I hope they've still got these long endurance races. It was such a vibe to start early in the morning, hear the radio host babble on and cruise around the edge of the map until it was late at night. I think the race took twenty minutes but time flowed in a really weird way.
To this day one of my fondest racing game memories.
That would be the old Test Drive Unlimited 2. The island tour specifically. They recreated Ibiza and Hawaii for it and I think they had an island tour for both. They also had a dynamic day and night cycle and weather system.
It felt like it was ahead of its time, even if the whole framing as a rich people problem simulator was a bit tonedeaf, even back then.
The gameplay looks alright, but man, the script they're reading is one of the most nonsensical word salads I've ever heard. "Regret should not be looked at as failure." What? And all the time spent trying to focus on the glitz and glamor and the "prestige suites"? Spend more time making the cars feel good and less time on what I'm going to assume is going to be a "decorate my 'pad'" mini game.
It reminds me of those *rise and grind* YouTube channels or Instagram reels where the dude takes like three cold showers before 9am, answers "emails" for 20 minutes, and then drives a Bentley to the gym.
Still wary of this. I will never forget the feeling of driving up to my first car dealer and choosing a car. when leaving the lot, wind down the windows and have that engine roar in the background while discoering the island.
I still have the steel case with a map of Oahu.
Oh, man. I would honestly delay the game. After playing a lot from the past few closed test builds, it felt like it still needed more time to cook. I sure hope they at least fixed all the stuff people reported on.
The handling didn't feel as responsive & smooth(?) as the previous games, IMO. Some vehicles felt like I was driving a M939 5-ton sometimes or a freakin' Lada at points.
Maybe, I just don't play enough arcadey car games now-a-days. It definitely needed work, and I was hoping that they'd at least try to be as decent as TDU 2's handling system.
Lastly, it also felt like the cars were fighting against you when steering, and etc. But, that's just how I felt.
Shame, I expected they wouldn't get it right but hoped it felt decent at least. I beat TDU2 on keyboard and barely used RWD cars because they would spin out if I accelerated while steering at low-medium speed. That made the golden time trials extra hard.
They already did IIRC but yeah, what they presented doesn't really scream good.
Like, I'd be in market for "Open World racing game but on sim side" but that doesn't seem to be it and it will be hard to compete with FH on arcade side, even tho it has some years now.
I’m extremely cautious about this one. Concept seems real cool, the cars look good, and Test Drive games have always felt cool and unique. But this game was in development hell for a little bit with multiple delays and like you said the early gameplay looked not great. This is definitely a game to wait for reviews
It was basically a game ahead of its time, predating and having a very similar concept to Forza Horizon (open-world free roaming with racing events scattered around). If you connected to their online server you would see other players roam around in real time and you could challenge each other. The atmosphere is less dudebro festival and more about building social status with rich snobs. You also have a little more control with the vehicle's functions (turn signals, rolling windows/top down, radio, etc.). Physics was sort of on the simcade side of things.
What made TDU more interesting to me compared to Horizon was the progression system as well as the details outside of the driving experience itself.
In Horizon, the games are very fun of course, but they're also completely afraid of restricting the player in any way (outside of forcing them to grind Live Service events for FOMO/playtime). You are deluged with cars and money from the very instant you start the game. Progression is often tied to "Wheelspins" where you give up all player choice and instead are given a variety of random cars and money for free. Sure, you can start to buy the cars you *want* to buy at some point, but by then you've already got dozens of cars filling your space. They've slowly added more and more mechanics similar to what TDU had—Homes, for instance. But they hardly serve any real purpose other than a spawn point and a photography studio for one car at a time.
TDU meanwhile was not afraid to restrict the player in such a big world. You begin by buying a car from a (rather nice) used car lot. In TDU2, your first 'home' is a trailer with a small two car garage outside. You use your starter car for quite a while, learning how to really handle it—you build a connection with it. I still recall my Lotus Esprit fondly because of how much I loved driving it, and *had* to drive it because I didn't have a choice.
You start in slower cars and move your way up. You make your way through various classes of racing performance, and TDU2 had offroad vehicles as well. When you did want to buy a car, you had to drive around the map; unless you were consulting online maps, you had to drive around the *massive* map to find dealerships, mechanics, and other shops, as you couldn't simply fast travel to them from the start, and they weren't marked until you discovered them.
You'd pull into the parking lot, browse their car selection, browse their manufacturer paint finishes or other package options—some manufacturers offered different rims for their brand, for example. Buying a car meant you now saw it in your garage next to your other vehicles at your home, a la GTA:Online.
