Truck World: Australia

[David Paterson]

The trees and the buildings look somewhat Australian and the road signs are mostly accurate, if sparse.

[jdwarfer]

Their progress might be slow but at least they are actively working on the game. It's far better than the past few years of nothing after the very first demo along time ago. I keep an eye on it. I'm still very interested.

[Xefjord]

I dunno if it's gotten any better, but I have not had any other driving games apart from SCS ones that I hooked up to my wheel and just felt good on largely default settings. I got into the closed testing for this a while back, and the default settings just didn't feel good on my wheel and it took a lot of tinkering to get something passable, but still not great feeling.

[flight50]

Any progress is always good. But for my 2 cents........that video looks more like an ATS map mod than anything. Isn't that suppose to be made with Unreal Engine? Or are they using something else? While watching the player drive the streets, the scale feels like 1:35 scale of old ATS. Just by opinion on how I'm looking at it.

[festmache]

The last couple of months, more frequent updates are given on Steam for TW:A.

After the route in First Haul, which is a part of Stuart Highway in central Australia, it seems that they're focusing mostly on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. They published several videos of routes in this region.

(There are also other updates, but I find the map stuff the most interesting.)

Still no information about a release date, so that's probably still far away.

There will be playtests again in the future and one way to participate is by sharing screenshots from First Haul:
https://x.com/AustraliaTruck/status/2029899690691490175

[festmache]

The demo (First Haul) won't be available for much longer.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/369462 ... 8209667140

Some interesting quotes from the news article and some replies by the dev in the comments section:

At this point, First Haul no longer reflects the current state of the game.
A lot has changed - including core elements such as controls, physics, and overall optimization.

Updating the prologue to match the current version would take a significant amount of time, and the team is now fully focused on developing key systems for the full release.

Right now we’re bringing different mechanics together into a single build, and a full gameplay loop is starting to take shape - which really motivates us to keep going.

We’re planning to release at least one more demo - this time as a more complete and representative version.
We’ll also run at least one playtest before the full release, and possibly more if needed.

Right now we’re finalizing our plans for what will be included in the release version.
So we’ll have an internal release target soon, and once we better understand how much time we still need for development, we’ll finally be able to announce a public release date.

It's taking a long time, but this sounds like they're finally zooming in on an actual release!

[Shiva]

Dev Log - Job System in Development
https://steamcommunity.com/games/369462 ... 6516912401

Not sure if the map shown is somewhat final, or only a test map.
But if not the latter, then they need good city/town mappers.

[oldmanclippy]

I wish this game all the best, but man it's never looked good at all to me. Say what you will about SCS, but they nailed the basic stuff that is easy to take for granted 14 years ago, so when you see games like this the cheapness and jank is so apparent.

If you're gonna try and take on SCS while being low quality then you've gotta make up for it with crazy ambition and I just don't see that here.

[festmache]

Seeing all their videos and reading the news updates from the last couple of months, my impression is that this game will feel a bit like the early versions of ETS2, quality-wise. Especially the map, where towns definitely feel Australian but are only loosely based on the real-world counterparts. This was the same in ETS2 (and still is in the UK... where I never drive anymore).

On the Steam forum, they have mentioned that they are with 8-12 developers now, which is even after their team has grown in the past year. This is another similarity with ETS2, which was initially built by a small team and now has hundreds of people working on the game

So yeah, I think we shouldn't expect SCS's current level of quality.
Still, the fact that it's a completely different continent and that there will be some freshness to it (different game engine, different UI, gameplay differences, etcetera) makes me very excited.

This game could go several ways...

Best scenario, it will do what ETS2 did: if it sells well enough, the game can be expanded and also upgraded in all kinds of ways in the coming years, and there might be a long future ahead.

Worst scenario: the game doesn't sell well, because everyone compares it to SCS's games which are simply miles ahead in almost every aspect (David vs. Goliath at this point). Expansions and upgrades won't be economically interesting and the game will just be what it is at the start... A sort of old ETS2 in Australia.

I think the future will look more like the worst scenario, but I certainly hope that it will be closer to the best scenario
From all the non-SCS games that I've ever seen, this is the single one in which I see potential to become a third long-term interesting trucking game similar to ETS2 and ATS, even though it might also go differently.

[Shiva]

festmache, for the cities I would rather say "inspired by the real-world counterparts".
It looks like they would have what is needed to get scaled down cities.
They would only need mappers and 3D modelers. Well, getting staff can be harder than one thinks.

Scenarios, I do hope for the best.
How many aussie truck games are there?