World of Trucks Newsletter #1

Greetings,

Some of you may have found our very first newsletter in your inbox during the recent week. It's been a bit complicated for us to mail out over 170 thousand e-mails (and that's still only about half of users registered on World of Trucks!), even using Amazon's back-end service, it took several days to go through the long list.

So far we have received mostly compliments from our readers, indicating that there's hunger for such information updates. Some of our fans come here to read our blog, other people mostly stick to Facebook, some prefer Twitter, but it would take a real obsession to follow everything we do on a daily basis. So we believe that the newsletter, covering a broader range of topics and sent out every couple of months, will be a good additional channel to keep in touch with the fanbase, especially with the players who do not play the game or engage in the community so frequently, but still don't want to miss out on new cool things happening that could spark their interest in playing the game again more intensively.

It was not a coincidence that we wanted to get the first newsletter issue out alongside the release of our Euro Truck Simulator 2 Scandinavia expansion, a little bit of additional PR never hurts, but we think that you could appreciate that we focused on slightly different and deeper aspect of its development, as well as provided an overview of other projects that we are cooking for you under SCS Software's roof.

To prevent excessive email bounce rate we opted to send the newsletter only to active World of Trucks users - those who logged in to World of Trucks at least once during the last six months. In case you were among people who missed it, fear not, we are going to store all our future newsletters on our forum, where you have an option to comment or discuss its content.

So here you go:

Comment on our forum here

NEW FEATURE REVEAL


 Here is a "random" new feature reveal as an example of work we do inspired by feedback from the community. We are currently working on a new game window that should make mod users' and creators' lives more organized and manageable - a Mod Manager.
ETS2 mod manager

The Mod Manager will help you organize mods that can be obtained from a wide array of mod sources and yet players want them to co-exist. In the future, we also plan for its integration with one of the world's best mod distribution channels - Steam Workshop. Developing our own SCS Blender Tools is an important step to improve the robustness of mods created for our games. We expect Mod Manager to be released in one of future regular free updates of Euro Truck Simulator 2 beyond the update 1.18 horizon.
 
 
AMERICAN TRUCK SIMULATOR


Our coverage of progress on American Truck Simulator on the blog has dried up a bit in the past couple of months, but that does not mean that its development was sidetracked. A lot of focus has been on getting the news out about the Scandinavia expansion, the first major project on the block for release this year. Very soon we'll switch the gears and start showing you a lot more about American Truck Simulator. We believe that we have got enough good-quality content built (and a couple of truck licenses finally about to be signed!) To finally switch into the mode of completing the first-stage release later this year.

Be sure to check out our unedited gameplay video to get a taste of what driving through America from the comfort of your desk feels like in an early alpha version of our upcoming game!
 
 
EURO COACH SIMULATOR

 Although most people in the company are currently occupied with putting finishing touches to Scandinavia and working on ATS, we haven't forgotten about this project! (And in fact there is more stuff brewing across a couple of small 1-2 people teams in our office!)

A small team has been working on building and implementing coaches on top of our technology during the past two years. We have been building the vehicles, chasing licences, and exploring technical aspects of adapting the ETS2 world - the gameplay aim is to have the focus on multi-stop routes that would be quite different from standard delivery jobs currently available in Euro Truck Simulator 2.
 With coaches, you are not transporting some inanimate objects, so the focus on gameplay is passenger comfort and adhering to route schedule. We have been doing some prototyping iterations on how to translate this into a working gameplay element, and no doubt for a long time already you have been bumping into bits in the ETS2 world for which there is no use for cargo deliveries, but which look inviting should you drive around in a bus or a coach.

What is the vision for the project? For a short while, we have been toying with the idea of building it into a standalone game. But in the end we have realized that we do not have enough focus to do a full-scale production of all-new original content. With inevitable extensive reuse of material from Euro Truck Simulator 2, it is more fair to think about coaches as appearing in the form of a DLC, benefitting from the constant updates to the base ETS2 game and sharing the same ever-growing game world as the playfield for passenger as well as cargo transportation.

Keep an eye out on progress updates on our blog in future!