The Freightliner Cascadia is a flagship line of trucks in the real world. It’s a relatively recent addition to US transportation, having begun production in 2008 and continues to be built for US roads and highways today. It’s largely absent in overseas markets though, where the older Freightliner Century-class trucks still rule the road. So why talk about this on a gaming blog? Because the truck class has just been given a digital license in American Truck Simulator.
Now developer SCS Software has finally added the trucks to the game, giving those that enjoy freighting across digital landscapes something new to drive. It has been some time since we first heard about this truck being added, it seems to have taken a lot longer than expected. The version running in-game even sounds right, as the developer took time to get that correct. The variant is the standard diesel variant, instead of the all-electric e-Cascadia that’s become more and more common. No worries about pollution in the digital world, so why not.
The team at the studio has also been hard at work on other related projects. A graphical overhaul for both American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 that includes a rework of the visuals to aid with immersion. There’s even a new ETS 2 expansion that increases the map size to include the Iberian peninsula.
The graphical update and the Iberia expansion got pushed to next year amid the slowdown of 2020. The team has been working hard to release the changes in stages across various patches with the Iberia expansion including the “first major release to benefit from the new light [enhancements] at launch.” The developer will then deploy another set of changes as they have to update “all the models and textures of both games.” Due to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, this whole process was pushed into 2021.
American Truck Simulator is one of the many competitors for sim game crown with other titles like Mudrunner and their sister title, Euro Truck Simulator 2. The American version of the game features much of the same flair as the Euro version with many more US truck designs and big city environments scattered all over parts of the US landscape. SCS also recently released the Colorado map expansion which added the mid-western state to the ever-growing in-game map.
