This past week saw the release of the open-world M.M.O styled racer Test Drive Unlimited 2, which lets people from all over the world cruise around paradises like Hawaii and Ibiza in a wide variety of exotic cars.
There was however, trouble in paradise as the opening weekend quickly turned for the worse as multiple complaints started to flood the internet on Friday evening thanks to massive game-breaking issues and exploits forcing the developers to disable entire online components.
Everything started to go awry when Twitter became flooded with tweets about people being unable to actually get into the game at all. Once the start button was hit (Xbox 360 version only), instead of loading the game up, the background imagery merely looped over and over again. It became apparent that the issue had to do with the TDU2 servers, and on the gamers side the connections weren’t even timing out, so it just remained in a continuous loop.
The blokes at Eden Games running who were also running and monitoring the official Twitter account @TDU2 have had a very busy weekend that pretty much kicked off with the following tweet:
By the next day they had issued another statement via Twitter:
The issues ran on well into Saturday, when the ability to actually get into the game itself seemed to have been mostly rectified. The joy was short lived though as even more issues began to present themselves
The game’s guild-like clubs were completely disabled for the entirety of the opening weekend, apparently due to some sort of exploit that needed rectifying, which Eden saying in another tweet that people should only expect them to come online by Monday latest (PST).
Even more issues started creeping out of the woodwork as even more complaints rolled in ranging from server connection and dropping issues, corrupt save games, environments/roads not loading up, missing DLC and more. We personally suffered from major server issues when trying to link up a few local drivers in the game as different players would constantly drop in and out of the servers and eventually had to give it up.
The Test Drive Unlimited 2 forums have been busy to say the least, and if you need help you can also head over there to a forum page called Members Helping Members to seek assistance.
Another forum page has also been set up that is being updated with the current status of the different issues and can be viewed by clicking here.
I am personally a big fan of the TDU series and while I have already had some great moments this weekend, it’s been a real disappointment to have so much of the opening weekend experience destroyed because of issues that lead to frustration and more.
Eden Games look to be very hard at work on all the issues so we hope that everything will be up and running as well as consistent very soon. Good on them for being so active on Twitter and working so hard to communicate with their fans and the community, but at the same time, it’s obvious that something very wrong went down this weekend.
It looks as though a bigger (and open) beta should have taken for Eden and Atari to test the waters, as its clear as day that when it counted, they were caught with their Ferrari branded pants down on the floor.
We are currently working on a review of Test Drive Unlimited 2 and will have a finalised version available once the major initial issues have been sorted out, so stay tuned.
Last Updated: February 14, 2011
