People Who Paid Extra To Play The New Test Drive Early Can’t

Test Drive Unlimted Solar Crown, the long-awaited next entry in the popular online open-world racing series, launched yesterday for folks who purchased the game’s $90 Gold Edition. Unfortunately for them, the game has been mostly unplayable due to server issues.

The last Test Drive Unlimted launched back in 2011 and let people drive around in awesome sports cars in an MMO-like open-world racing experience. And after waiting 13 years to play a new Test Drive Unlimited, players who purchased the most expensive version of the game were able to start playing on September 5 ahead of the racing game’s official September 12 launch. Or, well, that was the plan.

On September 5, developers KT Racing posted a blog on Steam announcing that the game was now live for Gold Edition owners. In that same post, the team admitted that there were some “connection issues” that were preventing people from playing. Then on September 6, in a follow-up post, the devs addressed the widespread server problems.

“Our teams are working tirelessly to stabilize the servers so that everyone can enjoy the game as soon as possible,” said KT Racing, before going on to list the following efforts “to address these network 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.
• Although each solution has helped partially, some of them have also introduced new technical challenges.We are actively working to resolve all the network issues and thank you again for your patience.

That post was later updated, with the devs explaining that things were improving and that they were continuing to work on the issues.

Meanwhile, over on Reddit and in the game’s official Discord, you can find numerous players sharing images of error messages, never-ending loading screens, and other problems. Many are reporting that they can’t complete races against other players and can only drive around the open world. Others can’t even get the game to load. And when it does load, there have been complaints about numerous glitches.

Solar Crown doesn’t support offline play. So until the servers stabilize and the situation improves, players who paid extra to play seven days early can’t take advantage of that perk.

Hopefully, things improve by September 10, as that’s when people who purchased the cheaper Silver Edition of the game will be able to start playing.

However, I also hope that this is yet another reminder to devs and publishers that if you are promising early access to folks who pay more for your online game, then you’d better make sure the servers actually work. And for gamers, I’d recommend waiting until launch, saving some money, and playing the game when it’s actually playable.

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