To me this is just a cheaper way to get the 323 and the routes like a bonus.Why do so many hate on shorter routes?Being a shorter route doesn't mean it some how a bad effort or wasted time,And if your not aware by now that DTG likes to recycle there trains offen,you clearly don't keep up on the DTG standard operating procedures.
And once the 700 is in there we can do a lot of the inner-urban routes like Orpington, the North Kent Lines etc and have almost full operation (with only the 376 missing once you get past Milwall)
I don't think it's that shorter routes are hated - on the contrary, if it's great quality and has interesting gameplay then that's brilliant. But, I think many would also like to see more busy mainlines with epic, super-busy timetables which can use a plethora of existing TSW rolling stock which, in turn, hopefully means less empty, large stations and timetables. Regarding the Glossop Line, the 323 is still a relatively new train from a recent TSW 3 route - would have been nice if they had chosen a route which could of used an older, existing loco; a good example could of been the 166 upgraded to TSW 3 for a route such as the North Downs Line.
I love to see this route coming! And the 323 is one of my favourite trains to drive due to the High sound quality and the train is in a really good shape. I've watched the cabride and what a lovely nice route. If you drive the whole round it takes an hour of fun drive. I don't understand the whole situation in this topic. The price 19,99 is fair and complaining before you see anything is a little dumb in my opinion....
Indeed, I have no objection to short routes, if they are the right ones. In fact if they announced Blackpool Tramway (about 11 miles) set in the trolley pole era with a Balloon Car and maybe a Railcoach, I’d be ringing Matt up and offering a £30 pledge in advance! Likewise the Tynemouth Loop in diesel days or the Severn Valley Railway. All £30 Day One purchases. In fact if Manchester to Glossop (are we calling it MGH?) had been set in the days of the 506, I would have gone Day One at £30, accepting the reality that Woodhead was too much to hope for.
One other thing since when did DTG ever state they only do things players want?There are alot things that get done perhaps nobody ask for.If DTG decides to do a occasional route nobody ask for thats there choice.What they decided to makes up to them.If you don't want it that fine,
I refuse to take seriously the word of a grown man who would willingly go on stream wearing pink cat ears Nuh-uh. Not happening. Unless it was for a bet. Kidding aside, I find the words "an hour is about right for gameplay" when talking about a complete run of a route to be rather weird. Is he saying that routes being ~30 miles long isn't due to limitations, but by design? "Not everybody has the time" — he is aware of the existence of a save function, right? I don't think simulators should limit stuff like the length of a drive because of gameplay reasons at all. Let's take ETS2 as an example. With certain map expansions, not to mention mods, you can set up deliveries that take 4+ hours to complete (Russia to Portugal, UK to Turkey, etc). Yet no one's complaining about the ETS2 map being too big. Because, it being a game from the 21st century, it has a save function. As does TSW, after much complaining from customers. So you can simulate an epic cross continental drive without being glued to your PC for hours at a time. "People want to spent 20 minutes and feel like they've done something meaningful." Are the devs not able to set up scenarios of different lengths using a variety of ingame pretexts and reasons? If scenarios were to run the gamut from, say, a couple dozen minutes to 2+ hours on a route, I'm absolutely certain players would be fine with it. This sort of thing used to happen all the time in TSC. Saying that long drives aren't good gameplay-wise is just not true. I want to feel the same sense of unironic pride and accomplishment I could feel after flawlessly completing a 120-minute drive as I could in some TSC routes. Yes, playing such a scenario would be a challenge. But this is still a video game, and a meaningful challenge isn't something to be omitted because "people don't have time." I find it to be strange how, having went from TSC to TSW, scenario and route lengths stayed the same, if not became shorter. I mean, I wasn't expecting a faithful recreation of the Trans-Siberian Railway, but you can only drive back-and-forth on a 30-mile railway segment so many times before it becomes boring. So for this reason and the reasons above, when Matt says that an hour is about right because of gameplay reasons, I humbly disagree. It might be a more-preferred length of, as he says, "the people who silently beg us not to make routes that are 300-400 miles long," but I don't think that should mean longer drives shouldn't exist. Or that "about an hour" should be the upper limit.
