Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown Definitely Looks Like A Game In Which You Drive Expensive Cars In An Open World

Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown sure has taken quite a while to get here, from the earliest rumblings of the game’s development way back in 2016 to the initial tease in 2020 and a string of missed release targets since. All that time, we hadn’t seen actual gameplay footage — until this week. Publisher Nacon and developer KT Racing unveiled the game in motion in a 35-minute pre-recorded video Wednesday, and it certainly does exist.

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Backing up, a very vocal and loyal group of fans has been pining for a new TDU entry for some time. It all started in 2006, with the release of the original Test Drive Unlimited on Xbox 360, PS2 and PSP. The 360 version in particular was a massively ambitious game; in an era before Forza Horizon, it promised and MMORPG-type always-online experience where you could cruise a one-to-one scale replica of Hawaii’s Big Island, O’ahu, in a wide range of performance cars while helping yourself to houses and new threads. It was buggy, sure, but it felt like a distinctly next-gen experience at the time, and the thrill of exploration in a racing game was refreshing and novel before it became an inescapable buzzword in the genre.

Credit: Nacon via YouTube

2011’s Test Drive Unlimited 2 added Ibiza alongside O’ahu and, regrettably, a story that tried way too hard and frivolous casino minigames that played out like Second Life for influencers. There was some driving, too. And it’s from TDU2 where Solar Crown appears to pull most of its influence.

Wednesday’s session mostly consisted of three-on-three multiplayer gameplay with players split into the game’s two faction: “Streets” and “Sharps.” “Streets,” in this case, being hypebeast punks who like JDM machines, muscle cars and big trucks, and “Sharps” preferring expensive European metal and formal evening attire. You’ll have to choose a side whether you like it or not.

Graphically, the game is mediocre in its alpha state. Solar Crown is set on Hong Kong Island, and while some of the denser areas look decent, flat textures and a total dearth of traffic cars or civilians leaves the entire experience coming off sterile and empty. To make matters worse, the game never appeared to run at a stable or high framerate during the entire footage, which would have been less worrying, perhaps, if it at least looked more impressive in a single frame. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of aimlessly tooling around in Assetto Corsa’s fan-made Shutoko Revival Project mod, except in a game built by a team of paid employees over many years that will cost $70.

Our six tour guides also spent plenty of time crashing into what few non-player cars populated the barren highways, and smacking walls or swapping ends when faced with tight corners. Now, I don’t bring this up to criticize their performance — the folks playing the game were developers and veteran racing game content creators like BlackPanthaa and Team VVV — but rather to question the quality of the physics at this stage in development. Despite the heavily produced nature of the session, other players’ cars were also jumping around and teleporting small distances quite often on stream.

But the real magic happened when our gaggle of rather stiff avatars stepped foot into a nightclub, a place where Solar Crown players can gather with a dimly-lit room full of identical men in white t-shirts and light-wash jeans and press a button the D-pad, which begins a limb-flailing animation. I assume these clones will be replaced with a more varied crowd of bodies and also some other players’ characters too when the game goes public, but still, this is an image I won’t soon forget:

At this point, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown is slated for an “early 2024” release, following earlier delays from September 2022 and then sometime in 2023. Before that happens, Ubisoft’s Ivory Tower team, which includes developers from Eden Games who were actually responsible for the first two TDU installments, will release The Crew Motorfest — another open-world racer that looks to take more inspiration from Forza Horizon set in, of all places, O’ahu.