Following a largely chaotic launch and some mixed reviews for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, KT Racing has addressed the game’s disappointed players and shared some information on the next steps.

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.

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 — including one connected to saves that players on GTPlanet have reported — 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.

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.

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.

Test Drive Unlimited: A Series History

If you're not familiar with the Test Drive Unlimited series, which hasn't had a new entry in 13 years, you might be unaware that it essentially pioneered the open-world online racing genre now dominated by Forza Horizon and The Crew.

The ingredients are right for the new game. Solar Crown, which is out now on Xbox, PlayStation and PC, is set in a roughly one-to-one scale Hong Kong, which turns out to be the perfect setting for an open-world racer. The combination of tight, detailed city streets, winding mountain passes and off-road trails offers plenty of variety, and every corner of the map feels hand-crafted.

The Game's Many Issues

It's just a shame the graphics engine can't keep up; on consoles in particular this looks like a game from a decade ago. You have the option of a performance mode that features compromised visual fidelity or a quality mode that serves up an unacceptably choppy experience.

Handling-wise it's a strange fish too. Braking for corners generates massive understeer, but lifting off for faster turns instead transforms it into pleasing, controllable oversteer. It's probably tuned to help casual players carve through traffic and, while you'll soon get your eye in, it's not as satisfying as Forza Horizon's driving model, which is as expertly balanced as a mountain goat.

While we're making comparisons with Forza, prospective players of Solar Crown will have to steel themselves for more gradual progress through the game. While Horizon is happy to shower you with gift cars, Solar Crown's approach is to keep you in individual vehicles for longer and force a more meaningful feeling of ownership by, you've guessed it, making them all extremely expensive. In a way, we respect the attempt to generate a real sense of connection to each car in your garage, but on the other hand we want to drive a Ferrari F40, please.

The main problem, though, is that everything in this game, from entering the open world to starting a race requires a solid connection to online servers that have been – during the early access period, with only a handful of players – flakier than the carpets at an eczema convention. The most infuriating thing is that this online requirement appears to be completely unnecessary: while the game will try and find you human opposition for your races, it can happily rustle up a grid of computer-controlled drivers and there's no real-money-to-pretend-money economy to keep locked down.

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown: A Cult Classic?

The server issues will almost certainly be ironed out over time, and while there's been some initial scrambling to fix the problem, we're anticipating more difficulties around the game's full launch when a greater number of players are dumped into the mix. When the dust settles what's left will be a relatively unexceptional online racing game blessed with an exceptional world to play in.

In time, we could see Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown becoming something of a cult classic, particularly if players embrace the Hong Kong map as a place to socialise online. For now, though, it's Test Drive Very Limited Indeed...

The Future of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown

This potential cult favourite has had a spectacularly catastrophic launch, and KT Racing is clearly working hard to fix the game's many issues. It is already attempting to fix the server issues and improve the visual experience, with a major patch coming soon.

Whether these changes will be enough to save Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: the game has a lot of potential. The Hong Kong map is beautiful and diverse, and the driving model is fun and engaging. If KT Racing can address the game's technical issues and improve the progression system, then Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown could be a truly great racing game.