Dovetail Can Do Longer Routes But Seem To Refuse To These Days.

I do agree with you that some parts are a bit rough looking. I feel Edinburgh Airport is a bit more improved now. We got the Planes which make it look better. The Queensferry Crossing is a bit of a bummer. It does exist but it’s missing the wires…. I know what you mean with the Dual Carriageway also but to be honest with you there’s quite a lot of other routes that also have blocky looking roads too.

Scenery could be better that’s true and 100% agree with you there but it’s still a fun route in my opinion. Plus they gave us Leven which was good.

 

The crowd that buys the most is what they're going for. We've been over this. If you're not the majority then it sucks... but people "blaming" the company for catering to the biggest audience that spends the most money is silly. What's to "blame" them for? They're just not making what a few people personally want.
That's what companies do.
They would be a "bad" company if they didn't do that.

 

DTG wont ever be able to please everyone, ECML was a high speed stretch that resulted in people moaning that they should have done Kings Cross - Peterborough instead for the commuter traffic. They then did that with WCML and people are unhappy that the Pendolino doesn't get to stretch it's legs.

They can't do both within the budget they work to, the only way to extend that budget is through higher pricing, and considering all the hullabaloo the £3 increase in recent routes caused that's pretty much a non-starter.

 

I be one of those who would definitely pay more for a longer route, I wouldn’t expect their to charge £30 for a 112 mile route, maybe £45 or £50? Understand the work that goes into it.
Wonder if I won the lottery and I bribed dovetail? xd

 

It’s a double edged sword. I like both but the electric bus stop services over 10 to 20 miles I find get monotonous very quickly. Peterborough to Doncaster did grow on me, the main issue is that the Azuma is not a very interesting train to drive. Very little sound in the cab and power in hand so that even climbing up the moderate ECML gradients, once at line speed you don’t need full power. If the route had been set with Paxman HST’s and Deltics…

SKW was just a borefest of tunnel, viaduct through some forest, a flat bit with a couple of side tracks - rinse and repeat.

WCML Over Shap, apart from the sound squelching ruining the 87, is one of my favourite UK routes in the game now. Decent long run you can get your teeth into, with a bit more variation in scenery than the ECML.

Then there are certain routes which if DTG want to put in the game, there’s no choice but to go the distance…
Settle & Carlisle, needs to run all the way from Skipton or preferably Leeds to give a full experience.
Highland Main Line - anything less than Perth to Inverness would be pointless.
North Wales Coast - needs to be Chester to Holyhead.
Northern ECML - needs to be Newcastle to Edinburgh.
No compromise.

We have seen what the reaction is when DTG curtail main lines like WCML South or the laughable Cardiff Valley Network with barely 20 route miles.

The only caveat is that with longer routes need to come with more save slots, so you can leave off, go and do something else which might also need saving, then come back to finish later.

 

The main issue with ECML was the start and end point. Trains frequently pass through those stations non stop, denying players the full timetable.

Somewhere like Kings Cross to Peterborough would give players a choice of what to drive with more options, yeah the services that miss out Peterborough would still be unavailable but that would be made up for with the commuter and freight services.

York to Newcastle would have been a more popular choice as every service stops at the two stations. It wasn't the length that people complained about, it was the random end points.

 

It seems that the exchange for longer routes is less interesting sections. WCML is 50 miles and is more interesting, however ECML and kwg are significantly longer but a very repetitive landscape. The biggest barrier seems to be time, hence why JT were able to make wcmlos as that was their only project for the whole year. Whilst I don’t agree that a lack of longer routes is an issue, I can absolutely get behind the notion that dtg keep giving us random start and end points.

 

Doesnt matter if the route is short, medium, or long in length. Doesnt matter who even produces it (god forbid of course if Rivet get their filthy hands on the route or have any form of involvement), Routes these days fall into the bare minimum of effort.

As well as costing nearly the full price of a SINGLE PLAYER game at release....

 

Something that is starting to niggle me. I paid less than £10 for the ATS Missouri add on and less than £5 for the Snowrunner Austria maps. Different games I know but don't tell me any less developer effort goes into these than a TSW route and the quality is quite superb too.

 

Definitely. For £30 you should expect a top quality addon with high attention to detail. While I don't think the Cardiff route is horrendous, it is definitely a fine example of corner cutting, for example the scenery isn't the greatest, and you don't get a lot of track at all, definitely not £30 worth.

