I was reasonably happy with TSW’s business model until their last round of price hikes. I realize that the UK is has been hit really bad by inflation, so if they’ve been giving their employees enough to keep up, maybe the new prices are reasonable. But $40 for a route add-on is just way too much for me. That’s moving it from the price of an expensive add-on to basically the cost of a new game. I think they need to rethink those new prices.
They’ve also been re-releasing old content at the new prices & with limited changes. Plus many of the US assets being sold are not great quality, depending on the developer.
Other games (Run 8, Trainz Railroad Simulator, etc) have their own plusses and minuses. There’s only so much competition and development in the space since the market isn’t huge.
Squirrel’s started doing some videos on Derail Valley again, which has really given me an itch to play. I’m going to try to hold out for the Simulator release though.
Yeah, I’m definitely holding off on Derail Valley - it’s a no-brainer to wait unless you feel the release is going to be delayed (which could happen!). Thanks for the heads up on the Squirrel vids, I’ll check them out.
I put 40 hours into it last time round, so I don’t know if I’ll go back to it straight away upon release tbh.
So far at least the videos are very much introductory ones, so possibly worth skipping if you’re already familiar with the game.
Ah, probably a skip then, thanks. I did watch most of his older ones already.
The early-access Diesel Railcar Simulator 30% off till Jun 13.
I’ve had this on my wishlist for a while and haven’t seen it on sale till now. At the same time, I’m not sure I really want to get it as I believe I was unduly influenced by a nostalgic Tim Stone article yearning for Cold War Britain ;)
Still, it’s supposed to be really good; might pick it up.
If you do please report back, it looks intriguing.
So I got it and put about an hour into it. I should say that I’m not a train sim guy so excuse the lack of knowledge here. Also, the depth of the gameplay was just starting to reveal itself after that hour so I might have some stuff wrong which shows up later. I only tried the Simple controls, which are literally accelerate and decelerate :)
There are 15 different trains to try but I dunno how different they all are - I tried two at random and they were very different, but a lot of them are called Mark 1, Mark 2 etc so they may be pretty similar, I dunno.
Physics-wise, there’s good sway to the train, but I don’t think there’s wheel slippage. The Help was telling me to apply max power from standing to take off from a station, for example, rather than accelerating gradually (it could be that this is fine for these little railcars in real life). Sounds are really good.
The trains I tried had manual gears, so just observing what was happening while I used the simple controls, it seems like you accelerate +3 notches (left handle below), then when the RPMs hit a certain point, you drop it down to neutral, and switch up a gear (right handle), and repeat that process that until you’re in fourth gear. Keeping an eye out for signals and speed limits of course; it probably takes a little bit of skill to master. Shifting down from top gear should be fun when there’s a 20mph zone coming up and you’re barreling along at 60.
There are assists on the GUI to help, and you can turn these off. Being 60s Britain, there is no indicator on the track to warn you that a speed limit is coming up, so if you turn off all aids, you’ll have to memorise the route’s landmarks to know when the signal is coming. You need to be at the correct speed before the back of the train passes the signal or you get dinged, I think. You can’t move around in the cab but there are loads of camera angles.
The route I tried over the hour went on and on, I never reached the end. I was hitting most platforms ahead of time by the end of that, but heavily reliant on the GUI and not what was outside in front of me, so there’s a reasonable learning curve that’s apparent early on. It’s like that whole sim thing where you’re trying to process too much info at once and freeze up, but you can see how you’d get comfortable with it. There also seems to a bit of working around other trains on the line (see below), but you have no control of signals or anything yourself, I don’t think.
It also supports various controllers - I activated my T1600M throttle in there no problem, though I couldn’t immediately see a way to use the slider on the throttle, I just ended up mapping one of the hats to forward and reverse - maybe it didn’t allow it while using simple controls. Hopefully it’s an option but potentially may not be with the throttle on the train working on a notch system.
I dunno, for me personally I don’t think I’m a fan of that type of train sim gameplay which involves getting to a platform on time, but I quite enjoyed it here. It helps that it’s all very English and charming, and if I have to get to Little Dorking at 1.12pm, then by god I’m going to do it :)
Oh, and expect some fiddling with the graphics settings to get something you can tolerate. It’s not great looking.
That looks great, thank you!
French TGV is available for free in both TrainSimWorld and Train Simulator but must be downloaded by June 2nd.
Dovetail Games was recently bought out by a French company and in celebration the French TGV is temporarily being given away for free.
I’ve played the TSW version and it’s fun. Mostly it consists of going very fast watching the scenery for the better part of an hour. There are only three stations total (including the start and end station) and there is a bit of a tricky part where you have to change from the Mediterranean voltage section of the track to the regular TGV voltage by lowing the Pantograph in the middle of a tunnel. Also it’s pretty easy to start going to fast when going down a minor grade (at one point I was making some screenshots for a friend and discovered after getting the shots lined up and taken that I was way, way over the 320km/h / 200mph limit and heavily in the red).
from the Steam page:
Four British Railways diesel railcar classes with manual gearboxes: 112, 117, 122 and 126
These will all be pretty similar. They are typical multiple units of the era, just for moving people around. There are loads of different variations, I don’t really have any insight into why :)
Class 127 railcar with torque converters (no need to change gears)
As above but no gears I guess!
Locomotives: Classes 03, 37 and 40
37 and 40 will be similar, the 37 is still in use to this day, proper workhorse. Both of these can do passenger or freight. 03 is a shunter.
Yeah, that makes sense! All the train silhouettes on the selection menu looked very similar.
Haven’t got back to it properly yet - I had one run where I was held up at a signal for 5 mins waiting for an express to go through, then failed the scenario by 5 mins :) It’s a good game; not sure whether it has enough gameplay hooks for me (Derail Valley has the whole cargo management aspect) but I believe there are missions to go retrieve breakdowns etc. so I will check those out.
Looking good! It has had quite a price hike recently; I dunno if I’d have tried it out if it was this price.
New loco in Derail Valley Simulator:
Nice! I like that it bridges the gap somewhat between the two existing diesels. And I watched another video of his which showed the overhauls to those engines - looks like that climb out of Harbor is going to be even more tense :)
I haven’t seen anything about changing the mission structure (my personal view is that you run out of steam a bit with the missions by the time you get to the upgraded locos) but I did find a page about their future plans which says the next update will address more variety, add towns and depots, and include a major map overhaul including adding sidings/double tracks for some future update which adds AI trains. It looks like a massive amount of work so who knows when/if we will see it, but happy to see it’s on the roadmap at least:
Today’s the day!
Start your engines!*
- I originally had a screenshot of three locos lined up in a garage, so the caption made more sense, but then came across this pic in my screenshots folder.
cheap way to try out TSW.