It’s been a very long wait, but the release of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is finally just around the corner, set for September 12. Developer KT Racing provided some insight into its post-launch content plans in a recent video, and one of them is a huge surprise: an entire additional map, to supplement the Hong Kong Island locale that the title will launch with. What’s more, longtime fans will be sure to love it, as it’ll take the championship back to Ibiza—the familiar backdrop of Test Drive Unlimited 2.
Ibiza will launch during the game’s second in-game “season,” which arrives in late December. The footage shown comes with a disclaimer that it’s a work in progress, but you’d imagine with four months between now and the release of an entirely new open world, what we see has got to be close to what will ship. It’s certainly not the most stunning representation of a place like this that I’ve seen in a racing game, but it’s a very different vibe than Hong Kong, and the déjà vu for TDU2 fans will probably be immense. Additionally, a character from that game has been teased as making a return on Ibiza in Solar Crown, if you’re really into Test Drive Unlimited lore.
The video goes into other content plans, covering new avatar apparel, car exterior upgrades, and reward cars available through TDU’s own version of battle passes, called the Solar Pass. It’s one of those systems where, if you play enough during a set period and meet certain parameters, you get goodies. Typically you have to pay to gain access to these, but it seems for TDUSC they’ll be free for the first two seasons. Eventually, the game will add a casino—another TDU2 staple—and KT shared that it’d like to bring motorcycles to the game and give players the ability to buy houses and apartments sometime in the future.
Personally, none of that really appeals to me, aside from riding motorcycles. The rich person fantasy conceit of TDU was never what I liked about the original game, set in Hawaii—I just got a thrill from exploring that immense map and shopping for and driving cars. But with all these extraneous, non-gameplay additions, it’s clear that KT is gunning to make Solar Crown a sort of Grand Theft Auto-lite, specifically for gearheads and, you know, without all the sex and violence. I’m sure there’s a market for that, but at the end of the day, I’m looking forward to hitting the streets.
TDU Solar Crown releases September 12 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, and PC. There’s supposedly been a Switch version in development, but given how the last-gen ports were canceled in 2022, it’s hard to imagine how the game could still reach Nintendo’s ancient handheld.
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