 

Same for WCML on TSC Euston to Birmingham. I have to say the Scenery for that route I found quite impressive. I did hear it was released in a really bad state, but I can’t remember how much it was now £30 maybe?
Good value for money.
Vegetation is visible, decent AI traffic, as I said scenery was good and also the Neutral sections worked.
Then you go to the poor TSW one which Liam has done great work on but it still needs tones more work.

 

But even here Snowrunner Devs actually care, Expeditons and now RoadCraft (I think its called), you can tell almost immediately that time AND effort went into developing the maps, the vehicles (Some fictional based on real life examples, and some faithfully recreated real vehicles)

Some TSW Examples include nearly all short routes such as Glossop, Mildmay, Goblin, and the soon arriving Manchester Airport. I can guarantee all of them have MANY reasons to not be the price they are due to copy paste locos and assets that are placed "randomly" to supposedly recreate an area a station is located in for example.

I get theres making profits to supposedly develop more content but with each passing DLC thats released, I feel its more solely making money, rather than listening to their community.

How many of us have ranted, complained, cried, pointed fingers at DTG to sit down and fix their routes of bugs, update scenery (granted, other developers for some routes), and nothing has come of it really, yet they still churn out routes/locos that are simply a joke in the value they are?

 

Do GTA and Forza Horizon (just two I have played) have similar limitations or do they compromise on other parts? I know they aren’t true simulators like TSW but both have huge areas to explore, main game, side quests etc

 

Just to be awkward my favourite routes are the "EMU bus services". Just goes to show that whatever DTG make it will suit some people and disappoint others. For me, as long as the quality is up to standard it does not really matter about the rest and length. I simply decide if it appeals to me and go from there. If it doesn't no point being outraged I have a choice to not buy it, which some people (not aimed at you in any way) don't seem to understand

 

So I assume London-Brighton is up there for you as a favourite?

That one is enjoyable because like WCMLOS it has a variety of services, express, stopping, freight.

That for me is a good middle ground.

 

Yeah that one ticked so many boxes.

High traffic, multiple paths, a branch, short, long, express & stoppers all on end to end mainline. Adding the 700 would have been the cherry on top to get the full length stoppers but nevertheless, one of the best for UK content.

 

Yeah London to Brighton is great. Also really like the 2 overground routes, WCLMS, Cathcart, South-eastern Highspeed as well as the new Dutch route, which with is a perfect length if I do the all stops services. I find I get easily distracted on the longer runs between stops.

Frankfurt is also up there on that list as the service variety is super, Dresden likewise.

I do like long distance routes sometimes but I have to be in the mood.

As I mentioned quality being important before. The Welsh route would suit me perfectly, but I simply cannot spend £32 in it's current form. May well do in a sale as I do with most German and other UK routes I don't pick up at launch.

 

Apart from the issue with steam, route length is the other main reason I've largely turned away from TSW.

For me the Pendolino on WCML south is almost pointless as anything more than AI traffic. A driver would never drive just to Milton Keynes and it's over quickly, in TSC I can drive all the way to New Street or from Preston to Glasgow if I want.

MML is also too short for a HST run as is GWE.

When they did model a longer route (ECML) they ended it an odd place as far as I am concerned.

For me the immersion is feeling like you are driving to a destination not just a quick 25 minute fast run which feels like a sop to say that is a box ticked.

TSW does many things well, the shorter network type routes are fine generally and I enjoy them as much as longer run as they are part of the experience of a train driver.

However there are clearly many of us who do like longer runs, I wonder if it stems from the childhood desire to drive express trains, which I always had.

Maybe in the future we will see the likes of Euston to New Street, it took time to arrive in TSC. If TSW UK content continues to be dominated by fairly short routes, especially with a preponderance of modern trains my investment in it will be minimal.

 

I just had an ad on FB popup for Steam Sounds Supreme who have a sale on so I had a look. The long list of steam locos and great routes just made me sad that TSC has all of that but we've got just 4 and one heritage line.

 

Comparing to ATS/ETS is an interesting thing.

