Hello Bus Drivers!
We know that you’ve been waiting for more news on Bus Simulator 21. We now have some! Thank you for your continued support for us and the game over the past months! And we are excited to give you a peek on what’s next for Bus Simulator 21 Next Stop.
Finally!
In the past, our release and testing schedule didn’t allow us to do changes on a deep level. Before we could touch core systems, we already had to close everything up and go into the next testing phase. But over time, we could not make any more meaningful improvements without going deeper into core systems.
That’s why we decided to reserve a longer period of time without releases. This allowed us to make significant improvements to many of the areas you sent us feedback for and which we could not tackle due to the complexity and dependencies of all interconnected systems! To get more things done during that focused development, we also added more people to the development team. Now, we can’t wait to show you what’s coming.
So, what’s coming?
We are working on a major update to Bus Simulator 21 – Bus Simulator 21 Next Stop – that will come to PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, PS4, and PS5 on May 23,2023.
While we can't reveal everything today but shorten the time until release, we’ll keep you informed with video clips of our fixes and improvements 👀😄 Follow @BusSimGame on Social Media and join our Discord to stay up to date.
The improvement process had multiple areas united under a common theme: Smooth Simulation. It solves the biggest annoyances you sent our way on Discord, reports, mails and tweets and makes the drive experience a lot more enjoyable and fluid. These are the areas we focused on:
- Pedestrians:
- Pedestrians will be more environmentally aware: A lot less crossing the street in awkward places. Less walking into the bus.
- They now move faster to allow for fluid boarding and unboarding. Of course some ”unique cases” might occur from time to time but you’ll feel a big improvement overall!
- Also, when the bus is full, passengers walk away and don’t block your bus.
- NPC Buses
- Buses driven by NPCs will leave stations earlier if other buses or players want to use the same stop and thus move out of the way.
- Route planning of NPC buses has been improved so they should not get stuck in areas with lots of parked cars and allow for much smoother traffic overall and a lot less traffic jams.
- Traffic
- We heard you! Too many traffic jams! Cars being weird. We were on it! We worked on smart overtaking of your bus and reduced waiting times on intersections and we significantly reduced traffic jams that piled up over time.
- Additionally, we fixed a number of traffic lights and added missing ones.
- For cases where a traffic jam still occurs and locks everything up, we added a “reset traffic button” that is accessible in the game’s menu.
- Crashes
- Crashes are a hugely complex topic as every PC and console reacts differently depending on the state it’s in, drivers, which and how many apps are currently loaded, what the OS is doing in the background and much more, but we again eliminated many sources of crashes when loading save games, starting companies, starting sandbox games… Bus Simulator 21: Next Stop will be a much smoother experience.
- Performance
- We squeezed out milliseconds here and there that add up, including FPS improvements for base consoles and reduction of memory usage to avoid “out of memory” crashes.
- Of course we have a lot of performance updates and fixes for the PC version as well.
- Input & Steering Wheels
- We’re aware steering wheels are a constant source of frustration. We’ve been investigating this for a long time and “Next Stop” includes lots of various changes and fixes for Steering Wheels. However, we were not able to reproduce all issues you reported no matter what systems, drivers, wheels we tried to get to the bottom of these mysteries. All in all, in our closed testing with players from our community, we’ve seen great results so we hope that most of the issues will be gone for good!
- Multiplayer
- We were working hard on various multiplayer fixes you reported, including connectivity and stability fixes.
- Map
- There are a TON of fixes on the maps where we removed obstacles, moved bus stop signs back so you don’t bump into them when stopping close to the curb, moved many signs so they don’t intersect with each other anymore.
- And there’s also a very big map extension that will be coming with the update. More details very soon!
That’s not everything that we will be releasing with the update. Keep your eyes peeled for more news here soon. If you have any questions regarding the announcement – please ask them in the comments section!
Get involved!
We spent a lot of time gathering reports from all over the internet: Steam reviews, Steam forums, Twitter, Discord and our in-game bug reporting tool. But we still like to hear from you! Go to our online Feedback Tool to send us what’s bothering you! We’re still listening!
Online Feedback Form
Know what’s happening
We’ve prepared a public roadmap where you can follow our endeavor. Make sure to save a bookmark!
Bus Simulator 21 Next Stop - Roadmap
Thank you!
Thank you for sticking with us. We’re excited to work on this update!
Your teams at stillalive studios and astragon Entertainment