For many "Gold Edition" players, who'd paid $90 the edition that included a week's early access to the title beginning September 5, TDUSC was quite literally unplayable. This persisted through to the Silver players with three days' early access and into the full launch on September 12.
Most couldn't access the game at all — through a mixture of not receiving verification emails for the compulsory Nacon account and just straightforward server issues — while those that could found it only fleeting, getting booted out of even the early, single-player races due to connection issues.
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown Server Issues
KT Racing did make some acknowledgement of the server issues at the time, but its latest statement goes into a little more depth.
Commenting that the game sets new records for concurrent game sessions every day, KT states that — despite being a little clued in with the playtest and beta phases — it wasn't able to determine some of the "technical scenarios" until it hit full public player volumes.
For the most part it believes the majority of such issues have now been fixed, barring some persistent bugs, which will be addressed in due course.
It's been able to implement some solutions through essentially sending patches into the live environment, avoiding "server maintenance" periods that take the game offline again for everyone. However there's some bigger changes in the coming days that may require a server maintenance period or a game update patch.
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown Graphics Issues
One of our biggest issues during our review — on PlayStation 5 — was how the game performed visually, both in terms of image quality and lighting, and poor frame rates despite having the "Performance" 60fps option selected.
KT Racing has noted that this is an area where feedback has been heard and development is continuing. Although it doesn't look like it's going to be quite as soon as the server fixes, there is a major update in the works to improve "the visual experience". More on this will be communicated in the coming weeks.
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown First Major Patch
As well as continuing to address the server issues, a major patch is coming "very soon" across all platforms with "more than 300 fixes" within. KT Racing says that they vary in importance and are based on player feedback, but may include "visual issues on Hong Kong island" as well as gameplay balancing.
This latter item is something we noted during our review, but has subsequently been highlighted by the wider community with some AI (which pack out the grid if there's too few human players, like when nobody can get online!) obliterating human world records in given races and making them impossible to win.
At the moment, KT Racing hasn't given a specific time frame for these updates, but it's continuing to monitor feedback from players across social media, and a new "Dev Diary" video from the game's creative director — Alain Jarniou — will appear soon to highlight the response.