A DLC yes is generally about $10 at release and will have a few thousand "miles" of road. Now it's about 1:20 I think so let's say Idaho DLC has 3,300 miles of "drivable road" So that's maybe 165 miles of road if it were 1:1 scale (like TSW)
It's even BETTER quality than TSW to be fair graphically. More animations, more traffic, more detailed buildings, and the physics are just as advanced. There's more unique landmarks. There's a lot more industries and map interaction.
So why the big cost difference in price?
I dunno.
ATS until recently said they had 10 people I believe working on maps?
They are essentially the same format. They're not open-world. You're driving a "corridor" with assets on either side. You are passing through some open terrain, some cities, etc. They are very similar in concept.
In fact, there are trains in ATS which while not having the physics of TSW trains, do have quite an extensive (incomplete) network. You can follow some tracks for miles and miles to actual sites with actual sidings (in many of the same businesses that you can service by truck, adding to that game loop in a way) I've wondered if ATS could use that baseline to expand to trains to complement the truck side of the house. The assets already exist, the market already exists, and maps are generally already there, although you'd have to add a few connections where they go away from the roads and then back since they end at many of the same industries anyway.
But back to the topic....

I really don't know what obstacles TSW has that make it harder or more work intensive to require a higher cost.
Maybe having to do with the third-person avatar or sticking to more detailed 1:1 scenery?
Then again, TSC routes are just as expensive and they're far less detailed than most TSW ones.
They also connect seamlessly with one another as you purchase new DLC, and the routes expand with the maps.
The random generation of cargo missions between industries and cities is also something TSW doesn't have.
Now I get it... they're not REAL logos for businesses (licensing costs money), and they want "realistic timetables" and such for passengers.
Maybe that's part of it? All that time programming timetables in, instead of letting them generate randomly?
It's not the animations or AI since there's arguably more traffic and pedestrians on ATS maps than in TSW, especially outside of stations.
There must be some reason beyond "making the cash" to charge that much more.
With the way gaming works, you'd sell MORE at lower prices and make up the difference.
So there must be a cost factored in that means higher prices are required to meet budgets.

 

I wholeheartedly agree. The Dutch + Cardiff routes are the same price as Atomfall (a AAA game that took years to develop), with £9 change to go buy something random from a [insert platform] sale. Most of us live in an era where VFM is king - and this is the main reason as to why I can no longer force myself to support the TSW cause.

Oh, someone mentioned that they wouldn't expect Dovetail Games to release a 112 mile route for £30, which is a strange thing to say because they can.....and already have!!

 

I can't help myself and buy every British route whether I really want it or not but enjoying exploring areas that I am not familiar with and sometimes fall in love with the DLC and keep going back. I used to collect Model Railway locos, initially in 00 then in N but it was just becoming too expensive. A £30ish route is far more affordable than a £150+ model loco.

 

Agree. If I want to thrash an ICE I find Koln-Aachen far more rewarding even though it's half the length

 

Keep in mind the truck-sim crowd think $12 for an ATS map is quite expensive and are currently skewering the Missouri map for not including every little town and junction at 20:1 scale, so i think SCS feel a little of DTG's pain about never satisfying everyone. Personally i think it's their best map yet.

Back on topic, the devs should make what they want to make- i think there's an audience for most of it and, as has been proven over and over they won't ever make everyone happy.

 

Already done, if you're on PC. https://www.trainsim.cz/?mod=article&showid=2754

 

Digital v's real world purchases aren't really comparable....and even if they were there are still multiple reasons as to why 'have and hold' version of anything are vastly superior to interacting with digital equivalents on your TV screen. The reason why I own a 'seen better days' Mustang GT or play Uno/Monopoly/Scrabble out of the box....even though I have cheaper digital versions at my fingertips.

 

When?

 

I have noticed that over on the SCS forum. It is a bit small but there is going to be a lot of that as they continue their journey to the East Coast. I am seriously looking forward to being able to truck all the way from Miami,New York or Boston to LA or Seattle.

Back on topic (sort of), I still do ponder whether there could be a demand for a similar scaled down paradigm in a train sim. Maybe not as small as 1:20. That would give a longer route (even at 1:20 scale Chicago to Seattle is going to be around 100 miles), just needs DTG to overcome how they would do it with editors slaved to real world DEM and geography.

 

Yes and no.
Convenience factors in. I have a stack of games too, but they take up space, are far more "dedicated" and require other people to play.
I enjoy time with friends around a table, but also enjoy computer games at different times.
In the end it boils down to how much time having "fun" you will spend for that money.
If I buy a game that my friends play once... then not a great investment either.
If I buy a DLC that I play over and over... then it's a good investment.

