Oh Yea!!! Oh Yea!!!! With as much fun as I’m having playing Euro Truck Simulator, American Truck Simulator will be a must have edition for my simulation collection of entertainment games. While I’ve known about ETS2 for some time, I’m only just learning about the plans for American Truck Simulator in the past few weeks and boy am I excited. While I know there are Kenworth and Peterbuilt mods available for ETS2, I’m holding out to drive these bad boys until I can do do so on virtual American soil…the way these beauties are designed to be driven. Plus the roads in Europe just aren’t conducive to these big beasts. But our wide open spaces and long interstate highways will certainly make for some awesome adventures.
While no official release date has been made public, I’ve read in a few places a mid August 2015 (August 10 on one site) possible release date. From what I can tell from the American Truck Simulator website and the few YouTube videos I’ve provided below, it looks like initially American Truck Simulator will focus on California and the West. A few of the images they show are Bakersfield, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles, California and one screen shot appears to be of Las Vegas. As I read through a few comments on the SCSSoftware YouTube Channel some viewers are posting that additional US States will be released as DLC. Some of these States may be available free, while others would charge. This is probably a good move on the part of SCSSoftware as they can get the core application out quickly and then add additional DLC packs as they expand across the map. Of course I would expect the mod community to also help fill in the blanks much as ProMods has done in Europe.
Again, I’m sure American Truck Simulator will be a huge hit with trucking simulator enthusiast all around the world
More about the videos below. The first video is the official American Truck Simulator teaser video which was released by SCSSoftware on 17 June. The second video features just under an hour of gameplay from the 0.1.60 Alpha version of ATS. Based on the 58 minutes of gameplay, the concept and function is pretty much the same as ETS2, just different scenery. One thing I did notice which is different is the parking scenarios. It appears you may be offered multiple parking scenarios based on difficulty. With one star being easy, two stars being slightly more difficult and three stars maximum difficulty. One would assume the experience points would pay more on the three star versus the one star parking options. I think this is cool.
Final thoughts. I hope SCSSoftware will continue to develop their Trucking Simulator applications (both Euro and American) and provide more features. I have a list of items I’d love to see incorporated into game play. But I’ll leave this for a future blog posting.
Until next time…
Happy Trucking!!!
JT