Many Projects, One Goal | ATS
We are working hard on American Truck Simulator: California, fine-tuning it and polishing the content and features. You may have seen glimpses of the locations already before in our earlier blog posts, but we thought the couple of panoramas below are still so cool that you will appreciate seeing them…
We have to admit that we have been in the “let’s finish it” mode working on American Truck Simulator: California longer that we hoped.
Basically, the “problem” is that we want to give it all to you. Euro Truck Simulator 2 has been great success for us – so we thought that we absolutely should not abandon it – let’s continue to improve and expand it! While we are at it, let’s venture across the ocean too with American Truck Simulator so that we can make happy more of the global fan base of the truck sim genre. At the same time, we knew that we will need to go deeper – and from this the ambition to create the complementary World of Trucks project was born.
We are adding community features and infrastructure to support implementation of a grand trucking universe with Virtual Trucking Companies and eventually with rich multiplayer. We would also like to introduce more vehicles into our world than just plain semi-trucks, so work has started on adding alternate gameplay and driving experiences into our simulation system. At the same time, we know that we need to keep pushing our graphics technology, there are still many things in our game engine to improve and optimize, and balancing such changes while trying not to break the game mods too badly is not easy at all.
Pursuing all these goals at the same time has been quite a ride. We have more than tripled our head count at SCS Software to over 50 people currently since the days of release of ETS2. While the content teams working on the projects are separate, they share the programming team, and we are still learning tough lessons when it comes to improving our testing and release pipeline.
Sometimes it feels like for every step forward we need to take two back, but we are stubborn and dedicated, and we are confident that in the end we will deliver on all that we have started. In our quest, we feel that quality is the most important thing for you and us. That’s why, more often than not, we tend to adjust our plans and sacrifice release schedules in order to stay true to our mission and to build new pieces of the puzzle in a way that they will all fit well together.
Very soon, you will see us take another step with World of Trucks. The first release in American Truck Simulator line is on the horizon, and the team working Euro Truck Simulator 2 has great things in development too for you for the next year. Please be patient with us and stay tuned!