Except the save function for tsw doesn't work all the time. There were and still are numerous moments where loading a save will cause problems on certain routes. For example, it shut off the gen field on a f7 in clinchfield which meant I wasn't getting any power on an upward gradient. Even safety systems get turned off on reload. doors on the njt coaches don't work when reloading from a save. Ats/ets on the other hand has a 100% working save game. You can't speak for everyone's wants and interests. I like driving short routes that take a short amount to do. Iow, cathcart, bakerloo and Oakville come to mind. But should dtg eliminate them completely? No. Your comment about how doing a 30 minute run is boring. Same goes for longer routes. Skw is one of the most boring routes imo. So is lgv. Short routes equally have their benefits. Bcc for instance is only 30 odd miles but there's lots to do and lots of stops. Regarding your comment about tsc and tsw and how routes have stayed the same length or shorter, it's not a fair comparison. Building modern games on modern software especially train sims is extremely complex. There's no simulator out there that requires the developers to build a whole separate physics engine for trains and to do a 1:1 representation of many miles. Dtg don't have the size or budget of a triple a studio and they can't survive off of producing like 1-2 routes a year.
"There were and still are numerous moments where loading a save will cause problems on certain routes." Are you able to read? Or are you just here to blindly shill? Are you seriously arguing that I'm wrong because the save function doesn't work properly? "You can't speak for everyone's wants and interests. I like driving short routes that take a short amount to do." I never claimed to speak for everyone's interests. You like short routes, that's fine. I wasn't saying they should be "eliminated completely." Do read my post, before you reply to it. "Your comment about how doing a 30 minute run is boring." Yeah. It is, when done over and over again, as many Journeys ask the player to do. Then it does become quite repetitive. Was that not clear? "Building modern games on modern software especially train sims is extremely complex." Are you honestly saying that, as technology improves, we should expect a decline in product quality and be fine with it, when talking about "especially train sims"? Get outta here.
Long v short. There are short and medium length routes. There are no long routes. I would like the choice to drive a long route.
A short route doesn't mean it has the lower quality. A long route doesn't mean there will be higher quality. Technology may be modern, but it does not mean everything gets easier. As games get bigger and bigger, it takes longer and longer to make content. Many assets still have to be built by hand which is why long routes wouldn't be really viable. Even LiDAR as mentioned in the May roadmap still requires lots of work to make autogeneration and procedural generation easier for route builders. Certain assets such as roads, houses and greenery elements have to be placed by hand all over 60 miles or however long a route is which is why 100+ mile routes with lots of scenery elements, complex timetables and multiple rolling stock is just not viable.
Clearly this route is not for you. I really do not understand people for complaining so much about stuff you don't have to buy. Just skip it, if nobody wants it, it will not exist in most cases.It is good that DTG tries to do something for people that like shorter activities. IOW is only 7 miles and a 205 minutes drive, only one train and I like to drive this one sometimes, because I know the route well< I know the train behaviour well so its relaxed driving this one. I don't mind having some more and I will buy them or not.
If get why people get angry when I route they want to own is below standards, I get why people get peeved off when thier favourite loco is poorly represented in game What I don't understand is why people get angry about a route they've no interest in getting announced on a roadmap.. For anyone not already aware, their is no law in any country (with the possible exception of North Korea) in the world forcing you to purchase specific DTG products. Save your hard earned cash and your anger for things that really matter.
I get it, sharing disdain before we've even seen anything comes across as petulant and a bit silly, but I'll say again, statements like yours always come across like 'I'm optimistic, be quiet, I don't wanna hear it, don't voice your opinions because of my optimism' etc. You're right nobody is making you buy something, however there's nothing wrong with wanting better for a product you're invested in. It's a pretty pertinent stance to take given the litany of issues across the catalogue. That said I feel similarly and would rather wait for sales, largely because I don't think recent releases are worth full price imo.
Oh, it is very much for me. It's got a lower price for a lower length, and I see nothing wrong with that. Like when a band releases an EP instead of a full-length album. If it turns out to be good/worth the pre-price-hike money and the reviews/videos from indepentent creators show it to be so, I'm buying it. I just disagree with some of the things Matt said in the stream about route lengths in general, that's all. I do feel the same about IOW. It's basically the only Rivet Games TSW route that's decently polished, so it's rather nice to do a run of it once in a while. Despite the train having multiple pictures of Matt in some sort of pyjama in every car
You absolutely cannot compare ETS2 with a train simulator considering route length and save games. For a simple reason: Road traffic has no dispatcher and signal logic. Traffic is spawning randomly. You only need to save the player's position. A completely different thing.
Also ETS2 and ATS start you off at a stand and respawn all the AI traffic. Even Run 8 resumes the save game with all trains at a stand and in the case of the player train you need to run the engine start procedure again.
