Locomotive engineers learn routes in extreme detail, this is the place to apply the brakes, this is the place to apply the throttle. Trains have extremely poor brakes, and knowing the track in extreme detail matters. The recent Amtrak accident in Philadelphia apparently happened because the Amtrak engineer was a young man of only thirty-two or thirty-three, with only ten years of Amtrak service, and five years of locomotive service. The evidence seems to be that he became confused at night on track which he did not really know, and applied the throttle too hard, for a minute or thirty seconds. That was enough to cause a dreadful accident. These simulators set out to reproduce the engineer’s experience. The people who buy them expect to experience them about the way a musician experiences a piece of sheet music, to gradually work at improving their performance over a given track, perhaps a piece of track which goes near their home, and which they spend a good deal of time photographing. The deep discounts for various tracks indicate the the limiting factor is learning to “perform” them in a creditable fashion before an audience of one’s peers.

Then there is model railroading, which is about building stuff in miniature. You get the most points for building stuff from scratch, with an exacto knife, needle files, etc., not from kits. Many years ago, when I was in engineering school, I took a course in projective geometry, that is, applied euclidean geometry. The “term paper” was to build a figure in construction paper: a 6″ dome, with a 3″ 90-degree elbow coming off the top, and transitioning to a 6″ prism section, with the centerline along the bottom of the elbow bend’s cylindrical section. Then we were to transition the prism section to a cylindrical section, 3″ in diameter, along the same centerline as the prism, and to intersect this with a vertical cone, I think about 10″ high. So I made the thing, showed it to the instructor who verbally examined me on the work, and got my grade. Afterwards, I showed it to my father, and he immediately claimed it for his model railroad layout. He had one of these big layouts which ran all over the basement, behind the furnace, etc.

A piece of sheet music is not the same thing as a phonograph record or a CD. I had a rather strange experience recently. A young co-ed told me that she was an enthusiast of music. So I naturally asked what instrument she played. It turned out that she merely meant listening to CD’s.

…aaaand I stopped reading. I avoid that garbage ‘website’ and its ‘journalists’, never expected to get the story copy/pasted here.

you can keep your opinions.

I know this will be lost in the noise, but have any of these authors actually tried playing the game?

Seriously, each of the trains I tried required sitting through a good 30 minutes of tutorials just to know how that specific engine worked. And then another 5-10 minutes if that engine was operating in a region whose signaling rules were different than I was accustomed to.

There is an optional overlay that can provide generic controls for anyone that just wants to play around, but if I’m going to spend the afternoon pretending to be an 1850’s era steam locomotive engineer running a passenger service though the lower UK, then by God I should know which of these shiny brass levers drives which cylinder cock, that I need to fuss continually to keep the Johnson bar positioned for peak efficiency, and that my score will suffer severely if I jostle my passengers so violently that their tea sloshes over the brim and stains their petticoats.

My point is that railroad folk enthusiasts generally have ridiculously high expectations, and are often quite willing to pay for them to be met. I’m sorry the companies which cater to your personal interests have been screwing you over lately (the horse armor thing really is disgraceful), but so far as I can tell this is not what is happening here.

TLDR: Train Simulator is not a game. It’s a product that happens to be sold on Steam that targets a very specific user base who is unnaturally obsessed with trains, and is willing to pay top dollar for every bit of extra precision they can get their hands on. I paid almost $500 for an authentic 1920’s era conductor’s hat that sits on a shelf in my den. $3000 for potentially *thousands* of hours of extra content I can actually engage with is a bargain.

This would be like buying Rock Band 4 and looking at the cost of all of the available DLC and claiming that it is a rip-off.

People will buy the trains or songs they want and not buy the ones they don’t want. Are the individual prices high? Well, they are higher than I would pay, but I don’t give any shits about trains (and I suspect the authors of both this article and the Kotaku article aren’t train enthusiasts either). I did spend hundreds of dollars on Guitar Hero/Rock Band songs because I loved those games and didn’t feel for one second like I was getting ripped off or like I needed to buy ALL of the DLC. There was plenty of DLC that wasn’t to my taste and I didn’t buy it, and I suspect for most train enthusiasts the same would apply here.

I used to make free DLC for this game and what i found was nothing but some strong hostility from the makers of payed DLC. Not only that the community would back the payed DLC companies and start a hate campaign against you. Alot like me who did free projects also had the same issue. The Community for this game is as hateful as it gets for any game, one free content maker was threatened all the time and when that did not work they turned on his kids. I myself was threatened with legal action because a train somehow resembled that of a payed version (which it would if you were modelling the same train), and had god knows how many emails of people sending me photoshopped pictures of my daughter been raped. So like many freeware makers they avoid this game like the plague.