With the announcement of TSW4, Dovetail has again received a fair share of criticism, due to TSW3 only being one year old. And whilst the improvements are various and the price for three routes in total is a great deal, many players feel betrayed and are forced to spend extra money. Therefore I had some thoughts on how Dovetail might be able to make TSW more player-friendly (ordered by importance). 1. Rebrand as only Train Sim Wolrd (no number) Back in the old TS Classic days, this was already a big point of criticism. Basically, the same game was released every year with a new number, making it seem like it was a completely new game. Whilst TSW has some major changes between its versions, it still makes everything convoluted and hard for new players to understand. With a rebrand to just "Train Sim World" players would need to buy one base game without having to learn about the compatibility and differences between the separate versions. It also stops players from forcing to buy routes, that they might not want, just to be able to buy another route later, that they might want. If we take TSW4 for example, the base game would still come bundled with the same three routes at the same price. Players who already own the base game would get the update of the base game for free at release, but would also be able to buy the routes by just buying the game again. If the routes would be also available to buy separately at full standalone DLC price, players who only want one of the three routes could buy them normally, whilst everyone else can get the discounted price of the bundle. 2. Separate rolling stock into addons At the moment trains get bundled into most routes of their country (e.g. BR 185). This leads to multiple versions of the same rolling stock with many differences, as they aren't all updated if e.g. a new safety system is added, but rather only the version included in the route that requires it. Therefore I suggest putting rolling stock as a separate addon, similar to what SCS does in their Truck Simulators. The Addons will not be purchasable, but rather you'll get them for free when you buy a route with which it was originally bundled. With that Dovetail would only need to update one version of the rolling stock, which is then used in all the different routes, rather than update as many versions as there are routes. 3. Extend after release support The missing bug fixes aren't something new. I mostly noticed that even though a new route has just been released, critical bug fixes take seemingly a rather long time. Therefore I suggest Dovetail extend its after-release support phase to a minimum of three weeks, in which the team who built the addon is fully available to fix bugs on the route (if no work is necessary they can of course work on something new). This relieves work from the Special Projects Team (or whatever they're called these days) and makes the waiting time for bug fixes much shorter. Of course, this will cost Dovetail a considerable amount of money, but I think that the resulting improved quality of the addons and therefore better reception among the players will pay back this investment. I hope that DTG will consider some of these suggestions and agrees that these changes will return their investment by getting more players to get TSW and its add-ons. Let me know what you think of my suggestions. Have I missed something crucial? Do you think that something is unnecessary?
Rebranding to just tsw may cause even more confusion because players would think it's the very first game in the series. Tsc made sense because well it got a name that could be easily distinguished from just train simulator 202x.
