Transport Fever 3 is a great jumping-on point, but it won’t tell you what to do

Transport Fever 3 is a great opportunity for developer Urban Games. It’s built up a faithful following with its logistics-led brand of infrastructure management sims, and its next installment could prove the breakout that pushes it up to the attention level of Cities Skylines 2 or Manor Lords. At Gamescom, we sat down with the studio’s community manager Sam Bennett to talk about how its upcoming city builder straddles the line between welcoming new players and catering to long-time series veterans.

It’s been nine years since the first Transport Fever, and six since TF2. In that time, Urban Games has earned itself a reputation for crafting some of the best city builders on PC, especially for those looking for more of an infrastructure-driven experience harkening back to classic PC games of the ’90s such as Transport Tycoon. It hasn’t yet reached quite the widespread audience achieved by Cities Skylines, but with CS2 still in the process of finding its footing, Transport Fever 3 could be perfectly positioned to become Urban’s biggest yet. But how do you appeal to more players without alienating your existing fans?

Bennett divides the game’s audience into three. “You’ve got the hardcore optimizers and min-maxers at one side of things, and they want to get ultimate efficiency over everything else, at the far end of the spectrum. On the other side, you’ve got the beautiful city builders who want to spend hours and hours and hours planting shrubs to recreate their favorite station in the world, or a city street.

“And in the middle, you’ve got the happy-go-lucky bunch who, as long as they are broadly succeeding, are not too bothered about if it’s making a massive amount of profit. But at the same time, they do want it to be quite nice to look at. So in order to facilitate the guys who just want to build we make it so that they can play without any money concerns whatsoever – they can just turn it off.

“To facilitate the guys who want an active tycoon game, we’ve made it so that the challenge can ramp matching their current level of success.” Transport Fever 3 leans into this more than ever. “Now it’s not just about ‘A goes to B and prints money forever.’ Now it’s all about ‘A goes to B, but you’ve really annoyed two cities in the process.’ And if you want them to grow, you’re going to need to start to think about making the right deliveries to them and making them happy with the way that you operate.”

Pleasing the hardcore tycoon fans and the aesthetics-driven builders is sorted, but what about that middle group? “We’ve got gamers who aren’t the most hardcore train fans, they’re not the most hardcore tycoon fans, but they kind of go, ‘I quite like trains, I think they’re alright. Oh, I quite like airplanes as well, and I like ships.'” To help ease them in, Transport Fever 3 “allows new players to play in the simplest way possible,” Bennett says.

“Maybe their vehicles never require any maintenance, or maybe some of the side-offer jobs that you get come in through subsidies. Maybe they offer super-wealthy amounts of cash to give you that injection to allow you to experiment without the fear of going bust. We ease people in.” Bennett notes that “the more difficult thing for new players is teaching them the mechanics and all the different functionality – but the big one is, we’re not going to tell you what to do.”

Transport Fever 3 wants you to set your own goals and objectives, he explains. “What is it you want to achieve?” The team is “trying to teach new players to embrace their imagination and follow their nose and see where it takes them on an adventure in transport.” All of these changes to cater to a fresh audience come with an important caveat, however.

“What you don’t want is for people who love the game to turn up to the new one and go, ‘Well, they’ve ruined it,'” Bennett emphasizes. “You’ve taken away things people were really enjoying, or decided, ‘We don’t like the way everybody used this particular function, so we’re going to throw that away and do it a different way instead.’ You’ll have players who say ‘You’ve changed and you’ve ruined it, and it’s terrible.’

“We always try to think of ‘add but don’t take away’ so it will feel familiar to someone who’s played before,” Bennett continues. “They’ll think, “I can see the graphics are nicer, I can see that the UI is different, but the game still feels the same.’ But then, after they play for an hour, they’ll realize, ‘I’m having to think about this game very differently from the way I thought about the previous one.’

“There’s no more fire-and-forget route building, where you build it once and it prints you money until the end of time,” You’ll have to make careful considerations about what you want to do, Bennett explains, “and they all feel like the right answer, but they also all feel like the wrong answer. We want it to be a constant dilemma of ‘What is the best solution to this problem?'”

Urban Games is eager to avoid potentially half-baked features, but it’s quick to consider how tools will actually be used. A full day/night cycle would be interesting, Bennett suggests, but builders would just turn it off because you can’t work at night. Instead, there’s just a slider you’re able to use. “It’s entirely cosmetic. Players wanted it, we’ve added it, it’s as straightforward as that.

“To ease new people into the game, you make it easy for them,” he concludes. “And the trick is not the mechanics. The trick is, ‘What would you like? What would you like to build? This is your world – how do you shape it?'”

Transport Fever is set to launch in 2026. You can wishlist it now on Steam.

Can’t get enough of the tycoon life? We’ve rounded up the best management games and the best simulation games on PC for plenty more such delights.

What type of player are you? And what’s your favorite transport-management tool? Let us know in the PCGamesN community Discord server. Perhaps I’m basic, but I really do love a good roundabout or three.

Additional reporting by Lauren Bergin at Gamescom.