Neither is really "better" unless you expect the stuff to disappear from Steam imminently.
And have a lot of storage space to use up.


I'd love a Mustang GT, but let's not pretend that doesn't take a decent pocketbook and an empty garage to fill ;-)

 

There are pros and cons. A lot less "empty space" and you can hit those landmarks faster. It does give a feeling of "accomplishing" more. You get to hit peoples' "favorites" faster too. ("Hey, they did my home state! I gotta buy it now!")
On the other hand, the "authentic experience" fans won't accept anything less than 1:1 to actually get the full experience.
I play ATS and Run 8 so I can see both sides of the coin. I like that you can see so many landmarks and cities in a trip and DO so much.
On the other hand, there's a satisfaction from running a nice long run "for real" (in sim) to see just how far routes are and get a sense of scale. Driving across the Mojave for example, or from LA to Arizona emphasizes just how BIG the country is.
As far as TSW style content is concerned, it wouldn't work well with urban commuter routes since you'd only be going a few feet between stops at 20:1 scale. The whole Mildmay is what, 17 miles? So it'd be less than a mile long in compressed format?
It only really works with larger map areas and you do lose some of the detail in between.
ATS gets around this a bit by "fudging" the scales and expanding to a far larger scale (it's not 1:1 but it's a lot less than 20:1 in cities/towns then going back to 20:1 once you get into the "country."

 

I don’t have an issue with prices specifically, the main problem is when the end product’s quality does not match the price of it.

WCML Shap - That route is worth every penny because JT went absolutely all out with it. A well built route, high quality locomotives, lots of variety on the timetable.

Let’s not forget how they went above and beyond including multiple liveries for the 87, 47 and 08. DTG would’ve probably charged a £5 for each livery.

Cardiff Commuter - Comes with two highly requested DMU units. The 153 is well made, while the 150 seems to have had minimal changes from its WCL predecessor.

Route scenery is very patchy, Cardiff looks nice but as you drive out to surrounding areas, everything looks more basic, route doesn’t cover the full branches included with a measly 20+ mile network.

The quality of this route does not match up to the price of entry. £20 is more fitting.

The Dutch route followed Cardiff and the difference in quality between the two is night & day. I know the Dutch route is mostly a straight corridor, but I’ll willing to let that slide because I know a lot of work goes into bringing a new region to the game and they did a really good job on scenery and rolling stock.

It’s like third party products. I personally don’t think a Rivet product should be priced anywhere near a JT or TSG product. Rivet’s DLC should be cheaper to reflect the quality of their add-ons.

 

"Value" is a personal opinion.
Just look at music or movies.
It's worth what the individual person thinks it's worth.
If enough people choose similarly, then a "group value" can be averaged, but that still doesn't mean you'll please every single person so we'll still be squabbling about this for years to come since we'll never agree on everything.
For example, I really enjoy the Fife route. It's Rivet. Oh well.
I like US freight routes. The majority don't. Oh well.
Lots of people love GWE. I think it's boring. Oh well.

DTG isn't measuring individual opinions.
That would be impossible.
It's mostly going by sales.

You can disagree all you want if it doesn't fit what you want to see, but it's a reliable metric that is as good as any other.
It's like arguing over if fast food is "good" or not.
Arguably it's not all that healthy, but if people keep choosing to buy and eat it... then it's popular and those restaurants kill keep making it.
Blaming the restaurants is silly.
They're making what sells.
Blame the customers if you need to "blame" someone.
Someone is still buying these DLC to keep DTG in business, whether you like it or not.
Just like people are wolfing down cheap hamburgers and sugary drinks even if you don't like it.

 

They are comparable in what is affordable and what is not while providing enjoyment in my free time.

 

I've noticed how you've always got to have the last word, but I don't need a lecture from the fanclub, cheers.

I understand how it all works, I can still have my own opinion though

 

TSW5:
(1/3 of the playerbase is, allegedly, on PC, so call it 3-4k a day - also bearing in mind that TSW5 was *free* for a good while and this is all it can manage...)

