Railroad Tycoon 3 Q&A

By Staff, GameSpotPosted Oct 13, 2003 3:24 pm PT

PopTop Software president Phil Steinmeyer briefs us on the studio's next Railroad Tycoon game.

Since the series began in 1990, with the original Railroad Tycoon (published by the now-defunct company MicroProse), the Railroad Tycoon series has quietly garnered a loyal following of fans who have enjoyed the games' combination of railroad building and economic strategy. Railroad Tycoon II received great critical acclaim when it was released in 1998, and the next game in the series will finally be released this year. With Railroad Tycoon 3, developer PopTop Software will add all-new trains, scenarios, a new victory condition, and a brand-new 3D graphics engine that will let players design their own train courses, lay tracks, and even change entire landscapes in 3D. We caught up with PopTop president and founder Phil Steinmeyer (who is also serving as the lead designer, producer, and programmer) for more information on this promising game.

GameSpot: When we last checked in, we saw that the game's 3D terrain engine and editors were already in place. What aspects of the game is the team working on at this point?

Railroad Tycoon 3 is almost done.

PS: We're very close to the finish line, so all we're doing right now is testing and [making] final balance tweaks. Railroad Tycoon 3 has a lot of scenarios and game content (28 scenarios--about 60 plus hours of gameplay), and so it takes a lot of time and effort to ensure that they're perfect.

GS: Other than simply introducing 3D graphics to the game, what would you say has been the most challenging aspect of developing Railroad Tycoon 3?

PS: We knew at the start that we had to make Railroad Tycoon 3 [with a fully 3D engine] just to compete in the modern gaming marketplace and to enable some key features, like tunnels and overpasses. But I don't think we initially realized how much of a difference a fully realized 3D world would have on the gameplay. It's very immersive. [Many people who play the game for the first time] comment that it's easy to get distracted from the core economic' game just because it's so cool to watch the trains steaming through the mountains--pistons and gears moving--up and down hills and valleys.

We also spent a lot of time making the engine very smooth and very scaleable, so you can instantly zoom in and out, even on older 3D cards (the game looks surprisingly good even on a TNT2). But there's also a lot of high-end detail that will only be seen by gamers with modern video cards. We can fully max out a Radeon 9800 with all details [turned up].

GS: Now that the game is pretty far along in its development cycle, what part of it would you say works particularly well? Is there a specific aspect of the game you're most proud of?

PS: One aspect that I'm really proud of is the economy. Railroad Tycoon II, like most games of this type, had a very abstract economy, where each city simply demanded or supplied some cargo, and everybody relied only on you--the railroad--to do all transportation. In Railroad Tycoon 3, the economy is managed as a vast network. On a typical map, there are about 15,000 economy nodes spaced evenly across the map--not just in cities. Each one may have some inventory of each type of cargo and may have an independent price for that cargo (albeit closely tied to the prices of its neighbors). Cargo can move around this network on its own, in the same way that it did in real life, and cargo can move relatively easily up and down rivers and coastlines. So prices tend to be relatively flat along these waterways.

But, before the railroads, it was difficult and expensive to move cargo inland--especially if there were mountains in the way. So a key strategy for your railroad is to try to connect interior areas to coastlines and river towns. The player doesn't have to understand the first thing about economy nodes or how we constructed this model technically, but it will come across as a much more realistic economy that can't easily be 'gamed' using the kinds of goofy cheats/strategies that often work in these games. It's sort of a subtle thing. There's a lot of subtle stuff happening under the hood in Railroad Tycoon 3, but I think overall it'll make the game feel much more 'real' than any other strategy/tycoon game to date.

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