Depends on what you mean by "better product". For some they want four hour drives. Some want decent shunting. Some want the save game to work. Some want to load the game without loading in. Others would have a certain tremor if the APT was released... "Better product" is in the eye of the beholder
Longer routes could be nice, but not from this developer. DTG has proven with KSW that they are incapable. Scenery loading when you're nearly past it, bushes clipping in tunnels and smacking you in the face, and stuttery frame rates (a base feature for TSW3). A longer route feels more like lazy development if the time constraints to push it out the door are the same as shorter routes.
I remember hearing somewhere, in one of the streams, that the main culprit is not the route length, but the speed of the train. When the train is going very fast, the UE4 engine needs to load and render assets very quickly, which is why this is an issue for TSW, unlike many other UE4 titles, where the simulation is a lot slower in terms of changes of scenery.
True, that is subjective. I suppose my definition of 'better' isn't content, more functionality, like for example in TSW2 on SEHS when a 395 drives by in a custom livery, it didn't choke the frame rate down to a crawl as the train approaches in the distance, something that always happens on TSW3, can't go near Ashford Intl for crashing too. Maybe it's to do with the add-ons manager idk, but even then Tharandter Rampe in TSW2 (&3) has similar crashing problems around Dresden Hbf as Nahverkehr Dresden in TSW3. Plus models reducing polygons & textures reducing resolution when you look at them with the camera, zooming in & out shouldn't be a thing.
As a consequence of this: UE4 is the wrong platform (which is what I am convinced of), but DTG are not able code a proprietary game engine that suits a train simulator themselves. With TSC (then RailSimulator), they had bought a game engine that was already done by Kuju (supposed to be MSTS2). They just needed to polish it a bit and add in functionality (which they succeeded in, imho. You don't have this sort of assets popping up there). With FlightSimWorld, they quickly realized that this was exceeding their capabilities (Flight Simmers have much higher expectations to realism as any other sim), the rest is history.
I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing when a new route reuses a train from a previous DLC. Don't get me wrong, I like getting new trains as much as the next person, but I play TSW to drive trains and when I find a train that I really enjoy I want to drive it on as many routes as possible. It's a shame when you get a really good train and it's only possible to drive it on a single route. For example, I really enjoy the Class 158 (call me biased but I put in a lot of work on that train to make it what I want to drive) so I'm very much looking forward to whenever Skyhook, or DTG, or Rivet (or Just Trains or any other current or future 3rd party developer) make the next route that features this train. If that route comes with a new train as well, great, but whether I enjoy the route or not will not rely on whether it does. To get back to the DLC in question, the Class 323 is a really well made train in my relatively unbiased opinion (wasn't involved with it) so I'm looking forward to getting a new route to drive it on.
If this is the case, then they are all the more foolish for having made KSW. Another "look what we did" and forget piece. However we've had high speed trains in TSW2 with the ICE and Javelin, but never did the scenery load in late like this. If optimization is even possible with this game engine, it would be nice if they could get some expertise and work on the game's core to get it working properly as a side project to their mad rush to pump out route after route every other week.
I find it astonishing how people love to defend greedy companies over the consumer who spends their hard earned cash on DLC that has a track record of being sub-par. Why are you trying to defend them? What are you getting from them? Why are you so sensitive to people criticising their products? In terms of route length: if a route is short it makes it less valuable to people who like BOTH 'short' and 'long' routes as if it's a long route, you can just drive part of it if you're not interested in the rest of it. And if the route is priced at £30 (which I really hope it isn't), is that really the standard that people want to accept? 14 miles and a repeated train when routes like London Commuter gave us more than double the amount of content for the same price? (in fact i think that one came out when dlcs were still £25) Let's also not forget TSC which had longer routes from the get-go (London-Oxford springs to mind), however I do appreciate that TSW route building takes longer.
For all of Matt's false promises (RD being one of many) I think you should revise your position. How dare you! The best train in TSW is the mighty 101! lol, for me it is the most fun to drive. As for the DLC, I'm waiting for TSW4, do you think it will come out for that?
The trouble is that many people seem to have spent to long staring at the sun through very strong binoculars, and have now found out the burning of retina's off one's eyeballs wasn't the smartest decision and doesn't help when trying to read clearly stated information on upcoming price for the aforementioned DLC........