American Truck Simulator:


And, to make the point as to how SCS can afford it, Euro Truck Simulator:


And also Snowrunner:


Dovetail's only notable games are Train Sim Classic (the all-time daily peak for which was less than 4,000 - and that was over a decade ago) and Train Sim World.
Catan, Fishing and TSW VR won't be bringing in the big bucks to sustain TSW Development in the way that ETS props up ATS, and TSW doesn't have a playerbase like those shown above, unfortunately, so we're left with the bill.

 

I do love a good racetrack, especially when it has at least 4 lines so you have express services overtaking freight & local services. I'm not one for bus stop routes, the minimum I go for is a semi-fast route/service

 

Ah the irony.

 

It's a valid point I didn't consider.
The development costs are the same if they sell 1 or 1 million.
Kinda brings the whole Thomas thing into perspective too.
Getting more players into the hobby would actually make things cheaper for everyone.
Meanwhile the focus seems to be on keeping the group of "true sim fans" as small as possible.

If all this work is for 3,000 regular players then the content has to be expensive to cover costs.
That's VERY niche hobby.
Which explains why model trains are super expensive too.
Now imagine that this hobby is actually much smaller than the physical model train hobby.

 

I don't necessarily agree that ETS2 "props up" ATS, its numbers are very healthy compared to pretty much any other game but the biggest AAA titles. I believe it hangs around just under the top 100 most played constantly, and it's worth baring in mind that's it's been in that position for a few years. Lot of games get higher peaks, but few necessarily keep that player count going for any extended period of time, ATS does though. And bare in mind ETS2 used the exact same business model for three or so years when that was SCS' only hit.

Also just in general a lot of companies do expect their assets to be self-sustaining. And the only reason you might see cases to the contrary sometimes is almost always because the company believes it has the potential to grow. If something makes them change their mind they don't hesitate cutting the life support. Main example that comes to my mind Disney shutting down the 2D animation after the middling performances of the latter 2D films. Disney with all the success it was having around that time 100% had the money where they could've saved it if they really wanted to, but didn't.

Doubt it, if Thomas succeed at $20+ dollars management are more likely than not going to look at that as the pricing being already cheap enough, because people are already showing they're wiling to buy it. And to them it's better to take the "If ain't broke, don't fix it" approach and maintain the course and get some extra loot in the process. That's been the consistent pattern in most companies in the past few years, case and point Nvidia's massive success post-COVID has ruined GPU pricing. And at this point it will probably only improve either because of the GPU market itself shrinking, or Intel & AMD taking proper swings at them and bloodying their nose.

 

figures indicate that on PC alone TSW5 has sold in excess of 250k copies.

 

Well, is that including everyone who picked it up for free?

And we need to bear in mind that a significant portion of owners of the game have probably never purchased a single add-on.

 

And yet the numbers also show that only 1,000 people play on steam at any one time. Now that's more than 1,000 people... no one is on 24/7... but compared to 1.1 million for popular games, or even the 40,000 for other sim games... it's not all that much of a market.
Niche hobbies tend to be very expensive.
They also tend to have relatively few vendors in that market because it's so small.
They also tend to usually be passionate about it too.
That just makes sense because if a developer were in the gaming industry JUST to make money they wouldn't choose the smallest audience possible to market to.

Serious question... what's the critical mass for this industry?
Is the audience growing or shrinking?
These long term are more important than just what an individual DLC costs.
A growing audience means you can reduce or at least stabilize costs because you're spreading that cost out to more customers. You need to make less on each person.
A shrinking industry means you have fewer people to get the same amount of money out of.

Another serious question.... has anyone here personally recommended TSW to a friend recently to try to build the customer base?
Have they discouraged them?

How many actively said Thomas was bad because it brought too many strange new people in (like ewwwww children! How dare they play a video game!)

I see a lot of hobby shops closing real-world around here as the old crew that used to visit them in the 80s-90s-2000s ages out, whether they start families, move to other hobbies, or die off. It's just part of life. If you think this is expensive...try tabletop wargaming! Their numbers aren't being replaced and as the numbers of players goes down, the price of each product goes up meaning there's an even higher cost to ENTERING the field...with fewer and fewer places to play and groups to form a community with.

It becomes a death spiral.

Big picture (and how it relates to the original topic here) is that yes prices rise... but WHY?
And if we're seeing less variety from less companies, with some minority things (like freight) being cut back, it might not be so much a huge business conspiracy so much as a struggling industry trying to survive.

 

I can’t speak to ATS but I play Snowrunner and there’s no way anywhere near the developer effort goes into that game.

TSW for all its faults is pretty focused on giving you relatively accurate world in 1:1 scale based on real places. And the trains are very technical and pretty accurate for a video game.

Snowrunner is complete fiction. The worlds are made up and not replicating any specific real places. The trucks are completely arcade, they aren’t simulating the real versions of those trucks at all outside of visual appearance. You aren’t getting simulations of the real engines and power output, air brake systems, transmissions or anything really. Lots of those trucks can’t even properly drive more than like 25mph (which is fine in the context of Snowrunner but obviously in real life they can go highway speeds).

I do like Snowrunner but it can’t be compared to a simulator. Replicating real world environments and highly technical rolling stock is the most important and time consuming parts of TSW DLC.

I actually have no problem with the pricing structure of TSW on a fundamental level, my issue with TSW lately is piss poor quality control, bugs, and optimization. If they improved those areas I’d be fine with the asking prices.

 

In any train simulator, the routes are also huge compared to most other video games' maps.

Snowrunner maps are 2 km * 2 km.

Yes, they have more detail in them than most TSW scenery (outside of stations), but I still can't imagine that making them is anywhere near the amount of work that a TSW route is. And that's not even considering things like signalling, timetables...

 

Agreed. DTG have more work in their schedule but they also have the most man power. I think though the arguably most requested high speed line of Germany (maybe even the most requested German route full stop) SFS Köln-Rhein/Main should be feasible now because once S-Bahn Frankfurt releases they have all major stations along this route in the game: Köln Hbf, Frankfurt Airport, Frankfurt Hbf (and Wiesbaden Hbf if they do the HSL link). While length wise it would be a monster project (between 180 and 210km depending on added branches: HSL link to Wiesbaden, airport loop Köln and extension from Frankfurt Airport to Hbf) the simple scenery in between makes it possible. Meanwhile the route offers more gameplay than KWG in variable stopping patterns and generally a more unique driving experience due to the track layout.

 

Fair point about the Snowrunner maps, but the slight counterpoint to that is every square metre needs to be hand crafted and detailed at the highest level, basically anywhere the player can go. By contrast, a train sim route once you get 200m from the trackside can get away with less detail (particularly if you’re Rivet ) decreasing exponentially the further out you go. As regards timetables and scenarios, there is plenty of evidence these are not as thoroughly tested as they ought to be, relying on the built in AI of the editor rather than hand playing. I would imagine the Snowrunner map missions, contracts etc. must be hand played to ensure they are feasible otherwise players would be up in arms at not being able to 100% complete a map.

I do to some extent agree with earlier comments though about vehicle physics, totally stop/go fantasy the equivalent of what DTG have done with Thomas I imagine. The whole paradigm is also designed to drag things out, whether it’s the convoluted broken roads and trails, the vehicles which as stated crawl across the terrain at 15km/h max, or the missions that turn a simple A to B run into a crawl around three sides of the map. Good fun though, but yes it is a game not a simulation.

 

You're also getting multiple of them though for the price you're paying for though, and it's only about 2/3rd's the price of a single route. Also you got to keep in mind SnowRunner has to have people actually design and plan out maps. Not just adapting a existing a location or loco into a digital form like DTG are doing 99% of the time. In that regard DTG have it much easier than most game developers.

Also i think most people here under estimate how much increasing detail does raise development times. For example Metroid Prime Remastered has much more manpower behind it, for context the credits are 10 minutes, versus three minutes for the OG game. And to be clear the original staff from 2002 aren't credited, so that isn't artificially adding to the length. And development took about two and a half years, which is the same as the OG game, and it's literal just a graphical overhaul of the GameCube/Wii version with no alterations to game design or controls.

Making a original game at the same level of detail probably takes double that time at least, Metroid Prime 4's development time at Retro is double that of Remastered. And notably was actually in development at another studio for another two years before that version was canned. So some unknown percentage of that version also carried over as a base for Retro to develop from. It's know for fact some story beats carried over at least.

 

I would be very suprised if that is true. I've no data to backup my response, I just don't feel like its the sort of game you buy purchase then never invest in DLC.

 

Does it though? I agree that the maps have some really good detail, but quite a large part of each of them is just fairly generic wilderness.

