot in 7 years.

 

Game runs better than ever for me (PC, Steam), looks incredible and the routes are busy at last and feel more true to life.

 

Im sorry but as the poster above said, this isn't a cutting edge simulator, it's not even close. It's the poor optimisation that's hampering it.

I mean what's hindering it from a technical standpoint?

The scenery isn't that complex. Cars and roads are bare minimum and certainly not next gen standard. Buildings - well they use a lot of the same assets across routes.
Trees? Again, with the exception of Nidderbahn and the new Mittenroute, trees are copy paste jobs of the same assets.
AI trains? As someone said these are fixed to a timetable. There's not much variation, there's no random events or cancellations or anything complex.
Dynamic weather? Dynamic weather just changes on a set time period between two preset weather settings. It's not random, or live weather or even has a complex cloud system like MSFS.
Passengers? They are just basic templates reused with some colour variance and basic pathing. They don't even turn up half the time.

We have to stop making excuses. Its a nice sim for the most part but its definitely nowhere near the power of next gen and that's because its not utilised and optimised properly.

 

I think we’re fast getting to the stage where this is becoming a pc only game and getting beyond even the best consoles which still lag somewhat behind a good gaming pc or laptop.
I currently have just upgraded to a new gaming laptop as the old one finally died. I transferred everything across to the new so am running on 64gb RAM. I can report that this and other demanding routes runs as smooth as a babies bottom.

 

Didn't someone spot ancient Kuju assets from TSC, well actually Rail Simulator, in Mildmay?!

 

Agreed. Stratford is a slideshow on PS5. And the blurry textures are maddening.
Fixes announced for many things that just never come.
Often I buy a route. It's bad. They announce fixes. I think OK I'll wait till the fixes come before I start playing. Then 6 months pass and no fixes. Just "we're working on it" or "we're aware of this" or "no news yet".

I am a mug. Getting robbed blind every time I buy a route. Despite all this I still want the Dutch route. I am part of the problem I know.

The draw distance and Z fighting issues on Xbox X are ridiculous too.

Why don't they ever do steams on console? Because performance is always worse than pc because they don't optimise.

 

It's essentially what I said, I certainly wasn't making excuses, they can't program the game to do what they want with the resources they have, people need to realise that this isn't going to change.

 

Well then they need to stop spreading themselves thin. It's better to have one quality product with customers than sell three poor products and lose customers over the life cycle?

Things like Thomas, Tram Sim, VR and a yearly release should be binned if they are under resourced, with the majority of the focus going to main breadwinner.

 

My sympathies lie with 3rd party developers.
I don't normally have a great deal of time for ambassadors but I have found it highly commendable that British Ace hasn't shied away from the issues surrounding Mildmay on both XBox and PS....he's made them public. The downside though is that prospective buyers are going to take one look at what's going on and not in a million years are they going to spend £25 on it.

The only concerning thing is that the aforementioned issues were also present on ambassador preview streams so it's release could have been suspended on consoles.....but wasn't.

To answer the op's question though: No, the game isn't getting worse in terms of features and variety...but the way in which it's developed and managed (from top to bottom) most definitely is. For me personally TSW2 was the the pinnacle of this franchise, with everything thereafter just a commercial juggernaut (or rather, Transit Van) hurtling uncontrollably down the road to nowhere.

 

OldVern I see you are quite often bemoaning frame rates and performance on TSW. Be honest, when using AP weather do you get more satisfaction from running TSC content or TSW content?
Respectfully

 

I don't use AP weather on TSC as I have a general policy of not buying anything which isn't on Steam. And TSC isn't installed at present, removed to make way for Mass Effect LE and Forza 4!

 

Just trains set the bar high thats how routes should look amazing work worth every penny

 

Yes. Quality control was never great but it feels worse lately. Patches come out, don't even fix the issues listed in the patch notes, and break other things instead. DLCs run bad on almost every platform. It seems the more DLC they add to the game the worse the core gets. The game makes me think of that Jenga block building game as an analogy. The more blocks they add to the top the more precarious it gets because the bottom is full of holes.

I want to keep supporting this game because it really is a unique experience (especially on console). It tries to accurately simulate pretty complex systems and gives us some pretty big 1:1 scaled worlds (I've been playing Fernbus recently and the scaled down worlds in most "sims" is a major immersion killer). But it is getting harder to sink money into this game.

 

obviously yes, more and more chronic bugs in game core
and I'm on PC, don't even want to imagine what it must be like for you guys on consoles...

 

I’m normally a glass half full kind of a person. I still do get a lot of enjoyment out of the game and I’m normally pretty optimistic. However, TSW5 is in my opinion, without any doubt, the worst release so far.

I play on PS5 and Steam. The PS5 version is not in a great state, I had one crash in TSW4, but multiple in 5. Despite many fixes, WCMLS is still buggy with incorrectly sounding AWS warnings on Green signals, occasional blurred textures and crashes.

On Steam thankfully it doesn’t crash or get blurred textures, but there are so many other bugs.

I’d be very surprised if TSW6 isn’t already in development which means they are developing on an already buggy core. It doesn’t fill me with confidence.

I’m pretty much only buying 3rd party routes from now on. The quality from JT and TSG is what I want (Incredible Trains is pretty close). I doubt I’ll buy Cardiff and although it looks interestingly, I’ll let others test the Netherlands route first.

Thank Goodness TSC is pretty stable.

 

I'm getting bored of it a lot lately. Don't know why, but it's enough to put me to sleep (not a bad thing for someone who doesn't get much).

I think I've just reached that stage where I'm burnt out from playing it a lot.

 

As I mentioned in another thread I would like to see the EP be forced to play only on Xbox Series X for a month, and not some dev kit with the emulated off the shelf Series X.

An actual retail one with all DLC installed, I bet things would get fixed faster for consoles or he would give up after 5 days and go back to PC. I don't think they realize how bad the blurry in cab textures are.

Ditto for PS5.

And as someone who is not that picky about bugs, has supported DTG on these forums when people over react to things. Heck I even like Fife Circle, and accept the lack distant scenery on Xbox and think people are over critical alot of the time.

Also who owns almost every DLC and has been on board since day one on Xbox. Most of which were full price day one purchases even I agree the game is in the worst state I have seen ever.

After Mannheim I've stopped buying DLC due to the blurry textures issues and increasingly poor performance. Until it is fixed, at least the blurry texture as that is a game changer for me.

Its a shame because I was looking forward to Mittenwald, Mildmay, Cardiff and the Dutch route.

I'm not ditching the game but I have reinstalled TSW4 and play the older routes on that core.

Thank god I have a 2TB expansion installed as both take up alot of room.

 

Truthfully, doing last months Mastery did it for me. I've tried to garner enthusiasm for this month but just can't quite bring myself to put in the time. Best to go off and play something else, put TSW in perspective after a few days.

 

Thing is, I play something else and get bored of that as well (I actually tried this the other day and ended up doing some housework instead which was ironically more enjoyable than TSW).

It's as if, despite its flaws, TSW has some sort of charm that always draws me to it, despite my many attempts to stray away.