On trying a FromSoft game, one group of people will see a challenge in the punishing difficulty and freedom in the lack of direction and hand-holding. They will meet the challenges solo through effort and learning, maybe supplemented by online guidance, and/or through jolly cooperation with others in person. If and when they emerge victorious, some will seek further challenge by running different builds, or by trying to beat the game while staying at character level 1, or naked with fists only, or with a Guitar Hero or Rock Band controller, or with their feet using a dance pad controller. A second group will decide this kind of thing doesn't interest them, maybe because it's not their style or they're just not wired for it, and move on to another game that is their style. A third group will rage at the game and Fromsoft, calling its difficulty artificial and unfair, its combat too slow or too fast, its bosses and/or boss runbacks too hard, ignoring that people beat the game at character level 1, or naked with fists only, or with ridiculous controllers. Two of these three groups will enjoy themselves. On trying the TSW editor, one group of people will see a challenge in the difficulty and freedom in the lack of direction and hand-holding. They will meet the challenges solo through effort and learning, maybe supplemented by guidance from DTG when it arrives or from others online, and/or through jolly cooperation with others in person. If and when they emerge victorious at their chosen task, they may seek further challenge by developing or branching out into other skills outside their box, be it timetable design, art and environment, deeper dives into locomotive mechanics, or what have you. A second group will decide this kind of thing doesn't interest them, maybe because it's not their style or they're just not wired for it, and stick with TSW as a player. Maybe they'll also decide they want to try developing something else in a user-friendlier environment. A third group will rage at the editor and DTG, calling its difficulty unnecessary and unfair, insisting the lack of guidance and hand-holding is failure rather than freedom, ignoring that people do succeed at this and can even make a good living if they work hard and become skilled enough. Two of these three groups will enjoy themselves.
I played Elden Ring near 3 times (killing allmost everything) and I'm waiting for the DLC. I loved it. The architecture, the ambient, the challenge (lost count of the deaths with the Fire Giant) I'm in the first group But TSW4 editor cannot be an Elden Ring. In Elden Ring you can skip certain areas, if they are to difficult, power up and come back later. With TSW4 you cannot place tracks before the terrain or place trains without tracks. The inability to load a route because the main .umap file is modified in some strange way and, the next time you try to start your route, it does not show in the editor. This is not a challenge, this is a bug. So, ok, there is fun in doing difficult things, but there as to be a reward at the end.
Not really sure what the point of the OP is, other than to humiliate those of us who had been looking forward to the editor, want to use the editor, but instead have been confronted by a wall as high as the one made of ice in Westeros with no map to help us climb it. I have experience building or trying to build routes in most of the sims over the last 25 years. Well apart from BVE as hand coding the route did not appeal. Even DRS I only paused because it’s largely pointless until we can import real world data, but everything else is quite straightforward. I was one of the pioneer route builders in MSTS, but at least Kuju gave us an incomplete manual to get started. This is a raw, unrefined developer’s utility. It is like going into a garage with basic mechanical knowledge, no Haynes manual and being told to strip an engine down and put it back together. Blindfolded. We like that DTG have given us the tool but in all honesty I would rather have waited another three or six months while it was tidied up and made more user friendly and some basic instructions and workflow written down. There are a lot of talented people out here, all of us with ideas for routes that otherwise wouldn’t have a cat in hells chance of getting built which, from where I see the state of this thing, seem likely to stay that way.
