Bigger Skies: American Truck Simulator Being Scaled Up

The dream of American trucking is big skies and grand vistas. American Truck Simulator [official site] is okay at that, especially since Arizona arrived, but it can feel a little dinky. Developers SCS Software have a plan. As well as adding extra states, SCS have announced they're making the whole game bigger by rescaling the world in a future free update. It'll go from 1:35 scale to 1:20, which SCS say will mean "75% longer roads outside the cities". They're also reworking the landscape for a bigger sense of scale and gosh, this is awfully exciting! Give me those grander vistas.

"The new scale is equivalent to that of Euro Truck Simulator 2, so the flow of time in both games will be the same," SCS say in the announcement. "There is also more room now to go back and improve some of the places that were compromised due to the limited scale and replace them with more realistic depictions."

As well as increasing the scale of the states, they're trying to increase the perceived scale too, and also creating new segments of road to fill in the gaps, reworking intersections and city placement, slowing the timescale so day and night are longer and you can drive for longer, and more. America will feel and be bigger.

SCS explain that their studio was only about 20 people when they first started planning American Truck Simulator, so they had to pick achievable goals. Since then, the studio has more than doubled in size and is still hiring. Now that American Truck Simulator's promised initial states are out, they say "we are at an intersection: we can either accept things as they are and continue building the world as is, or we can take a step back and change things before it's too late." So they're changing it.

It'll take the map designers several months to rescale the world before they can move onto to making new states, SCS say. However, asset makers are already working on new vegetation, landmarks, and so on for new states in the meantime. SCS hope they'll be able to create another map design team too, one expanding eastward and one northward. Come on, Oregon! Give me Portland's white stag. Roll on to Washington! Show me the fog. Give me all of the fog. Have it seep through the vents and fill my truck cabin.

Here, check out how much bigger the current game space is becoming: