Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 [official site], the curiously zen-like, genre-defying game of hypnotic vehicular repair, is very much back on the road these days, but it was not ever thus. CMS18 launched in a rather troubled state, rife with bugs and interface peculiarities, but to the credit of both developers and players, it was rapidly and repeatedly patched, backlash was restrained and the result is an excellent game that’s rarely far from the upper reaches of the Steam best-sellers chart.
But what, exactly happened – and are the developers now confident that CMS is ship-shape? Also: what is it about this superficially car-nerds-only game that makes it so compelling to almost anyone willing to pick up a virtual wrench?
Note: quotes have been edited slightly for translation-based clarity.
“Honestly we didn’t expect so many problems,” Kuba Trzebiński of devs Red Dot Games and publisher PlayWay tells me. “The launch version was way too bugged and it never should have gone on sale. It was our great mistake.” But it was also a surprise: “On release day, thousands of players started to play, at the same moment, and find all those bugs, we were a little shocked.”
The root of the problem was having eyes bigger than their stomach. “We put many extra modules, content, functionalities (like Barnfind or Junkyard) into CMS 18, going after our fanbase’s voice. At some point we were started to lose ground under our feet. There was too much of that content, and too little time to release.”
On top of that, internal testing didn’t turn up many of the problems, but, by their own admission, the creators “tested mostly modules separately, not [as] a whole game.” A certain excess of confidence didn’t help the situation. “We had in mind that our previous CMS editions received great reviews from gamers. That blurred a little our clarity of vision,” confesses Trzebiński.
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Source: Rock Paper Shotgun