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Train Fever is a fantastic prototype of a game. I wouldn’t exactly call it “finished”, or even close to that. I find that more often than necessary, I don’t play the game but fight against the game’s various odd design decisions, missing features, and general quirks. There is a lot to be done yet. Granted, the basic stuff is there and works – with the exception of the industry part, which could be fleshed out a lot more. But in most areas, the game stops at laying the groundwork, and misses the refinement.
That may sound more negative than needs be, but that talk about a TF2 has me worried quite a bit. The team behind the game is tiny, so I doubt that working on two titles at once will be possible. I’m quite willing to forgive the current unfinished state of the game if I can expect that it will be worked on and improved substantially during the next months.
Now, stating that “we’re considering a sequel” and actually starting working on one, are two entirely different things. Let’s see what the plans are.
I stopped playing because well.. i am missing logic in the game. Randomly placed sawmills and refineries (generally speaking: typical ‘city’ industries) should have been placed in cities. And yes, the missing features of laying ‘road over rail’, x-crossings and way-points are having a huge impact on that decision.
The game has a lot of potential but for now i really feel i have to wait to long for the map to load and ‘play’ with broken things. I just don’t like it anymore. there’s just to much illogical stuff going on. They implemented a gui ‘window’ snap feature (try it, they will snap to each-other).. but forgot to implement a snap feature for train stations to fit on existing railway tracks or stations. Whats more important?
Please work on 1 or 2 things at a time. For example, implementing waypoints will bring me back for sure. Do not work on 60 features at the same time because then, by the time the patch comes out i probably forgot about the game… And i’m not alone. Update the game every week with a new little feature or little change that keep existing players attached to the game.
The developers are already working on a lot of issues. As top priority improving the game performance, bug hunting and also making that the game shall use for its calculations multiple CPU cores. These issues shall be fixed as soon as possible, the developers said if all goes well at the end of this month. Planned for the next month are an improved game tutorial and improved mod features too, meaning that until now hard coded parameters shall become soft coded, placed in open configuration files. Regarding game modding the developers are also working to implant vehicle and game map editor tools. Other issues that have a priority are the waypoint feature, as the developers said to determine what specific tracks a line must use. Further improved the map textures and the issue that you can’t lay roads over rail tracks when building a level crossing shall be fixed and the cars driving through trains issue will be fixed too. Road traffic signs and traffic lights shall be implanted, and longer freight chains too.
See in German: http://www.gamestar.de/spiele/train-fever/artikel/train_fever,51449,3078239.html
All those future features do not seem like a reason for be to continue playing this game day in and day out, even on hard =\. I would rather goods be split into different type of goods and towns growing by supplying all goods to it. And of course trains using multiple stations not a way-point “hotfix”.
For the more advanced getting started guide, I think most of the people who would be playing by the time that is made all comes out will not be interested and they’ll only have the hardcore fans left >_<.
I complete agree with Nique, however im still playing because of the fact that I have never reached the “electrical era” (because something with free time).
Its very illogical, the fact that industries are not in cities doesn’t really bother me, but they are just randomly placed. No logic whatsoever. Oil in the mountains, iron ore near a river, a goods factory in the middle of nowhere. And why are there no cities in the middle of mountains? The preview gameplay video’s show a nice track trough mountains, but there is no reason to do that now except for a single industry line…
Industry is however, if you understand the system, pretty decent and logical. The demand system is, if you think about it, very obvious. Why would a coal mine deliver 50 coal while the factory can only use 25?
But the passenger transportation, wow i’ve never been so frustrated because of simple passenger transport. Inside a city, getting profitable tram or buslines is so difficult. Its like gambling. It seems to work the best when you have a very “long” city and put a line from one end to the other. But like in CIM certain buildings have a higher “potential” of passengers, e.g. a train station. With TF, NOPE, building a bus line to a station has absolutely no extra impact.
These fundamental features together with basic cross tracks (SO annoying), upgrading tracks, placing stations over track, road over tracks, building decent bridges (way to difficult), and indeed waypoints are very important short term needed features in my opinion.
In my opnion, improving mods feature should be prioritized only after the basic missing features, like waypoints, platform selection, add l=platforms to stations.
Specially the platform selection feature. Stations look so dull without those complex junctions. What is the use of junctions at station when u cannot select the platform where the train is heading.
My theory on TF2 is if they really need to rewrite and call it TF2 to fix this version, they owe us at minimum discounted purchase of the next one.