Yes, but going with that figure of 200 m each way from the trackside, then WCML over Shap is at the very least (because we're completely ignoring the width of stations, all the accessible areas for the Carlisle trip workings, the entire Morecambe branch, and the fact that while distant scenery is simplified, but someone still has to make it) 15 times the size of a Snowrunner map.

I mean, obviously Snowrunner needs to be tested, every game does. Specifically the missions are so much simpler than a TSW scenario or timetable though. It's really just "take this thing from point A to point B" most of the time, and how you do it and with which truck is completely up to the player - so honestly they'd have to mess up pretty badly for one of those to just be straight up impossible.

Well, first of all you gotta use the AI to make the thing in the first place, even if you're using the real world timings - the game needs to work out who gets to go first at junctions and everything.

Of course then once you think it's all done, it's gotta be tested of course. But honestly, having a human drive every single service in a timetable is completely utopic. They are just far too big. I'll do some very quick back of the envelope math here, using DRA cause I know the service pattern. Per hour & direction, you get 2 S1 (45 min), 1 RE50 (45 min), 1 RE15/18 (30 min), 1 RB31 (15 min), 1 IC/ICE (35 min) and, say, 3 freight trains (45 min). Let's say trains run from 0500 to 2300. So that's 18 hours * 2 (for each direction) * ((6*45)+30+15+35) minutes of gameplay per hour = 12600 minutes = 210 hours of gameplay that you'd need to test. Of course, you're going to have to redo all of that every time you've made a change to the timetable, so hopefully no one actually finds any problems that need fixing. Oh, and what about Substitution and Layers? Some problems might only happen with a specific combination of disabled layers, or with a certain combination of services having a certain combination of rolling stock substituting into them, and at that point it probably becomes mathematically impossible to "test everything" before the heat death of the universe.

 

Go and make a map in Trainz or some other creation program and place down all that foliage, "generic wilderness" still takes hours of time and effort to pull off. Especially if you don't want it to be obvious copy and paste jobs everywhere. I remember back in the day not really realizing this and I'd spend hours placing grass alongside the tracks, and placing bloody seaweed in the ocean because it didn't feel right leaving them plain. Similarly refused to use things like the copy and paste tool because it felt cheap, I genuinely wanted to spend time on every tree so it could be placed a bit differently. Or how I'd spend hours messing sizes and directions of textures constantly trying to make sure they don't repeat, because it always annoyed me on other routes. Needless to say all my routes got abandoned one or two base boards in as kid for that reason.

(Well, that and the fact my computer wasn't great and would becoming unplayable slow very quickly on my routes. Almost as if there was a reason that a lot of those time and budget saving tricks I disliked were done, figures,)

Again though, TSW really isn't done to all that high of a detail, even those stations frankly are quite bare. For example those underground tunnels you can use in many stations rarely have any detailing besides a handful of posters and some people walking around preparing to do blast up the stairs at Mach 10 as they tend to do. Even above ground many of the textures are too clean and there isn't as much clutter as there should be. Lot of random houses in various open world games you'll only go in once for ten seconds feel much more lived in than even the best made iconic stations on JT & TSG routes do.

Never made a TSW scenario, but in TSC if you don't care about complex shunting moves (which you will notice aren't done in anything close to the numbers though freights and passenger services are) it's usually just as simple as going to the map and selecting what yard track or station you want it to go. Maybe add a waypoint or two, adjust if it's meant to stop or pass it, and if it's a passenger service set the departure times, it isn't that hard. Lord knows going back to Trainz I spent spend hours of trial and error setting detailed schedules and learning how all the various AI markers and placing them on routes to have semi-reliable AI trains. That's complete pain, and I'm not sure if I'll ever do something like that again.

I'll also add everything I've ever heard and reading about programming is that many simple things that shouldn't break but do anyways. Software is famously very fickle and break randomly if you look at it the wrong way. So I'd be shocked if those SnowRunner missions probably don't get a fair bit of testing. Especially since from my experience that game is much more rock-solid than TSW. I've never encountered any noticeable bugs in my hundred hours or so playing, on Nintendo Switch to boot, which usually gets kind of iffy ports of games. Where as even solidly made routes like the TSG & JT lot I can usually stumble into timetable issues within a twentieth of that time.