Picture the scene: You’ve waited 13 years for a new Test Drive Unlimited instalment. Caught up in the hype, you have purchased the all-singing-all-dancing Gold Edition for $89.99. It comes with seven days of early access, which opened up today.
Except, only for some. You see since 8 am UTC today, 5th August 2024, Solar Crown has been flagging. A litany of login errors and network issues have besieged players across all three platforms.
In our experience, it has been possible to enter a session on PS5 by repeatedly trying to start a new game. Eventually, we connected and played the game with no obvious issues. Leaving the game and restarting, however, meant returning to the home screen and yet more errors.
The Traxion team has not been able to play the game on PC, despite numerous attempts. A prompt sometimes appears with a queue number, which is reminiscent of trying to buy Oasis tickets via Ticketmaster.
TDU SC is an online-only title. The network connection does mean that you encounter other players organically in your world, and can complete any challenge in the game with friends or without. But, it comes at the behest of stable infrastructure.
“Our teams are working tirelessly to stabilise the servers so that everyone can enjoy the game as soon as possible,” reads the statement issued by the Kylotonn development team.
Four strategies have, according to the Nacon-owned outfit, been attempted so far to resolve the issues:
- “Our server team has actively investigated the root causes of connection failures.”
- “We have implemented server optimizations to handle the high volume of players trying to access the game.”
- “We have increased server capacity to reduce queues and connection failures.”
- “Our quality assurance team has conducted thorough tests to ensure the stability of our fixes before deploying them.”
However, so far, this has not resulted in a fix for the patchy performance.
“Although each solution has helped partially, some of them have also introduced new technical challenges,” continues KT Racing.
Solar Crown is the first MMO-style title to use the KT Engine technology platform, although thanks to the Isle of Man TT games, not the first open-world game.
“We are actively working to resolve all the network issues and thank you again for your patience.”
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown releases in ‘regular’ form on 12th September 2024 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Update: 7th September – Players who have been affected by network errors during the Gold Edition’s early access are set to be compensated with in-game items.
