Longer Routes Accurate To Real Life

why can't we have really long routes, accurate to real life, with details, etc? something like an "expert route" like the DB BR 101 Expert, it would costs more (obviously) (and also would be work for a third party) but I would happily pay for a more realistic experience in terms of route lenght and scenery details

 

Because it would price out of most peoples price range.

A 300 mile route would cost 3 times as much to make so £75.

If these forums are anything to go by most think DLC is overpriced as it is, heaven help us if there is a £5 increase on a route.

Also DTG have to support the core and keep it running (not saying they have been doing a good job at it) and pay about 200 full time employees wages for the year.

So that is why they set limits to how much work is done time wise and for what they feel will sell the most based off of figures and surveys. And how many DLC they release in a year.

By pricing a route that high you are going to price out of most peoples price range and it would probably lose 50% of sales to a normal priced route.

And that is a risk they are not willing to take. So it is up to 3rd parties to take the risk, like the expert 101 was.

And do we really need a 3rd thread about longer routes in the last week.

 

When you say “expert route” do you mean more features?
A random event triggered. Being called by the signaller and told to wait at a signal until told to proceed (with authentic voice lines).
An accident occurring on the line, told to cancel your service and return to the depot.

Basically everything the game provides now, but with more polish and a higher level of detail.

 

more features and also more realistic lenght (the actual A and B points of the route; where it actually starts and where it actually ends)

 

yeah, forgot to mention that it would be work for a third party as DTG itself would hardly take on a job of this size and complexity level

 

Not to mention the increased system hit that keeping track of all the activity on a longer route would mean. As well, the longer playtime needed without having a reliable save.

 

do you mean "full" routes like the highspeed line Hannover-Würzburg of which we "only" got Kassel-Würzburg, or do you rather mean that the distances between stations are 1:1 to the real world?

 

both

 

well the latter is completely invalid then, because literally all routes are already in 1:1 size. please tell us where you got the idea from that they are not.

 

From my limited use of the TSW route editor, everything is laid out on a 1:1 basis as otherwise DEM data and mapping overlays would be useless.

My take on the OP is that routes do need to start and finish at logical terminating points, with just about the worst example being Peak Forest which started at the small wayside station of Ambergate instead of logically Derby and ended at Chinley instead of continuing on to Manchester.

Then we have Bernina which stops at the minor station of Ospizio instead of completing the run through to St Moritz completely omitting the major junction and depot at Pontresina.

 

More likely £90-100, which is obscene and anyone who would spend a hundred quid on any game, especially a DLC for one, should have financial decisions taken out of their hands

 

In a couple of years we'll be paying that anyway for the big games, we're only ~20 quid away now (see Mario Kart World et al)

 

Whist not wanting routes 3 times as long because I’d only end up saving it to another time anyway, I think there is a good case for making certain routes longer in the way they lengthened SEHS or the way Shap arrived. The criteria for me would be the type of train that run on the line more than anything else, a good example being WCMLS, I don’t know who made the decision to end it at MK when they’d also decided to add a 390 as dlc. That just doesn’t add up in my book. Another example would be extending GWE beyond Reading.
I think the community would have been willing to pay a bit extra for situations like that so they could really stretch the legs of the fast trains.
This would then benefit everybody without breaking the bank on all routes. I don’t think slower metro type services need extended routes in all honesty.

 

Routes tend to get longer, as soon as DTG is able to work more effectively. This takes time however, because we also insist on high quality. It all is matter of economy. In general, I am OK with the route length on some routes you drive 2 hours, which is more time than I in general have available to play.

 

Longer routes would great but I can see certain issues arising from them with the current state of the game.

Firstly, there are lots of people who don't want (or don't have the time) to drive for hours on end. With the poorly functioning and underdeveloped save system we currently have, long routes become undesirable to a big group of people. This absolutely needs addressing before long routes become a more commonplace. Having multiple save slots à la Euro Truck Sim and preventing things like PIS from breaking upon loading back into a run are a must.

Secondly there is the matter of how this would be achieved. Do DTG and other devs take longer to create bigger routes in general? Do they LIRR route and sell a "new" version of the route with additional mileage and stock or do what they did with SEHS by "extending" existing routes and replacing them in newer iterations of the game. If it's the latter you run into problems with whether or not it can be considered financially viable. I'd still love to see the ECML route extended up to York but I wouldn't want to pay £30 for that. In theory you could subsidise a project like that with a Class 91 Loco DLC or something for the route, but it'd probably end up having to be priced higher in order to cover that additional cost.

Finally, there's something to be said for doing separate routes that continue on from a shared point. This hasn't really been explored much yet in TSW beyond a few DLCs sharing a station that can be used to route hop to another. While it wouldn't be as good as just driving a whole route seamlessly, I think a slightly more robust route hop feature that takes me from a service in one route to the same service another could potentially be decent.

A hypothetical example would be that DTG makes a Reading to Bristol route. I could drive service 1C03 from Paddington to Reading on the current GWE route, then upon arrival at Reading get a prompt to continue my journey on 1C03 in the new Reading to Bristol route. This could be a way to mitigate technical and developmental issues caused worlds being too big. The thing is, even approaches like this present their own problems. It would mean that new routes would have to dated to the same period as the original route. You also would potentially run into timetabling issues between the two routes if you're delayed on your journey. Would the game ignore those differences and just set you up as if you'd started fresh from there or would it attempt to account for your delay and simulate the rest of the timetable with that in mind.

That was a lot of yap to basically just say, I do want longer routes and hope we can get them. I can just see some of the potential challenges that need to be accounted for.

 

yes, this is what I meant