Beta game-play videos

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Beta testers, YouTubers and press have published several videos showing game-play of the current beta version. Please find below a selection of such videos, sorted by language and date. This is just an overview, more videos can easily be found on YouTube etc.

It’s still a beta version, and there are major improvements still in the pipeline, but we are happy that the game was received very well so far. We look forward to releasing the game very soon (September 4)!

English:

August 22:



August 19:

German:

August 18:

August 18:

August 16:

August 4:

Italian:

August 24:

31 thoughts on “Beta game-play videos”

  1. Hey devs, I need access to the beta as I can’t wait until september 4. If I won’t receive it I will probably go mad and end up in psychiatrist hospital!!! 😀

  4. Do steam have an other release date than the 4th? At steam it says the 5th september and not 4th september as writen in this post.

    • No. There is only one release date (September 4). However, at the moment it is not correctly set on Steam. It’s set to 09/04/14 17:00 PDT, which is actually September 5 in Europe.

      We will change this very soon so that the release date is September 4 in Europe as well.

      • It’d be great if you just turn on early access so everyone who pre-ordered can start plying earlier. Any reason not to do this?

      • when exactly is releas now? Steam says at 5.9 about 3 clock in the morning (Swiss time)

        • Steam reckons 16 hours from now, which works out to 8am UTC (9am BST)

          Rather wishing it was tonight, as I have a free evening.

  5. Yeah, it would be great if the beta became opt-in-able once you’ve preordered on Steam… obviously with lots of “NOT representitive of the final game!” caveats 😛

    Otherwise, *sigh* guess I’ll just have to wait until next Thursday…

    Also, is it just me, or do all the lets-players so far seem not to consider attempting to carefully plan out a train route to smoothly climb the contours of the hills? They all seem to get slightly confused by the gradient system, and just end up bulldozing clean through all the low-lying foothills, and avoiding the steeper areas altogether.

    I wonder if it wouldn’t help to have the “sun” at a lower angle, so the shading is more pronounced on the hills… it currently is sufficiently uniform as to make the terrain all look deceptively flat, even though it obviously isn’t.

    • It also seems that many people don’t tend to their networks properly like they should. They often run too many or too few vehicles on lines that causes problems or could generate much more profit. Or design things in ways that cost so much when you could spend much less.They manage to cause gridlocks when it is pretty obvious that will end up like this. It is so painfull to watch, if only I could do all that stuff myself. Arrrgh!!!

    • I’ve seen many titles which took pre-orders on Steam, also let their customers have an early access to the beta. I wonder why this game keeps it an totally closed one…
      The only people playing now are the kickstart funders and the guys who were lucky enough to send the application form for the beta tester recruitment in time, right?

    • I thought the same when I watched some of the videos last weekend. Obvoiusly the mountain was too steep, then it simply is not possible to make a straight track between two cities, but one has to look how to make the path not too slow for the trains and not too expensive in building it. :O)
      It would be great to see more videos that show the current game functions in detail and are explaining these, so that one can learn how to play the Game correctly. And then, next week… 😉

  8. I’ve watched some videos yesterday evening and while I have to say that I am very impressed with the way the game looks, I also noticed there a loads of improvements possible. I fully realise that the video show a beta version and that things can be changed before release or after it using patches, but still feel the need to mention a couple of points I noticed.

    In one of the vids the camera is put under water and then you see nothing. No underwater life (okay, the game isn’t about that) and not water surface either. Small detail and of course not a main goal for the game, but all these small details do add to the experience.
    Another thing I noticed was the way cars take a corner as if they are on rails.
    I saw trams driving with a an electric guide on their roof, while there weren’t any catenaries along the track, looks very weird.
    Many vids also showed a lot of stuttering and while this can be caused by pc’s not being up to the required standard and/or the game having to be optimized, it doesn’t look good when trying to sell a game.
    Building tracks also seem to have issues when trying to cross nodes and I often saw people trying to lay track and got into a series of messages about it not being able to build.
    This might be because they aren’t doing it the right way, but it doesn’t make me feel comfortable to buy a game ‘having such issues’.
    Money seems to be another issue, while building seems to cost an aweful lot, the profits seems to be low, which makes players having to loan more and more and more, until they can’t loan anymore.

    As said, not trying to be negative and fully realizing the vids are made with a beta version.

    • Yeah, well. Complaining about a lack of water fauna in a transport/biz tycoon game is really a bit of a stretch. Agree with the stuttering though, I hope that’ll improve on retail. As for money: There are various level of difficulty, I assume the difference there is mostly down to money. Quite frankly, most of the recent tycoon games were awfully easy, so personally I’m looking forward to a bit of a challenge.

      • The water thing is indeed a very minor issue, but I also found in a video that passengers are entering a train, while they aren’t in front of any wagons. They just pop into the train from anywhere on the platform. Same thing with them coming out of a train. From one point a whole series of people is coming out of the train and all go the same route after that. Of course you can say those are minor details as well, but how hard can it be to simulate a normal boarding and offloading of a train? Them popping in at some point is understandable, but boarding a train from the other end of the platform, just looks too weird. At least make them walk to a wagon.

