Transport Fever 3 aims for sim perfection, as dev rejects half-baked features

There's something inherently satisfying about successfully managing traffic. Whether you're adding roundabouts to your city in Cities Skylines 2 or ensuring your citizens get to work on time in Transport Fever, seeing those free-flowing roads hits all the right dopamine receptors. We chatted with Sam Bennett, community manager at Urban Games, to understand how its games are edging closer to perfection, what its perfect weather system would look like, and why Americans don't understand roundabouts.

Sitting somewhere between a city building game and a management sim, Transport Fever 3 is the epitome of accuracy. But it's still not perfect. "We haven't made the game yet," Bennett explains. "[But] we get closer to it every single time." The depth of the changes Urban Games is making, he says, means that it might take players a few hours (or mods) to figure out why it's better, but those fundamental mechanical improvements are slowly building towards the perfect Transport Fever game.

However, this also means that the developers don't want to put half-baked features in. Weather, for instance, can't just be a cosmetic improvement if it's added to a future Transport Fever game. It must have a mechanical function, and it must impact and interact with the gameplay, which makes it such a big job.

"How does weather impact on the transport that you've got going on?" Bennett asks himself. "Does it slow vehicles down, does it piss passengers off, does it make cancellations? How does that work?" These are all questions the team will have to ask if it wants to add a dynamic weather system in the future. While Transport Fever 3 adds beautiful day and night cycles, as well as cloud cover that reflects in the lakes and rivers, it'll be rain and snow that really sell the immersion - so long as they impact gameplay.

"We could easily make it cosmetic where weather really changes nothing at all," he continues. "But we'd far sooner make it a great feature that has more than one impact on gameplay."

Like any road management connoisseur, Bennett also has strong feelings about roundabouts. "Here's the one pro tip that I will give any aspiring rail roundabout constructors," he says. "Don't put signals on the roundabout. Never put signals on the roundabout. Never ever. You might think, 'oh no, it's fine, it's gonna help things' - no, it's not. It's gonna wreck it."

Bennett's passion for traffic is clear as he discusses the precise placement for signals on a rail roundabout (at the entry point, obviously), but he's also got an idea as to why the fairly standard infrastructure generates so much buzz online. "Everywhere else in the world, you look at a roundabout and go, 'yeah, it's a roundabout, what's your problem?' But it's still unusual for Americans."

As long as US folks are driving online conversation, roundabouts will be a hot topic - in videogames and real life.

If you can't wait another year to see how much closer Transport Fever 3 is to the real, perfect game that Bennett strives for, then why not check out some of our favorite strategy games to scratch a similar itch?

If you're desperate to discuss the best rail roundabout systems, then pop into our community Discord server; we've got plenty of British people in there to explain how roundabouts work. Unless that's off-putting, in which case you can just chat with other Americans.

Additional reporting by Lauren Bergin at Gamescom.