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Maybe one of the reasons it’s been so quiet round here lately is the recent launch of Cities Skylines. I wonder if Urban Games have been watching and realised how amateur they look against how well done a proper developer like Paradox has done things?
I have to say, the launch was superb. The vibe and excitement on Steam was intense and there was always a member of the Dev’ team to answer any questions. The game itself was released early and is SUPERB, finally a true successor to SimCity 4 and when it launched, it WORKED with only minor bugs reported, most of which can be fixed in one patch or modded by the community. Overall, it’s a finished game and Urban Games would be wise to see how its done properly. Oh and before any of you fanboys cry ‘not fair, UG are small’, Paradox only had 9 people working on this and its widely acclaimed as the best urban sim game EVER.
Train Fever is still the better game for a rail enthusiast but Cities Skylines proves what CAN be done. I currently have a city that has over 70,000 simulated people, along with cars, buses, trains, subways, aircraft, trucks, etc, etc. and it runs smooth as silk. I mean it, 70k people and a huge city and im still getting over 30fps!!
This amateur pile of crap still stutters on my system with a 3.9ghz CPU and 16gb of ram when you have a town with a few HUNDRED people in it!! Yes I know, the LOD is far lower in a big city sim than it is on TF but its the core calculations that count and 70,000 vs about 10k maybe on an entire map is one hell of a difference and Skylines is still smooth!
@Cities Skylines
Lol the Game is rated “Pegi 7” the same as the grafik looks like. From the gameplay possibilities it is 15 Years behind what you had in good old gamer days.
One major difference that we should not forget about Cities Skylines is that it’s not their first game. The game is coming after Cities in Motion 1 and 2. I haven’t played CiM2 but I used to play to CiM1 and it was crappy as hell.
All we can wish to Urban Game is to have the same kind of approach than Paradox and have TF evolve over time to something as well finished as Cities Skylines, with tons of attention to details and no major bugs registered upon release of the game (something EA should also look at if they want to release another SimCity in the future).
I think it is unfair to compare any two games. There are several games which feel complete than train fever. At the same time there are thousands of games made by professional companies which dont match train fever.
However devs can learn from how companies like paradox regarding how they interact with members and further improve their game
Just to counter, two facts: I think that a major part of the game engine is recycled from the CiM series (it is not a game completely built form scratch) and, a small detail that spoils part of the initial game success: lack of autosave feature…
Some people also complain that after a few hours of game play, it gets somewhat plain and boring. But I guess that this depends on people’s likes.
Train Fever is not a bad product. There are performance problems and a few bad design/gameplay choices. However it is still one of the best train/transport games. Railroad Tycoons and Transport Tycoon (in part) might have better gameplay, but are now graphically outdated. Railroads was interesting, but it was even more bugged than TF and developers did not support it.
I think that what I regret the most about Urban Games (which by the way are to be applauded for the product they made and their ongoing support with many patches [I know that they should have released a more finished product, but at least they are patching it]) are that
1) many probably not so difficult modifications that would improve gameplay are not done (e.g. street over rail, X crossing, slower pace of time, articulated industry, editable maps, different “weight” of passenger and cargo wagons … there even is a post with hundreds of suggestions)
2) developers do not seem to care responding to these posts (even knowing that they plan to work – or not – on some elements would be better than indifference).
So please developers, show us that you care about our remarks and please try to benefit from them to improve the game.
Why are you comparing a City Building Game with a Transport Tycoon game they are completely separate.
Agreed.
It’s hard to compare a city-builder and one that focuses on transport. Two different focuses.I agree completely. The game is reallyinteresting vut it would have been better if devs concentrate on fixing minor issues and replying to threads.
Two different focuses, yes … but also many similarities in the gameplay/interface.
I have been playing with City Skylines for the past 3 evenings, and there are some very interesting features that I would really like to have while playing Train Fever :
– CS allows you to upgrade/downgrade any road without limitation. If you put a larger road, the surrounding houses are destroyed, but rebuilt automatically
– CS allows you to destroy houses/buildings to lay out new roads/rail with one click. It’s much user-friendlier than in TF.
– CS comes with zero “main connection” restriction. You can even destroy the main highway connecting your city to the outside world. If you don’t rebuild it, your city does not expand properly … but at least you are able to improve the roads or destroy/rebuild everything in an easy way that TF player can only dream of
– Creating new transportation lines is 100x easier in CS than TF (of course, with much less options as the game focus is not on precise transportation plans)
– Generally speaking, the layout of any new road/zone/train/metro/bridge is 10000x easier in CS than in TF. You don’t get blocked every 5 minutes because of terrain elevation, rail/road crossings. You don’t loose millions of cash trying to figure out how to build a goddamn bridge over a small river.