  9. Looks really cool. Can’t wait for sept 11 the Linux version. 🙂 Exciting times for not just us but especially you guys. 🙂

  10. I’ve noticed a couple of posts, and in a couple of vids, people suggesting that things like the harsh economy, and the difficult terrain, are things that will hopefully get fixed after the beta.
    Don’t do it! The terrain, and your bank balance are your main adversaries in a game like this… I especially hope they don’t “fix” the difficulty of building a train line up the side of a mountain. I’ve been waiting years for a game like this – one that actually poses a real challenge, and actually takes a little consideration and engineering to pull things off.
    The only thing I wonder from looking at videos, is if we couldn’t do with a little more explicit control over gradients and spline start-end points… and maybe to ability to plan multi-segment routes before committing to build. Some of us can handle that sort of thing… open up the complex engineering tools – as an optional “advanced” building mode perhaps?

    • It does seem quite straightforward to me, terrain doesn’t seem too difficult only to the point where one may need to spend more, or just plan a bit more carefully, the economy seems balanced, one can’t just build the whole map from the start, you expand as you get more money. Making profitable lines looks pretty easy, common sense perhaps, but it’s true I have a bit of experience with RT3 which is a similar system, just weirder, harder to understand 🙂

      Yea I’d be disappointed to have things too easy from the start! 🙂

      • I’m interested to see how consistently challenging the “Hard” difficulty mode is… TTD had a tendency to end up with you earning near-limitless mountains of cash eventually, no matter how difficult the start was. I hope they’ve managed to balance the economy well enough that you still have to play with care and attention in the late-game.

        I would also welcome a “Seriously Mountainous” terrain option. Hilly looks good, but I always tend to prefer to play these kind of games battling against a harsh unforgiving world, rather than having masses of open space to create a vast sprawling network wherever I like.
        Plus, mountains look so much more appealing than flat boring plains. Especially when you weave a railway around them 🙂

  11. Great ideas
    Great controls
    Great user interface
    Great maths behind the scene
    Economy would need some polishing

    Graphic engine is a disaster to this game. I dont think the game could gather an attention when it looks like this. I know that you are in the beta. But, … rather wait a change the graphic engine than throw alll to the trash bin. Mybe licencing Unreal or CryEngine for 5percent? Both engines has similar offer for small studious. Your revenue will bring a LOT of more people and sales than you spend on the engine.

    Regards,
    gG

    • Licensing a 3rd party engine doesn’t magically make a game look pretty. The look of a game has far more down to the content generated for it than the engine it uses to put it on the screen.

      Certain elements of Train Fever look beautiful as they are. The only side that I find somewhat lacking visually is how sparse the landscape looks between cities. The occasional forest looks lovely, but most of the landscape is just bare, smooth swathes of perfect default grass texture, with some randomly generated fields scattered on top.

      To really look better, I reckon it would require working features into the landscape more. Having dirt-tracks, roads, and hedges integrate with the procedurally generated fields, and occasional scattered farms and dwellings, to make it look more like a real-world rural landscape.

      I think that would go a lot further towards making it look better than porting it from a specifically tailored custom-made game engine into an entirely unsuitable generic FPS-centric game engine.

      • Some video here has shown big cities. About 5thousand ppl. It was not playable even on above average PC. The engine is not only about graphich effects. The Engine midleware is about optimizations. Setting up processes, action, events, sounds, …. . Small studio dont have money to support 12 research/development guys who brings better one occlusion light effect in a month.

        Check what new Unreal is able to support. Anything from 2D arcade, strategy game, FPS shooter, car racing, … anything.

        Landscape is empty, that’s true. Actual engine is not optimized enough to show more details, that’s true.

        I see only ways:
        1. we can say that empty landscape is intended.
        2. devs fill up landscape, and say that our PCs are too weak
        3. we can pray that engine programers will do a miracle in a month. Haleluuja.
        4. change the engine

  12. First of all great job Urban Games!!!!
    Unfortunately i feel that the game will be criticized because of the high expectations of some people .. but for those who will have in mind the fact that the dev team is composed by 3 people !! how much of a masterpiece of a game u want ? especially since this game is their debut game. I for one am excited for the chance to play a modern TTD the game won’t be polished right away again the manpower is too small for that , they even support modding for it so they can just concentrate patching and improving the game at the moment thus giving the game more lifespan. This is a chance for them to prove that they can to something right and they will learn from mistakes like all(most) people.Look at big companies where they have 100dev team and they let us down every year and then cry about every little thing here.
    I think that if the game will be enough succesfull and they gather more talented people in their team to lessen the workload and expect in 3-4 years a sequel that will be much better than this one.

    PS @gGeorg : maybe Unreal engine if it was choice (not really) but cryengine is resource demanding and very unsuitable for this type of game.

    • A big “Thank You” to the developers! Thanks for bringing us this game! Keep the passion for the Game, share the tech details about how to mod and continue development and improvement after the release!

      A lot of things is a matter of personal taste, but I like what I see! It was really about time in the transportation simulation genre to have a new game like Train Fever. I cannot wait to play it myself!

      Constructive criticism is a positive thing if it is shared in a polite and respectful way. And if someone is displeased – nowadays there are many ways where one can program a game and show that he can do it better. The expectations are high, of course. Therefore my respect to the Train Fever Team that they accepted the challenge and created Train Fever!

      I think the release is not the end, but only the beginning! :O)

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