It is £20, something which has been mentioned several times so that isn't a stick you can beat them with, funny how some miss that little fact when it doesn't fit in with their argument. It might be hard for you to believe that amongst the noise of the forums a lot of people are getting a lot of pleasure out of TSW in general, including me and I can be as critical as the next person. There is a balance to be struck in my mind, some on here just never have a good thing to say, which makes you wonder if they even ever use TSW and if so, why if it is that bad? Are they greedy? All I see is a company staffed by many enthusiastic people striving to create quite a niche product and make money, which is one of the main facets of being in business. Yes they make mistakes, yes sometimes they appear shoddy and I sometimes find their decisions difficult to understand but overall I think many just express what they feel, which in general is a great satisfaction. Some don't seem to be able to handle that not everyone has an axe to grind.
100%! Although the idea is nice, I found out that CC liveries were causing nothing but problems. For example a train would pass by with no loco on the front as the CC livery failed to load on time. I also noticed the game would load a lot slower. While it was a nice creative idea, the game just can't handle it so I only use the "vanilla" un-CC'd game (perhaps the scenarios part of CC may work ok though).
Ouch... I remember similar issues in TSC and they were the bane of people's playing lives for a while... I'll stick to the defaults for now and hopefully DTG can find a better solution (though I won't be counting chickens... maybe rounding up the flying pigs)
But yet.... how many people realistically spend 4 1/2 hours in one go driving on ETS2. Because unless they are in a VTC, they usually arent. Hell, I have over 1200 hours on it, but I rarely play for more than hour a day, mayby 3 when I streamed, but that was just for the stream. I don't get why everyone always uses SCS as a comparison. One game is over 11 years old, the other is relatively new. You can't compare the..
And for me, it is the worst. I despise it, any route that has the 101 as an offering for me, will be skipped and refused. I don't like how it drives, looks, or sounds. I'll take the 150/2 over it anyday, and that's saying something.
I'll have to check again if it does that to the ROG base model, but I suspect it will because the same thing happens with the default ICE 1 nose (also seen pics of it happening to the EMT HST headlights), I mean the textures of the ROG 37 are definitely askew popping in & out. These aren't even CC creations, they're designs that I haven't shared, specifically for the trains passing by anyway. Though it definitely has no issues with default skins.
Nobody is defending corporations. They’re pointing out that corporations exist to make money. As a consumer you are free to buy or not buy whatever they are selling. There’s a ridiculous level of childish entitlement that permeates this forum and the person who started this thread is top of the list. DTG release content for a Train Simulator. They do not make life saving drugs. You are not obligated to buy anything from them. It is a luxury item. Same as buying a pair of trainers. Buy what you can afford and what you want. If you don’t like a short route. Don’t buy it. Simple. The person who started this thread is the person who posted the open letter a few weeks ago complaining about DTG releasing too much content and how they couldn’t afford it all. As if that’s their problem. You don’t need or have to own everything they release. Only what you want and can afford.
I was inclined to believe that. And I was blaming my aged PS4 which, without any doubt, is not up to the challenges of a modern simulator even with limited layers, assets, traffic and train length (They just don´t tell you). But then I switched to PS5 which is IMHO nothing short of a quantum leap especially when you jump to 4k. It is a whole new sim and quite enjoyable. And yet, I´ve noticed stutters when ON FOOT, in the middle of nowhere with no Ai trains nowhere near around. Always at the same spots. Additionally it is notable that the older routes like e.g. MSB, RSN or GWE present much less stutters than the newer routes. Maybe coincidence? Or the result of the work of the (now extict) pres crew? Hmmm, RSN runs almost perfect in TSW2 under all circumstances. It sure boggles the mind ...
This is a slightly different issue: the new sky rendering is a resource hog, and this does not apply to older routes that have not yet been "upgraded".
Or, when they made newer routes they tried to use "new tricks" which are taking up more runtime and thus causing more slowdown. The adage "less is more" really does apply to programming sometimes.
I think they're talking about the German DB BR 101 rather than the UK Class 101... The German one is lauded as a decent loco. The class 101 seems to be hated by many because it's a bit of a complex beast
Interesting. If the new skies are making the game run that much worse then they've really put their foot in it as they can't go back now to making routes with the "old sky" as people would be up in arms. Probably should have done some proper QA testing before releasing TSW3, yet here we are. Perhaps they will gain some expertise and learn some tricks for TSW4 to try to salvage their ailing franchise.
Funny how for me TSW3 is running better than I have every known TSW to run. I am sure they would not have been bought by another company if they were failing. Still if it comforts you to believe it.....