Train Fever is certainly the nicest transport tycoon I’ve every played, and one of the best. I really appreciate the way UG tries to improve the game over time, the free DLC, the modding community …
… but Cities Skylines is by far the best city-builder ever made, with a sense of user friendliness that send TF back 10 years in the past.
I don’t say this to criticize TF or UG. I’ve really enjoyed playing TF, and I will certainly continue to do so in the future (when I’ll switch back to TF after hours on CS 🙂 … but CS is certainly the best example of what kind of improvements should be done to TF or any futur TF2 to raise TF level from “a nice good transport tycoon-type game” to “the best transport-tycoon game ever” 🙂
Well.
If you have ever played CIM2 at release, it was crappy, not better than when TF released, then Paradox polished the game and renamed it Cities Skyline.
If you look at into the forum of CIM2, lots of players feel like they were betrayed, because just some months after the release of CIM2, there was no more pathes fixes new functions, and only DLCs..
I hope the devs of tf won’t go this way.
Bollocks. Skylines has nothing to do with CIM2, completely different game and it’s not a “polished version”.
What was so bad on Cim2? I’ve got it from the day one and it’s always been better than TF as a product. It wasn’t perfect, but far from this badly planned and executed alpha game.
Why so much hate?
It’s not really that fair to compare these two games. Cities Skylines is not the first game Colossal Order has made, I’m sure they’ve learned lots from their previous titles. For such a small team I think UG has made good work sofar, I know how much work it is every day.
I do agree though that the support could be better here, sometimes even few words to support threads would show you guys are present and take care of the people who plays the game. It does require time also of course.
Anyhoos, I still enjoy the game even it has few issues. I’m looking forward how the game develops in the future
I wouldn’t call TF a “badly planned and alpha game”. It far from perfect and need some polishing, but it still remains a very enjoyable train-builder/management game. I don’t regret any cent I’ve spent to purchase this game, and I’m once again expressing my support to Urban Games for all the efforts and patches to improve TF.
The comparison I’m doing with Cities Skyline is to see how Train Fever could evolve over time, through patches or for the next version, not to do a direct comparison to see which game is better 😉
It’s not hate. It’s is strongly expressed caring which comes from frustration. Simonmd also said the same thing long time ago. This game has so huge potential that it just frustrates the hell out of me to see all this stupid things in it which aren’t anything else than half arsed design things by people who are not experienced enough and didn’t ask help from the people who know how to do these things.
– Scroll bars don’t scroll, and are barely visible to indicate there is something further down. So many people didn’t realize that you actually have 6 different roads in this game before reading about it on the forums.
– Line update button does exactly the same thing as clicking the line name does. Was it really so difficult to program it to open the replace vehice tab directly?
– Pop up video windows which tell you about old vehicles can’t be disabled and they grind the game to halt when dozens of them ar about to pop up. Why now have a status bar at the bottom which tells you all about these things.
– New vehicle annoucnements aren’t standard size windows, and quickly closing them is not possible as the X is all over the place and not on same location all the time. Same happen on a vehicle list at the depot when you sell several vehicles. Sell X jumps every time one line disappears.
– Opening windows, lines, vehicle, depot, buy vehicle, etc, throws windows all over the screen and not next to the mouse cursor. And even if you scroll the screen to the actual location of that vehicle or line, this pop up doesn’t move.
– If the line pop up is too close to the edge of the screen and you press replace vehice tab, it expands the pop up window out from the screen.
And so, so many other similiar issues in everything in this game. Like you see it’s not much, and it could have all been sorted with just a little bit of thought and knowledge about UI but even after several updates, nothing has been done to address this kind of issues.
And just one thing about patches. It’s not great to have patches every 2 weeks or month. They should not be needed in the first place. In any game, it’s the lazy ass developers and rushing publishers who release unfinished items as with Internet it’s so easy to patch later on. Before online time, games were well finished and occasionally there was a bug or two but nothing was clearly unfinished. In this game, this is very much in alpha stage where the consept is laid out, and NOW would start the polishing work to get a proper beta out to do actual testing and then off to release. Now we all are doing the testing after paying for the product and developers don’t even bother replying to bug reports and complaints about bad UI. Those are the things why beta is done in the first place. Just makes you wonder what actually happened in the beta testing of this game last summer.
But for the record, not even Cities:Skyliens get a clean start. There is quite a few small issues which need sorting out BUT unlike this game, devs actually are on it and there is nothing as game breaking and bad in it as there is in TF.
Despite of all this, i’ve had my moneys worth of time on this game so far but i can’t see myself playing it anymore. USA DLC was ok for couple of games but it is so unbalanced that it’s more annoying than fun to play it. IF devs would actually respond here and have a discussion with people, i would spend happily more money with them, either on paid DLC for this game or TF2. If they keep it on this level like they do now, they can Foxtrot Oscar.
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