Powerfull ATS screenshots from American Truck Simulator

Your questions are coming again and again through all communication channels: “What is the release date for American Truck Simulator? What are the features going to be? Please tell us and show us more!”

Trouble is, we are not exactly sure ourselves, it’s a moving target we are working on. Any release date you may see anywhere in the media or coming from the distribution channel are only speculations at this stage. For almost half a year, we have been adjusting and re-adjusting our internal plans, and we may still need to do it again.

Part of the answers depends on our negotiations with US truck manufacturers. We don’t want to release even the initial version of the game (which frankly will only be a “slice” of the future big whole-continent 100+ cities vision of the complete game) with unlicensed vehicles. We have been through the trouble with ETS2, and it complicates things just too much. We want to set the bar high and push for maximum fidelity, and proper branding when vehicles are introduced into the game is very important to have our game taken seriously.

On the world content side, the team building the game has been growing, and we see real magic happening in the map! But as with everything, it is a balancing act – the more detail we put in, the longer it takes to build. We need to get our content creation pipeline into the best possible shape for the initial game release to be able to support it with a stream of additional content releases down the line. It would be great to be able to use the word “rapid” somewhere in the previous sentence, in fact it has been the goal of our programming team in recent months to make our tools more productive, but you already know us, we will be trying our best not to push your patience to the limits.