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That’s it, no more, forget it, I’ve uninstalled Train Fever. Urban Games, you are the most pathetic bunch of amateurs I have so far come across in the gaming industry and you have taken my money under false pretences and wasted my time.
Why do I feel like this? Because this game is now in a worse state than it was TWO patches ago, demonstrating to me that the developers have no clue what theyre doing. Back in November, we had a buggy game that ran badly. Now we have a buggy game that runs badly and has added crap like the ‘main connection’ disaster and now crashes all the time as well! The latest patch is the last straw. THERE IS NO IMPROVEMENT IN PERFORMANCE. I have a system, that FAR outweighs their recommended specs and yet it starts to stutter and freeze after only about 30 years of gameplay. Also, they have no started adding and fixing things that should have been in the game from day one (doors opening on the TRACK SIDE was seemed ok for a ‘finished’ game for example), the problem is, there have no been about six months of public mods that won’t be compatible with such things and so pretty much EVERY copy of TF will be unstable and at risk of crashing unless it has NEVER seen a mod’ and is a totally fresh install. Games like this RELY on 3rd party addons, whether they be rolling stock or game file changes like the ‘cargo mod’ or ‘balance mod’ to keep them fresh, but if we have a new patch every month or so that will conflict with 3rd party mods then we can’t use them and that means the game is dead. Personally, I’ve had the game crash FIVE times in the last couple of days since trying the new patch and I’m sick and tired of having the time taken to layout a new route or something destroyed by some random .mdl file clashing with something.
The simple fact is, they came up with a good concept and a great way of implementing it HOWEVER, they thought “we can make some cash on Steam if we get this on sale now, after all it kinda works don’t it? Anyway, we can patch it later, lets get some cash!” This is the BIG problem with the gaming industry today, Urban Games are not alone in this, even the big names often release a game before it’s ready to meet a seasonal target for example. However, just because the like of EA think it’s ok to flip a finger as us poor consumers, doesn’t mean it’s ok.
This game is not even a Beta, it’s an ALPHA status game. What makes me mad is that it COULD be a fantastic game but the developers decided to try and make a quick buck and rush it out early. Urban Games, you’re a bunch of greedy amateurs and you deserve to have this fail big time.
Harsh? Yes. True? Yes.
This kind of quality level belongs to early access products and together with community it gets finalised. But unfortunately now it was sold on full price and considered being in condition for the release. Which is incorrect, even today it barely is releaseble product.
It has great concept and some great ideas but it’s just so clear that there is no proper plan, management and testing in place. At all. Small team is not an excuse. Being computer game is not an excuse. How pissed of your guys would be if your car would be as broken as this game is? When people pay for the product, it needs to be as good as it can, and not somethig what a bunch of beginners got together with bubblegum and hope to cash in. I know it’s hard to take this sort of criticism and time consuming, but you can barely see a comment from developers on other stuff than technical issues.
I haven’t played this for a week now and can’t force myself back to playing it anymore. It’s just too frustrating experience. Almost 300 hours in game does prove that i gave it a good go and managed also to enjoy it occasionally, but it’s far far from well thought finished products. I mean, game engine for train game which can’t even understand underground spaces and thus the tunnels have black curtain on them? And the curtain can not be built underground and hence the tunnel portals end up looking like shit. Just a small thing, but proves where the problems lie…
I would love to see train fever 2 with proper maps and all these issues sorted out. I’d be willing to test it for free as much as needed. But it would not get my money again until it would be proven to work as expected.
well yeah we all know it’s an unfinnished game. But as far as releasing an unfinnished game is concerned, AFAIK, the game has a publisher, which is different from the development team, which means that the devs don’t have a say in price, availability and release date for that matter the publisher does.
I’m surprised they’re releasing a free DLC, i honestly am, the way publishers act these days.
I mean yes, i totally agree, the game crashes, the game lags, and devs are trying to fix these things on a biweekly basis, and for some people, the patches have improved the game.
And stop generalising that patches don’t do anything good because that’s a big big lie.
I for example, used to have loads of crashes before the latest patch. Now, not as much anymore. The preformance has also improved. And even if i did have troubles with this game, i’d always provide detailed information of the situations, devs are quite active on the support forum which i appreciate and that’s how you solve issues with a game, if you’re more than 8 years old. You realise moaning and complaining gets you nowhere in life.