I personally enjoy this game. Although I find time goes too fast (or OpenTTD goes too slow) and the maintenance costs make using trains not worth it, but you don’t build towns without it. Lots of wishes, etc. Even had a waypoint need pop up yesterday in my hard game.So DLC, patch, version 2, I don’t care. I just would like to see them actually work to fix it and not gouge us too badly. A company that actually stands behind their product would be a nice change from normal software.
I think the developers are making the right decision regarding the priorities: first get the game playable on all intended hardware, fix all major game breaking bugs (crashes,….) and put together a decent manual (though I would have hoped for a detailed user guide, explaining all about the workings of simulation model, the pathfinding systems and construction restrictions with tips and examples)
I find the list of coming features also quite decent. Especially the waypoints, laying road over rail, and industry chains. Achievements and eye-candy stuff are not my personal priority though.
I’m still enjoying the game a lot, by setting up my own goals with every new game (eg survive on hard mode with trains (done), integrated railway network to all cities on large map (current), grow the biggest city I possibly can (next), …
There will be a day I will get bored by playing the same game over and over, but I don’t blame the game. It’s a great game! And I have all confidence that it will get even better soon.
The problem here is that the devs pretty much ignore us on the forum, I know they’re busy trying to make improvements, and I was actually saying that we should give them a break when the game was first released as other people were saying that they weren’t getting involved in the community, but at this point i think some interaction from the devs is important to keep us wanting to play the game.
The problem with the game is that there are way too many bugs that are causing people (myself included) to stop playing. Look how quiet this forum has become since release day, the oldest post on page 1 is around 24 hours old, on release day and the 10 days following it was buzzing with activity, I was going through 3-4 pages of posts with new replies, suggestions, bugs etc, and I even made over a page of notes pointing out bugs (with screenshots), and making suggestions for improvements, which took me well over an hour to type up and post to the forum. But it all seemed to fall on deaf ears.
I paid $31 for this game, so I would consider it to be a premium game, the way it currently functions I would say it is more like a $10 budget game. Meanwhile the devs post on another forum saying that they are considering making Train Fever 2. Well sorry guys you really need to either fix this version first or give us version 2 for FREE as we should have had a working game in the first place.
Maybe the future patches will make me return to Train Fever, but for now I feel like Urban Games have taken my money and given me a product that is worth about 1/3 of what I paid for it
@ RickD! I partially agree to u but not completely . Devs have listed some of the most demanded features in their upcoming version means that they are not ignoring the community. However there interaction with the community (in which they are lacking) would be welcome. I was a part of Transport tycoon 2013 for android forum and the devs usually replied to suggestion saying that “this feature is in the pipeline or not” kind of thing. However that was for a bigger company, in contrast to only 5 members.
I appreciate what this small dev team has done so far, but I request them to get in touch with the community as well.
We could not know about their plans their plans through external sources only; I wish they had posted it (copy pasted) in the forum as well.
I agree, I would like to see the Dev’s get a little more involved on the forum. I do not agree that the game is not worth it, I have already had my monies worth in therms of play time and I am not done yet.
I am also glad that the game has done well enough to warrant a sequel.
The devs may have listed some upcoming features that have been suggested by forum members but where are their posts acknowledging that we are also taking the time to report bugs and suggest improvements. I am also part of a community for another tycoon style game (its called Automation if anyone is interested) that is being developed by a small team (3 members). They are extremely active on the forum and any suggestions made are responded to with a yes, no or maybe.
As for having my money’s worth, I have to say I don’t feel I have. I have played for around 30 hours and put the game down mainly due to frustration with not having a smooth gaming experience. I was expecting a more complex economic model like ottd, but where passengers / cargo have specific destinations. TF has that but the route calculations to get to the destinations are seriously flawed, and that is just one of the many current flaws that we have no idea if the devs are planning on fixing
when cars enter the game and become more advanced, people prefer to use them as the route calculator doesn’t factor in travel time including traffic jams. It seems that method of travel is calculated by distance from source > destination x speed of vehicle on a clear path. This causes huge traffic jams (in my game I have a jam reaching literally from one city to another), no one uses my service which was previously very busy because on a clear route the car would be quicker. In reality though in my train passes an individual car at least 3-5 times
Quite frankly, TF in its current state could easily be classified as an early access game. The core features work (most of the time), but compared to OpenTTD the only area where TF stands out is the graphics really. There’s so many basic features missing in TF, such as auto-replace vehicles, crossings and so on. Sure, it sounds great that you’re able to build track however you want it, but the truth is that you aren’t unless the land is completely flat and there’s no road near it.
If focus is even slightly switching to making a TF2 already (which would surprise me), a lot of customers should be pissed really. There’s a lot of potential in TF, but it does need a lot of work to justify the current price tag.
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