The other day I grabbed TSW5 Special Edition in the March Madness sale on the PS Store. It looked like a good deal considering I hadn’t played since TSW2, as it came with multiple routes I didn’t already own. So far so good… My time with the new game on PS4 Pro has been appalling. First thing I noticed is how loud the PS4 cooling fan gets just from walking around on even the most remote train stations. The noise is overpowering considering the subtle audio aspects of TSW. Why? I have some quite demanding games installed on my system and they don’t stir the cooling fan like this game does. Then the CE-34878-0 crashes. I cannot believe how many I’ve had in just a few days with the game. First I tried a freight run from Freiberg to Dresden, which crashed within a mile of the stopping area. The next day I attempted a passenger move from Fulda to Frankfurt, which also crashed within a mile from the final destination. Then tonight I wanted to try Dresden to Riesa but the game crashes before it has even loaded the session. I tried it twice with the same result and it was the final nail provoking me to post this thread. During my short time with the game I’ve honestly had as many crashes as I’ve had completed runs. It’s immensely disappointing. The only routes that seem to run well are the ones dating back years ago to content like East Coastway. The three Rush Hour routes and newer actually seem to run worse than what I remember from TSW2. This is all a bit ironic because I remember those old dev stream videos in which Sam always said optimization is “ongoing”. Going backwards I suppose? I have also encountered some smaller issues which were on schedule to be fixed when TSW2 was still the current title. Examples include the lack of Rush Hour passengers on London Commuter and the defective DSD on the BR 313. All this stuff was being worked on back then, but fast forward to TSW5 and smaller issues like these appear to have been abandoned rather than sorted out. Are things equally dire on PS5 and PS5 Pro? I’m also trying to understand how Sony is cool with selling the broken PS4 version on their platform. I remember they initially rejected Cyberpunk over its poor quality control, but TSW5 and its various add-ons are not any better, are they?
Gen8 platforms such as PS4 are increasingly being unable to cope. To the point where some DLC is already gen9 only. Unfortunately, it won't get any better any time soon.
TSW5 brought in Live Map 2.0 which came with station labels and much more information with regard to services and signals, and the community appear to blame the reduced performance on this new feature. As for the old routes performing better, the older routes don't take up as many resources to run; East Coastway is one of the least resource-intensives routes in the game, so the memory issues probably wouldn't be as prevalent there. You may want to try disabling labels and such in the live map as well as comparing how the game runs when the live map is fully zoomed in to when the live map is fully zoomed out. While many bugs have been fixed over the years, you are correct in that some remain unlikely to ever be fixed.
