Rant: Mods in Campaign & Other Gripes

[arminlinzbauer]

I really wanted to give Transport Fever 2 another chance in 2025. I missed the joy of building intricate networks, watching miniature trains move through mountains and valleys, and maybe adding a few mods to spice up the experience. But I should’ve trusted my gut—because it turns out the game is in an even worse state than when I first left it.

Let’s start with the campaign. It used to be possible to load a campaign save, enable mods, and just keep playing. No harm done. Now? Doing that results in “no tasks available” and missing campaign assets—like the distilleries in the Scotland map just being replaced with generic assets. So not only can’t I mod the campaign anymore, I can’t even continue a modded campaign save without it breaking assets. What a shame. Why was this taken away? Why punish a harmless bit of community freedom?

And don’t get me started on the so-called “Deluxe Edition”. $10 for what was advertised as “3 exclusive scenarios” and turned out to be nothing more than basic, unscripted maps? That’s not “exclusive content,” that’s a workshop-quality asset pack dressed up for a cash grab. I refunded that DLC the moment I saw the bait-and-switch. Being sold fluff is one thing—being lied to about what you’re buying is another. I never had a problem with supporting this game and Urban Games as a developer, but I hate being purposefully misled. This angered me to a point where I not only got a refund, but outright uninstalled the game for a few years.

The workshop is the heart and soul of this game. The modding community is what kept it alive long after launch. And yet, it feels like each update chips away at what little freedom players still had. What’s left now is a shell of something that could be great, but keeps getting in its own way.

I miss the version of TF2 where creativity wasn’t punished, where “modding the campaign” maybe wasn’t oficially supported, but possible if I so chose, and where Urban Games knew the value in its modding community instead of trying to compete with it for cash - and failed.

Urban Games: stop locking things down. Stop chasing “platform parity” or technical purity at the cost of what makes your game fun. Give us back our sandbox.