Ever heard of a trucking RPG? No? Well, here’s your chance: Road Truckers: New Beginning is calling itself the "first true trucking RPG." A major playtest should soon show what that actually looks like in practice.

Maybe the folks at Road Studio S.A. thought: "There are already plenty of truck sims out there—but what if we turned the whole thing into an RPG?" Well, that’s got my attention.

Sure, Road Truckers: New Beginning won’t let you pelt gas station attendants with old tires because fuel prices are out of control—and the first screenshots don’t exactly suggest Pokémon-style truck battles either. But it does promise relationship-building, player choices, plus quest and progression systems.

No, you won’t be building relationships with NPCs by yelling at them from the cab. You can get out of your rig, though apparently you won’t be exploring the entire open world on foot. And if the idea of a trucking RPG sounds weirdly appealing to you, there’s good news: you’ll soon be able to sign up for a playtest over at Steam.

Yes, "soon." I have no idea why the PR people didn’t just give us an actual date—maybe because this way I get to write one more news post about the game. You sneaky devils. 🙂

The playtest will have more meat than some full releases

Creative Director Michal Puczynski had this to say about the scope of the planned playtest:

"Our maps are massive. We have two in the game, and want to add more in the game's life cycle. The first one, smaller than the second but still huge, will be fully available in the playtest – and it's just a fraction of the roads you'll find in the full game."

Wonderful—so the trucks in Road Truckers: New Beginning won’t be trapped on a single kilometer of road. The playtest is, of course, meant to put the sim’s stability and all its features through their paces on a larger scale. It’ll also teach players the basics, like how to make sure their trucker eats, sleeps, heals illnesses (wait... are we getting smoke inhalation as a status effect?), upgrades their base, uses the workshop, and so on.

So yes, at least going by the developers’ own pitch, this game is aiming to do quite a bit more than straight simulation peers like Euro Truck Simulator 2—which, for the record, I’ve also sunk plenty of hours into. But what exactly does this thing offer beyond what’s already been mentioned?

Truck sim with a story

Road Studio S.A.’s game even comes with a story: New Beginning is set in the fictional country of Vale Rico. Its roads and settlements have fallen apart, and your trucking business is meant to help turn that around. In other words, you’re rebuilding a forgotten region. According to the official info, you’ll meet "people" along the way, form relationships, and shape Vale Rico’s development through your decisions.

For all its RPG dressing, the core is still about hauling all kinds of cargo, managing your truck, customizing it mechanically and visually, and reviving the local economy. Truck customization, by the way, is described as very extensive, and the game world is also supposed to be significantly larger than in its predecessor Alaskan Road Truckers (formerly Alaskan Truck Simulator).

How interesting that world will actually be remains to be seen—especially since the quality of those promised collectibles will probably matter quite a bit.

Pretty steep hardware requirements

Veteran armchair truckers might also want to know that Road Truckers: New Beginning supports both wheels and controllers (Xbox, PlayStation). What really jumped out at me, though, were the hardware requirements listed in the press email. On the low end, a GeForce GTX 1060 for minimum settings plus 16 GB of RAM already felt a little suspicious. And for "visual quality"—which I’m choosing to interpret as "max settings"—the stated minimum is a GeForce RTX 3080 and 32 GB of RAM, which is pretty wild.

You can check out the latest trailer for the game below; personally, I’m not seeing where that kind of hardware appetite is coming from. Not that New Beginning looks bad; but to me, this has all the makings of poor optimization.

Right now, Road Truckers: New Beginning is planned for PC and PlayStation 5. It’s safe to assume the PC version, currently slated for Q2, will arrive first, especially since the PS5 release is still sitting at a vague "2026." And at least you won’t have to buy the this game blind: publishers Feel Good Games and Movie Games S.A. want to release a playable demo soon after the playtest.