I know games that release with no multi-core support and later re-release for a full price again, only because their major feature update was multi-core support. TF re-wrote multi-threading in a patch. And we’re getting a free DLC in a few weeks.
I mean, for a game that gets so much criticizing as Train fever, I have to say it’s unfair just because there’s a plethora of worse games with much less whinging on their forums.
Yes it’s a free world you’re allowed to criticize but, we’ve all heard that before OP, seriously, good luck in finding a better modern 3D transport simulation game, I haven’t, if i did, i wouldn’t buy TF in the first place because I read the reviews and shortcommings of the game BEFORE i decided to buy it anyway.
At first I tried the game via an unorthodox way. It was lagging and crashing and spitting fire at me. 🙂 Then, when I got home from the middle of the ocean, even though the game was buggy like hell I decided to buy only to help the team uphill. I update each time and play the game every now and then to see what’s changed. In a week I’m off at sea again and I won’t be able to patch it or get the DLC, but I hope I’ll have a pleasant surprise when I’ll come home again.
Good luck, Urban Games!
PS: (To Simonmd and others) If you want the perfect game build it yourself!
There is no such thing as a perfect game, no sim, shooter, puzzle game or even this can ever be perfect, to suggest that’s what people like myself are asking for is daft. What we are asking for IS WHAT WE PAID OUR MONEY FOR, ie, a game that WORKS. That’s all, I’m not expecting Star Trek holodeck style complexity, what I want is to be able to build a line on a reasonable size map and then build another to interact with it without the game crashing every other session or simple be able to move across the flipping map without having time to go make a cup of coffee before the game finally unlocks itself from a self induced seizure.
I am from a generation that remembers the days before Steam, Origin, etc. I remember when you bought the game on a disk, in a box as a FINISHED and WORKING product. There were NO patches and if it didn’t work, you took it back to the shop and 9 times out of 10, they’d give you a refund or at least an exchange for something else. Now, what do we get? As I mentioned before, even the big names are happy to do it, look at the disaster that was SimCity (2013) until Maxis/EA finally gave in and patched it to make it usable.
Don’t get me wrong, online stores and availability of updates can bring benefits, you can argue that a game like this would never have even made it to publication without the likes of Steam being in existence but what I am angry about are two things,
1, the Developers for acting like they DONT GIVE A SHIT. What do we hear on these forums EVERY DAY? “it crashed” … “it grinds to a halt” … “this doesn’t work” …. etc, etc. and what do we get from the Devs? “hey guys, we’re going to add some shit that no one wanted and we’re going to bring out an American DLC so more shit wont work!”
2, People who go all gooey and stand up for them like they’re being picked on or something. It’s people like that who help and allow shoddy, lazy, unfinished games like this to exist. Those are the kind of gutless people who when asked by a waiter if his meal is ok, say “y yes, fine”, even when they know it’s well below par. People like that make it harder for the rest of us who actually care about how our money got wasted.
Well, experiences vary greatly. In fora like this one, it happens more or less the same as with surveys. When everything goes right, people usually don’t express it. When something goes wrong, people do complain. Therefore, it isn’t a good measure what you can read here.
In my particular case, game works like a charm, even with default configuration. True that I have it running in Linux on a fairly new computer.
Seeing what we have in the market, I can see no other 3D modern transport simulation game. Better this to nothing. There are things I don’t like, of course.
Regarding the dev team, they don’t pay attention to answering the community, but I can see that patches come on a regular basis and, try to follow more or less what is suggested by a majority, albeit not exactly: multicore, the dreadful “main connection” thing, although not eliminated or made configurable, at least has two patches.
All and all, I don’t regret to have bought the game at all.
Simonmd, your words are tooo harsh and discouraging.
Dont forget that this game is not dead. Devs are trying hard to fix the flaws, despite of which many of us find the game entertaining.
For the main connection feature, I dont like it as well, but we should be patient about it and give the devs time to find out the best solution.
