Euro Truck Simulator 2 is genuinely one of my all-time favourite games, and I say that without a hint of irony. In it you drive a variety of heavy goods vehicles around Europe, and while that sounds like the most boring thing imaginable on paper, it’s bizarrely compelling when you’re behind the wheel.
You can read sim expert Tim Stone’s review here, or read about my experiences playing it with the Oculus Rift.
And if you’ve experienced everything the vanilla game has to offer, there’s a truckload of brilliant user-made mods available online. I’ve had some ideas for mods of my own, but a lack of any art or coding talent whatsoever means they’ll probably never leave my head. So here they are, for posterity.
If any skilled modders, or even developers from SCS Software, are reading this: you can have these ideas FOR FREE.
Smuggling
You can haul all kinds of exciting cargo in Euro Truck Simulator 2, from wood shavings and yoghurt to forklifts and big pipe things. But wouldn’t it be amazing if you could transport illegal cargo too? For a massive amount of extra money you could transport drugs (crystal meth hidden in chicken batter, maybe), illegal immigrants, or stolen electrical goods. But in doing so you would run the risk of being caught by random checks at border crossings, or being sniffed out by passing cops. Trying to move tonnes of illegal goods through multiple countries would be exhilaratingly tense.
Hallucinations
Picture the scene. It’s the dead of night, you’ve been driving for hours, and your fatigue meter is almost full. You haven’t slept for days, then suddenly the cars in front of you begin to melt into the road. An eerie, porcelain face appears in the moon and screams. You turn your head and there’s a dead body in the passenger seat. Its head turns, slowly, and it whispers “Die.” Then you black out. You wake up in a garage with a big repair bill and curse not stopping at that last motel for a snooze. These creepy hallucinations would be an imaginative punishment for not taking regular breaks.
Dangerous cargo
You do actually get to transport dangerous cargo in Euro Truck 2, including flammable liquids, explosives, and ammunition, but they don’t really change anything except for the weight of your trailer. I’d love it if these types of deliveries could potentially be deadly if you have an accident. Imagine driving around knowing that the petrol tank tethered to your truck could explode in a ball of flame if you crashed. This same feeling of peril could come from fragile cargo too, like panes of glass or rare antiques. Danger and edge-of-seat thrills aren’t really part of the Euro Truck vibe, but it would be fun.
Sickness
You stop at a service station and you’re hungry. You buy a questionable egg mayo sandwich and a few miles down the road you feel your stomach begin to growl and bubble. You have no choice but to stick your head out of the window and blow chunks all over the dual carriageway. For the rest of the drive, the urge to puke will strike you suddenly—and it could happen while navigating a tricky road or screaming down a motorway at top speed. You can choose to hurl all over the steering wheel and upholstery, and keep your eyes on the road, but you’ll have to pay to clean it up.
Hitchhikers
It can get lonely out there on the open road. So wouldn’t it be cool if, along the way, you could pick up random NPC hitchhikers. They’ll appear at the side of the road, thumb in the air, and you can decide whether to ignore them or bring them aboard. They’ll have different personalities, some of which will be funny or entertaining, while others will be massively annoying. And maybe—and this will only happen rarely—they’ll be crazed murderers like Rutger Hauer in ‘The Hitcher’ and they’ll just sit there and stare at you for a bit before murdering you, causing an instant game over.
Truck modification
You can mod your truck in the vanilla game to an impressive degree, but they’re all steeped in boring old realism. I’d love to be able to /really/ modify my truck, adding spikes on the wheels for slow drivers, a ram on the front to shove through traffic jams, and exhausts that spit fire. I want to create a truck that wouldn’t look out of place in a Mad Max film, and become a feared road warrior that the police don’t even dare to challenge. I realise that this idea sort of defeats the point of Euro Truck 2, being a realistic sim and all, but that’s the beauty of mods, right?
Extreme weather
I love the rain in Euro Truck 2. The first thing I do when I install the game is set ‘rain probability’ to high. It’s just so damn relaxing. But I’m wondering whether some more extreme, freak weather events would add an extra element of excitement to the game. Intense storms that reduce visibility to almost zero, wild winds that blow your trailer from side to side, snow that clogs up the roads, or scorching sun that melts and pops your tyres. This would probably work better in the forthcoming American Truck Simulator, though, as the weather in Europe is mostly pretty temperate.
Road rage
I swear at other drivers a lot when I’m playing Euro Truck 2, because they’re god damn idiots. But what the game sorely needs is an in-game insult button, with NPC cars that respond. I want to flip the bird at my fellow road users and call them assholes, and I want them to shout insults back at me. Maybe if things got really extreme a fight could break out, determined by a Total War auto-resolve-style system, and you could either win or wake up in hospital and lose a few hours. It’s always a bit immersion-breaking when a car rams into you, then just drives away without stopping. This is the solution.
Toilet breaks
Euro Truck 2 has fatigue and petrol, but what about your driver needing to go to the toilet? This is probably the most achievable of my dream mod list so far, but maybe it would add a level of unnecessary realism. Imagine the possibilities, though, like an extreme diarrhea ‘endurance mode’ where you have to make it to the next service station without covering your employer’s pristine cabin in human mud. This could be combined with the sickness mod a few slides back to turn the game into a kind of disgusting, bum-based survival sim.
Yeah, I think I should stop now.
