Dear friends of truck simulation games,

Pavel Sebor has news about the Euro Truck Simulator 2 release: finally, they are ready to commit to a specific release time.

This piece of good news may however be mixed with a bit of disappointment, especially for the less patient among you. 

We have been working on the game for almost two years, sticking to the proverbial "when it's done" planning all this time. Now, at last we are confident that the status of "good enough to be proud of the achievement" is on the horizon.

We have set the release time to first week of August 2012.

We are aware that waiting almost 6 more months is a lot for many of you. We haven't announced any release date ourselves until now, but some of our distributors have been working with speculative time-frames for the release, raising hope among you of an earlier release.

Taking 30 months to develop a game is a tough decision to arrive to. It's testing the patience of you - fans of our games, it is testing the patience of our distributors, and it's definitely testing the dedication of the development team. However we are confident that it was The Right Thing to do - we needed enough time to re-factor the graphics engine at the core of the game and to develop the cool effects on top of it, we needed the time to build the high-detail 3D models to populate the virtual world with, it took considerable effort and time to establish industrial and commercial relationships that will elevate our games to a new level. Giving in to time pressure would only result in us having to make too many compromises. We have just one chance to make a good first impression.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 will bring a massive improvement over our previous games, but in fact, it will "only" be a major milestone along a long and windy road ahead. There are many cool features that we would like to add, but lots of things will have to wait for a future game or games. Our wish list is very long, and you are constantly helping us grow it even longer with your input and feedback. It would be a dream scenario to be able to pack all those features in - season changes through the year, cities teeming with pedestrians, other types of big vehicles to drive, being able to get out of the cabin and explore the world on foot, vehicle damage from collisions, real brands for everything in the world, loading and unloading cargo from the trailer, multiplayer, covering all of Europe from Iberian Peninsula to Ural mountains, from polar circle to Asia Minor, and then going beyond the confines of Europe to both North and South America, to Africa, Asia and Australia, the list goes on and on. Euro Truck Simulator 2 should be a solid step towards the goal of the ultimate truck simulator, but only the first such step (well, second actually). With your continuing help and support, we want to continue the effort beyond the release of the game and take the remaining steps in the years to come.

A series of screen shots from a delivery of goods from Plymouth to Cardiff. Note that while it is possible to choose either left or right position of the steering wheel when buying any truck in Euro Truck Simulator 2, the tester in this case preferred the continental setup atypical for vehicles in the United Kingdom. SCS Software leaves this up to the player to choose what is most comfortable for him. 

The support for truck lighting and illumination has been reworked for Euro Truck Simulator 2. Crucial features are still accessible by hotkeys, but all the functionality has been brought together under one roof in a handy user interface dialogue.

There is quite a lot of requests in your comments for showing more than just scenery and vehicles all the time. Indeed it's about time to reveal a bit more about the game, even though of course SCS Software will want to keep some things as a surprise until the release.

In the image's below you'll see how the banking works  

It isn't just real trucks that SCS is trying to haven in Euro Truck Simulator 2, they would love to make that game world filled with as much real stuff as possible. This is a long term effort that may not be fully realize with the initial release of Euro Truck Simulator 2, but they will be pursuing it over time. For now, here is a practicle example of this push, something that truck drivers stopping to take fuel while driving across Czech Republic might encounter...