Hi, I’ve finally got around to playing the East Coastway, and it’s certainly my favourite route so far. Particularly enjoyable is the fact that the frequency of services make this route feel alive and enjoyable to free roam, especially compared to the Great Western express where free roam simply isn’t viable with such little traffic. This problem is even worse with the LIRR and NEC which must be running in game at what seems like 10% of real life traffic. Having added portals to enable Brighton/ Seafood to Victoria trains to come and go on ECW, surely this could be done to legacy routes to massively overhaul the number of AI services. I actually spent some time on the testing team with Dovetail over a few summers years ago now. In my final summer, very early development had begun on what would become TSW and I was tasked with creating track assets that could be placed into unreal engine 4 for demo purposes. I say this because it’s given me an understanding of the complexity and challenge in developing TSW, something I think a lot of the requesters do not realise with the level of their expectations. Given this, I wanted to make a tiered suggestion list, incrementally more challenging developmentally, with exclusive focus on free roam, given that this is classed as a major selling point of the game but has quite frankly has been neglected since release. Most of these will be referenced with regard to the ECW, since it’s currently the most viable to free roam. Firstly, adding paper timetables on display at stations, obviously reflecting the AI timetable operating, these would be displayed like the collectible maps, though not as collectibles, massively helping you to gauge your wait time at stations. I recently found myself free roaming at Darlington with no clue when, or if the next departure would be.This could be expanded by giving the player a paper timetable to bring up with a hotkey, showing all the daily trains and timings between Brighton and Ore for example, as real TOCs produce. Secondly, enabling the LED displays at stations, not with the repeating message we see on Train Simulator, but with the true to timetable upcoming train informations. Seeing the small display listing the 1st, 2nd and 3rd departures with their timings and the slow scrolling of the first departures calling points would go a long way to giving that differentiations from Train Simulators experience that so many people are asking for. Finally, as many people have already requested, station/train announcements. I find it disappointing that onboard announcements are not already in the game. Inspiration could be taken from the WOS franchise, where the automatic Ann is fully player functional in a game nearly 10 years older than TSW. This would again go a long way in differentiating this game from the more arcade feel of Train Simulator. In terms of station announcements perhaps this could be achieved with a trigger point a set distance from the station to begin the ‘the train now approaching is the...” or “the approaching train does not stop at this station.” With the doors opening being another trigger point for the repeated announcement. I certainly would hope to see at least the service timetables implemented, though I personally don’t feel that the following points go beyond what was and is expected of a game that promises so much. Cheers guys, looking forward to a 313
