Arizona Panoramas

We are hard at work putting finishing touches on Arizona DLC for American Truck Simulator now. Very soon we should enter first a closed beta and hopefully soon after an open beta phase.

Today we would like to treat you with three panoramas showing the principal river of the Southwestern United States - the Colorado River. The river will not be just a sight to pass. For the players who enjoy hunting for Steam achievements, we have prepared a new one - tied with the river.

Your task will be to cross the three bridges in Ehrenberg, Yuma and Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge near Hoover Dam. You will also have a chance to drive along the edge of two canyons carved by the Colorado River - Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon.

The panoramas above show an artist's depiction of Colorado River near Kingman, again near Yuma, and Glen Canyon.

Arizona road network

Arizona is not just more of the same. Our work on California and Nevada started well over two years ago, and even though we kept polishing the game all through the development cycle, the map design process and the roads were largely based on our older generation of tools and prefabs. Meanwhile, our tool-chain has matured considerably with the ETS2 team's work on Scandinavia and Vive la France, and for Arizona, the ATS team is using the power of the new modular system to put the road network together.

  

Things look sharper with higher resolution textures and better continuity of segments. But more importantly, rather than having to do with the limitations of huge monolithic prefabricates in places of intersections, the modular system is bringing way more flexibility. We can get the intersections to look closer to their real-world inspirations at particular locations. There is a greater variety of shoulders and side-walks, we can mix in elements like unique authentic pillar types and matching bridge segments for given interchanges.

 

In all our truck games ever since the first 18 Wheels of Steel games all the way to current American Truck Simulator maps, we have always been struggling hard with the limited space in our scaled-down version of reality. There never seems to be enough space to squeeze in all the right types of roads and the right types of intersections.

For Arizona, we tried hard to make the combination of road types clearly separated, with country roads and city roads crossing and joining the freeways and interstates with appropriate types of intersections. It has a nice side-effect too, the speed limits can now be harmonized and more logical, which contributes to a significantly smoother ride.

  

An extensive system of horizontal marking makes the roads and intersections look more authentic. We have also improved the coverage of warning and information markings for Arizona.

The Grand Canyon State

Arizona has got its nickname The Grand Canyon State thanks to the magnificent steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River. This wonder of nature is playing a very large role for the local tourism with some five million tourists each year, while it just happens to be an obstacle for the transportation industry. But we have been working hard to portray it in a very visible way in American Truck Simulator, inventing some new tricks along the way.

    

Arizona gets into shape very visibly now, and we are eager to start internal beta testing in the matter of the next few weeks. We are also ready to commit to take the map expansion through a public open beta test towards the end of the testing period. We would like to give  a chance to the most curious of our fans to experience the incredible beauty of the new region before the final release.

   

Game updates need more time in beta

Whenever we go for Open Beta of a game update, we always do it hoping that there are no major problems with the update, that the beta process will be just a confirmation that we are in good shape for official release. So we are not exactly happy that we have already passed two weeks of open beta tests for ETS2's 1.23 and ATS's 1.2 updates. But we never want to compromise quality because of time pressure. We are focused on providing you with game updates which is thoroughly tested and polished. Please have patience with us, cool stuff is on the way with this and more game updates in the future.

Meanwhile the ATS map team is hard at work on Arizona DLC, a free map expansion coming for American Truck Simulator. We are getting a ton of requests to show more of what we are working on. We never want to show it all, generally speaking we want to keep surprises for players during their first experience with a game or a new content update. But hopefully you will enjoy these a few new screenshots showing the new state! As you will see here, we have a few novelties appearing with the DLC release, including new AI vehicles, new roads and intersections...

Arizona Teasing

We have been working hard on Arizona DLC for American Truck Simulator already for several weeks before we have shipped the initial release edition of the game. We are making great progress, but there is still al lot of content left to be finished. We don't have a release date to announce yet, but there should not be more than a couple of months of solid work ahead us, plus the final testing and polishing stage. Maybe we should try to use the Open Beta approach for Arizona, what do you think?

Anyway, we thought you may be happy to see a couple of screenshots as part of the confirmation that we are firmly committed to giving you Arizona soon...