Age Of Transport – The Real World Sized Transport Fever

Let’s watch this showcase video from the game’s developer…

Yes, it’s real. Everything you see comes from an indie game developer pushing the limits of what Microsoft Flight Simulator has: a real-world-sized transport simulator. And yes, this is from an indie developer – not from a small or big game studio. How crazy is that?

Age of Transport is already listed on Steam, developed by Amazing Games. And it’s set to launch as an EA (early access game, with a final release next year (estimated).
The game developer says in his video that he will give updates on the development on his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@AgeofTransport

So if you want to play on bigger maps…or the whole Earth itself, this is worth following. Who knows what we might end up with.

As a side note, we may also wonder why products from other game studios or larger game developers are so limited in their games’ playable areas. It’s surely a money/business side to everything that goes into game development, but we see that small indie developers are showcasing products that are now challenging the more generic, arcade-ish simulator genre.
In fact, games in development so far will also challenge Farming Simulator in the years to come. And to me, that’s positive.
All of that gives customers alternatives, when many game developers push DLC instead of expanding and improving what they already have. And surely all the frustration that is aired on the Steam Forums and not the game developers’ restricted Discords is noticeable every time they announce a new DLC.

Farming Simulator is very limited in the vanilla map size, while the game engine can render maps up to 8 kilometres and more. Almost all vanilla maps sold as DLC have been the same size since Farming Simulator 15.

For Transport Fever, the largest maps are hidden inside the game and can be unlocked by changing a line in the game’s configuration file or by mods. Yet the game has no real-world globe, where we can choose a gameplay location. Most playable maps in this game are generated or can be downloaded as mods or game saves. Yet there is no map in the game that is based on a real-world location, but rather biomes or climate variations featured in the latest Transport Fever game.

Euro Truck Simulator is also scaled down to shorten the transport network, while mods like Promods https://promods.net/ try to stay a bit ahead of what SCS Software https://www.scssoft.com/ is pushing. Still, it has no globe where you can choose your location for your transport company – mainly for trucking cargo from A to B. That said, the game is improving, and the DLC is the expansion itself, with content based on real-world locations, but not at real scale.

If Age of Transport becomes the real deal, then it’s for the greater good for simulator enthusiasts to explore. And maybe it’s also a strong signal to other game developers to think outside the box they made long ago, and start advancing into real-world-sized game products, for whatever transport gameplay it holds.