Alaskan Road Truckers is a highway to madness, and not in a good way

As was foretold, I jumped into the newly released Alaskan Road Truckers the other day. I knew it was going to be a rough road judging from the demo and every trailer shown for it. However, the roads are pretty beyond rough. They feel as though the roads, as well as the people on them, were created by someone who has never been in a vehicle before.

Alaskan Road Truckers has a lot of problems, but the biggest one is that the central gameplay – the driving – sucks out loud. Part of this is the driving controls and vehicle physics in general, but the other part is the world around your truck.

One of the first things that struck me was a bump in the road. Right by your HQ is this big dip followed by a hill, and if you hit that thing at a speed faster than a crawl, it will pop your rig up. If you have a trailer, it will severely damage your load, as well. The highways are littered with this sort of thing. Not just uneven patches, but turns that are far too sharp and aggressive swerving that don’t make sense. Maybe they make them different in Alaska. Or they were crafted by some sort of trickster god.

I still keep writing Alaskan Truck Simulator

The speed limits are beyond comprehension a lot of the time, both from a gameplay and traffic engineering standpoint. Before every single intersection, the speed limit drops to 15MPH. It might even abruptly drop from 55MPH, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a three-way intersection and you’re going in the direction that doesn’t face a stop sign; you will need to quickly slow to 15MPH. Or not, because with all the speeding I did, I never got ticketed.

I mostly had to watch out for other drivers, who are much more mindful of the limit and will quickly brake hard for these changes, regardless of how close you are following them. Yet, the braking speed of your truck is, realistically, a lot slower than that of a car, so it’s not uncommon to be joining them in the back seat. In this bizarre world of strange traffic laws, you are at fault. Always. Even when someone doesn’t yield for right-of-way.

I’m speculating here, but I think the sudden changes in limit are because someone programmed the AI traffic’s speed to be tied to the area’s limit. So, rather than get creative with the traffic AI and give them realistic behavior, the developer changed the speed limit for every intersection so the NPC drivers would slow down before attempting to turn. I haven’t seen Alaskan Road Truckers’ code, so I don’t know this for sure, but there’s evidence of similar shortcuts taken in the programming.

Like, for example, there are stoplights in the game, as you’d expect. Also, as you’d expect, they turn from green to yellow to red. Typical etiquette for a stoplight. However, when it’s their turn to change back, they then turn from red to yellow to green. I’m not sure if you’ve ever been at a lighted four-way intersection, but the traffic signals don’t do that. They just go from red to green. Again, I think this was a programming shortcut.

Stoplight etiquette

Meanwhile, even on highways with a speed limit of 55MPH, the other cars on the road never reach that speed. Ever. They max out at around 40MPH, toddling along while you’re trying to meet a deadline. 

This is on top of your usual bugs. In one town, I witnessed two cars just doing circles in place. This was not only hilarious to watch, but it made it difficult to bypass them. If I can speculate again, I think the NPCs are locked on strict paths, and when they get shunted off them, they struggle to get back on track. I was once driving behind a dump truck that was driving in the ditch so confidently it took out a traffic sign. Later, as I approached my HQ, I saw a truck doing the same donuts I saw earlier. It marked the beginning of reality folding in on itself as my entire maintenance garage had disappeared. When I went to upgrade my HQ, it just displayed a nice image of the forest and wouldn’t let me exit to continue the game.

Alaskan Road Truckers stinks of being pushed out the door before it could put its pants on. Speaking of which, doors in shops don’t really open. You approach them, and they snap into the open position with no animation. A lot of these quick shortcuts seem like they’re just placeholders, so the game could be tested and fine-tuned in a big-picture kind of way, but the fine-tuning never happened. The traffic, for example, might have been planned to be overhauled later, but they just never got around to it.

Get off the road, grandma

It’s frequently pointed out (by the developer) that the developer is a small team, which is fine when explaining cut corners, bugs, or general ugliness, but you still have to have standards. I’m more willing to believe that this is a publisher issue if anything, because I can’t imagine a developer looking at this and saying, “Perfect. All Done. Let’s ship it.”

The roadmap for updates suggests that they’ll be adding several features through to next year that should have been in the game at launch. Things like new roads that just aren’t there right now and additional needs to keep your trucker alive. It’s a very “release it now, fix it later” mentality.

Many of these issues I outlined are fixable, and there have been two substantial patches since launch, with the one today possibly addressing some of what I outlined. But they’re problems that should have been fixed before they started charging money. Jankiness is fine, especially for a small developer. I can live and love janky. But Alaskan Road Truckers feels like it’s still a game with a tonne of placeholders and a lot of rough road.

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