Monday, February 21, 2011

Extreme Trucker 2 on the shelves in Germany

We have received confirmation that 18 Wheels of Steel Extreme Trucker 2 is now available on store shelves in Germany, of course localized into German language.

The Extreme Trucker games are aimed at a somewhat different audience than what perhaps constitutes the majority of the visitors of our blog. The games are supposed to appeal especially to younger players, with more arcade approach. And they were also developed on very lean budgets, with as much material as possible re-used from the earlier 18 Wheels of Steel games, and many of the new 3D assets created at the same (lower) level of detail to keep things in line. Such is the reality of the PC games retail market in the USA - for the publishers there it is hard to justify higher budgets on such niche genre games, they just don't see the sales potential there for a serious sim.

But still, Extreme Trucker 2 is a work of love of a small dedicated team inside SCS Software, and they worked really hard. They did their best to overcome the limitations of the legacy material to produce a game with a few good hours of fun packed into it, with two all-new maps and new areas added to the old maps to give players lots of new stuff to explore. We are biased of course, but the maps have spots in them that we think are the best looking sceneries in any SCS-developed games so far. With new eye candy effects in the graphics engine, and big parts of the physics code and the traffic AI code rewritten, we think the game is worth trying. In many areas, there are glimpses in the game of things under development for Euro Truck 2.

Extreme Trucker 2 is distributed in Germany by rondomedia.