Also donot forget that this is their first project, and I applaud them for it. There some few professional companies whic give a damn about the community. UIG entertainment have products like transport giant and farming giant which they promised to improve but now their community is completely abandoned by their devs. U can check it put at Steam.
At least the devs are trying hard and continuously improve the game. So plz don’t discourage them by such harshness.
Neither is the game dead. Nor is the DLC made entirely by the developer. They have asked the community – who seem to love the game – for help on some models. Because of that; it’s free.
Anyway. Sad to see players leave unhappy, regardless of their view on a game.
I dont think it’s dead. I runs just fine for me, but i did tinker with it a lot. there is a mod that allows me to reduce the overall population of the world by 50% and that has helped a lot. There are aloo a lot of small comunity patches, not to mention the mods that make it extremely interesting.
There are issues, i give you that we’re still waiting on the developers to fix, but that doesnt mean the game is dead dead. It like….. undead !
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Did you report all these crashes by the way, in the manner that you are meant to report crashes? I’ve never had a problem with the game crashing, personally. Nor with it running particularly poorly (I mean it certainly wasn’t good, but nor was it unplayable in any sense).
There are certainly minor issues I still have with the game and it was DEFINITELY unfinished at release, but the devs obviously have been working to try and fix it and I give a lot of credit for that alone. I have 110 hours in the game, they’ve mostly been fun hours and I’d definitely say that I got my 20 quid’s worth already. Plus I expect to get more as they release more (paid or free) content for the game.
Personnally, the only crash I experienced with TF was right after installing a graphic mod. I removed this specific mod immediately and never had any additionnal crash since.
Otherwise, the game is running smoothly on my computer, without noticable lag, except very late in the game when I have many train/bus/truck lines. This has been considerably reduced with the last patch.
I stopped playing the game after the Xmas patch (the one that introduced the Main connection feature). I have started again this week-end to test the last patch and the game looks playable again to me. I have played several hours on a new map without being blocked by the Main Connection issue.
There are still many things that can be improved in the game, but it’s not as bad or unplayable as written in some posts above. Looking at the continuous rate of patches, I’m confident that the game will continue to improve.
I’ve just read the the text attached to today’s build. Who said that the developpers were not listening to user’s complaints ?
The problem of the game industry is, that they use frameworks. Everyone thinks he is able to program. But most are only able to code. Bad thing is, that less people know how to use pointers in a right way. Hey Arrays and Lists are very easy to use. OK, if you want to write a small tool, this is true. But if a programm written like this becomes big, you will have an issue. Hey, computers today are fast. BUT, they get really slow, if they just are searching the adress in memory for the next task all the time. Of course, it is nicer in code, if you all name it. But to get it fast, point on it, and from one task to the next task, put a pointer. If you want to put add a task in between, move one pointer. It is a one time job. Rather than searching the task everytime agaiu.
First, I apologize for my English: I need to Google Translate.
In Italy there is a proverb that says: careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which warns about the need to be able to distinguish between the negative things (of which it is useful to get rid) and positive ones (who would be better to maintain and store).
It seems to me that the attitude of @simonmd is just that.
Obviously he has every reason … His analysis is 100% accurate. However, the result of all these reasons leads him to “kill the baby.”
I played a Train Fever for more than 100 hours and many times I have been tempted to install this or that mod. But I did not!
Why? The reason is simple and intuitive: I knew in fact that installing the mods I would risk the stability of the game when they inevitably would come other patches. And in fact I have never had any crashes.
And since I’m not a computer expert I preferred to avoid trouble.
But the mods are needed to improve and make Train Fever more playable and fun, you say.
It is true! But I think there is a way out. Should be the same developers Urban Games, after doing a poll on the official forum of the game, to implement the mods and mod-packs the most successful in the next patch. In this way they and only they will solve the problems of compatibility between the mods and the game.
Then must be left to the players, using a key option, the possibility to activate the mod in the game.
For example, suppose that the Urban Games decide to implement in the game Cargo Mod of Gwinda … I must be able to choose whether to activate the complex industrial chain that offers the mod or to continue with the “vanilla” industrial chain.
I think that a first step at the Urban Games are already doing with the USA DLC, but I also think that this patch is dictated by commercial reasons (US market).
Ciao
Paolo (compay59)
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