The Game Shifts Into a Higher Gear

Since the release of the game yesterday at 10 a.m., we've received a flood of feedback and we're thrilled to see so many of you excited about the changes introduced this year!

Your enthusiasm means a lot to the entire team. What you're playing today is the result of many months (and even years) of hard work, and it's incredibly rewarding to know you're enjoying it. If you're having a great time, we’d be hugely grateful if you could leave a positive review on Steam, it really helps us and supports the future of the game.

Thanks again for your support and most importantly, enjoy the ride with TDF 2025!

[dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/2511320/Tour_de_France_2025/"]

For this devblog, we won’t be focusing on a single topic, but rather going over all the changes made to the game to make it more enjoyable and realistic.

Let’s start with the game’s onboarding, which has been revamped with a welcome sequence on the first launch. This allows you to adjust brightness, sound level, and default difficulty without needing to go into the settings menu. It also includes options for color adjustments for colorblind players. These quick settings can later be modified in the Options menu, where all the usual settings remain available.

Steam players will have access to additional advanced settings that were previously unavailable, allowing them to fine-tune performance, such as rider detail level, view distance, or motion blur.

This might seem minor, but it brings us closer to realism: the game now handles certain special letters better. Characters like the “ž” in Primož or the “á” and “í” in Iván García were not properly supported before. Some letters might have been displayed correctly, but mechanics like having names pronounced by the speaker during the podium ceremony didn’t work. Now, more riders' names will be pronounced on the podium, with spelling more consistent with their native origin.

Unfortunately, the “č” in Pogačar still isn’t handled properly — a particularly tricky case we hope to resolve by 2026.

This year, we’ve taken audio updates a bit further. As mentioned, more rider names will be pronounced during podiums, and as always, stages come with their own dedicated commentary. We’ve also refreshed the menu environment. The sound effects have been reworked to bring a bit of freshness to an area that hasn’t evolved in the last 10 years.

Thanks to the new engine, we’ve been able to add many more jerseys to the game. While we were previously limited to around ten jerseys for national champions, the game can now handle over fifty — including the new African champion jersey.

We also took this opportunity, with help from Tomgtr7, to redesign the individual Pro Cycling leader jersey, which didn’t seem to be popular with the community 🙂.

At the same time, we revised the rules for wearing this jersey based on your feedback: the World Champion jersey will now take priority if a rider qualifies for both. We've also updated these rules to reflect the new UCI regulation, allowing a national time trial champion to wear their jersey during a team time trial.

Removing this technical limitation also allowed us to add 8 national teams for the World Championships, resulting in a more packed peloton with 25 teams at the start.

The new engine also lets us go further in visual race reproduction. Each ASO race now includes specific sponsorships we can more easily replicate in-game, making each race more unique and recognizable.

Beyond sponsorships, we’ve also increased the number of bike frames and helmets.