Jacob Lyman

Railroads Online is a brilliant game idea, shot in the foot by its own development cycle. I started playing the game early shortly after release, in the Unreal Engine 4 build. It was buggy and had faults, but it was an early access build so it was forgiven at the time. There was great potential from the unique theme of narrow gauge railroading, and had a killer soundtrack of Americana classics. The most fun I had in Railroads Online was this early age, even if the cracks in the game were showing. The first sign of trouble for Railriads Online was a dev team split when many of the developers (encompassing all the most skilled artists, engineers, modelers and researchers attatched to the project) left to form competitor Studio 346, and launched their own competing title Century of Steam. It's not a great look for Railroads Online, when a competing title made up of former devs established an "anti-Pope" that consistently outshines the original game. That glorious Americana soundtrack I mentioned earlier was eventually dropped by Railroads Online in favor of bland stock music, perhaps out of spite for all the musicians on the old music were now part of the competing studio. A bit of Railroads Online's soul was lost when they ditched the old music. Well maybe Railroads Online could attract a new development team to regain it's footing, right? Instead we saw the game sign on with shovelware publisher Astragon and bring in mobile game developer Black Sheep Studios for quality assurance. Railroads Online committed itself to a path of mediocrity, and as the game continued development day 1 bugs persisted as new problems were added. A rushed half-baked console port was prepared in time for a late 2024 "full release." This game wasn't ready to go to 1.0. It's still a buggy glitchy mess that has had most of its charm buried by feature bloat. I suspect they kicked it out the door to "full release" to milk what was left of its audience before the eventual arrival of Century of Steam steals any momentum Railroads Online has left. The advertisements for release were also so bland and uninspired, I suspect Astragon is using ChatGPT to write commercial scripts to spit out "content" to promote the game. Railroads Online is a game running on fumes, and unless the devs invest the work needed to save the game from a mountain of technical debt, the game is destined to sink as better games start coming to market. This is not the game I had hoped it would become when I purchased it in Early Access and I am not holding my breath that Railroads Online will turn itself around before it crashes into a rock wall and explodes on itself.