ETS 2 Coaches: How Passenger Satisfaction Will Work

Cargo does not care how you drive. Passengers do. SCS Software’s newest Coaches update for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is about the system that will judge you for every harsh stop: passenger satisfaction.

Game designer Vojtěch P. has led the feature since February. He previously worked on the Gallery redesign, Photo Trophies and Driving Academy, and now handles UX, UI and gameplay design for coaches. As usual, SCS stresses that everything described is work in progress and may change.

Every passenger is different

The key detail is that satisfaction is not one shared bar. Each passenger is calculated individually, with their own sensitivity. Some barely notice anything, others take even gentle braking personally. They also board in different moods, so the job is to deliver each of them in a better mood than they arrived in.

Smooth driving raises satisfaction. Hard braking, sharp turns and traffic violations lower it. If you drive a perfect leg between two stops, you get a bonus on top.

Timetable versus comfort

Vojtěch admits the two main goals pull against each other. You need to keep to the timetable, and you need to drive gently, and doing both at once is the challenge. Internal testing has already changed the rules:

• The difficulty went up: gains and losses are now much more noticeable.
• Satisfaction now grows with distance driven rather than time elapsed, which the team considers fairer.

He also makes a point we liked: real passengers do not applaud you for using your indicator, so the game should not either. The team found it far harder to come up with reasons for satisfaction to rise than reasons for it to fall.

Showing it without cluttering the screen

A lot of the work is about presentation. Too much information while driving and the screen fills up, too little and you do not know what went wrong. At stops, Vojtěch wants boarding and leaving passengers shown as individual people rather than a progress bar.

He also says that fitting a new vehicle type into a game where every term, icon and menu was built for trucks, and letting players switch between them, is a bigger job than the coaches themselves.

Ideas that may come later

Some ideas are on the table with no promise attached: passengers asking you to turn on the heating or air conditioning, temperature affecting their mood, or someone requesting an emergency stop that you have to find a safe place for, quickly.

Our view

This is the system that will make or break Coaches. Per-passenger moods are a good choice because they give a bad stop real consequences without turning the whole journey into a fail state. If SCS gets the balance right, the timetable pressure alone should make coach driving feel very different from trucking.

Source: SCS Software blog. Images and video: SCS Software.