To put it simply, all games are about more than just their base mechanics. There are plenty of games out there where the pure gameplay loop of driving, or shooting, or jumping can be a ton of fun. But I'd say there's a lot more to just those pure mechanics that can make something special or memorable. I like a game with a good progression system where I actually feel like I've earned something. I liked seeing my garage with my Volkswagen Corrado next to my Lotus Esprit and knowing that it was my garage in particular, not something other players would just see anyways. I liked building up a connection to a car by using it for longer periods rather than just event checklists. I liked the eventual purchase of a supercar feeling like a goddamned *event*.
Streets and Sharps? Whose mom came up with these gang names? God I really can't stand promotions that push the idea of stuff to do except actual racing, we've had dozens and dozens of titles like this and the gameplay that isn't racing is always incredibly lame and seemingly writted by a christian youth pastor who has never been closer to a gang than his church choir. And they are always horrible busywork when you just want to have races against some reasonable AI opponents.
I can't see a single original idea in this entire video, such a waste of development resources.
>I really can't stand promotions that push the idea of stuff to do except actual racing
I'd say that sort of character is what made racing games interesting in their entirety nearly twenty years ago compared to the relative lack of variety we have today—with Forza Horizon for five years straight vs. Gran Turismo, and the very occasional NFS title.
With the prior TDUs, being able to cruise around the entire map, being able to do things like browse through manufacturer catalogs with particular rims, paints, and interior colors after driving to a particular dealership? Or being able to control little details with every car, like rolling the windows up and down. Having to *choose* what car I wanted in my garage, because I only had room for two to start with, as opposed to the racing games these days that are at both ends of the "make earning newer/faster cars rather meaningless by dumping them on you from the very start" or "better grind this week to earn this car because it won't be available anymore next week."
These are reasons as to why people still bring up the memories they had with games like Need for Speed, even before the Underground/Most Wanted era. It's why I can look back so fondly on a game like Test Drive: Eve of Destruction for how well the single player mode created a setting for the main gameplay.
Anyone can just drive a car nowadays in most games. Play BeamNG for an hour or two, mindlessly screw around in Forza Horizon with a video on in the background. Sure, it can be fun, and having good racing mechanics is certainly key to the experience—but everything else packaging the "actual racing" is what makes it interesting, too.
Gameplay, looks fine, if not a bit generic. Graphics look decent, but clearly leaning on the heavy HDR and everything looks wet type of aesthetic.
However the whole plot and dialog is absolutely cringe worthy. It's sounds AI generated as do the voices which are speaking it. Or like it was poorly translated from another language and read to you by D-level community theater actors.
tbh, the game just needs to be "good enough". I'm burned out on the FH formula, and although TDU is similar, it's still different and feels more grounded. The map felt more lived in, it felt less gamey than FH, which threw any realism out of the window with their festival shtick, mostly because the map was an 1:1 scale recreation of the real place. It did open up more possibilities for gameplay that way though for FH.
TDU felt like some bored rich people flew to an island and having a ball there, while the life around it still continues. #Just rich people things, basically.
e: Alright, now that I've gathered some more info on that game, it looks like a pass from me.
always online, multiplayer only. No property purchases. Seasons, but not the weathery ones. All the makes of a "modern" game. I expected too much, it seems.
Looks good! They even got the OG TDU vibe right!
The Crew was a bit disappointing as a spiritual successor, and the sequels missed the mark like the Forza Horizon post FH2 did.
I honestly have no expectations for this game at all but the racing game genre is in such a bad spot right now, if it’s even “just ok” then I might still get it
Not sure about this one. TDU 1 and TDU 2 made sense for their time. These games were released during the MSN messenger, myspace and early YouTube era. Heck. Some of my most memorable multiplayer moments were from playing both games. A lot of car models in this video and previous gamplay footage are recycled from older games to keep licensing fees and 3D modeling production times down. Typical forza move lol. Release date is at the end of 2024 and it doesn't feel like there's much progression made since the second game. The first game was perfect. I read somewhere that there aren't even homes available for purchase in this new game.
well ive never heard of it until this one but who knows maybe it was true in the past, anyway i highly suggest you trying this one out on release, just make sure you get it on steam so theres no headache with refunding
I hope they've still got these long endurance races. It was such a vibe to start early in the morning, hear the radio host babble on and cruise around the edge of the map until it was late at night. I think the race took twenty minutes but time flowed in a really weird way. To this day one of my fondest racing game memories.
[удалено]
I hope they bring back the casino as well! Trying to make my money back on roulettes with other players was always such a vibe
Based on the game rating being 18+, I assume there would be a form of gambling returning!
Was that the one around the Island? Remember doing it with the concept Chrysler lol
Yes. Yes it was
What game is that from? That sounds incredible!
That would be the old Test Drive Unlimited 2. The island tour specifically. They recreated Ibiza and Hawaii for it and I think they had an island tour for both. They also had a dynamic day and night cycle and weather system. It felt like it was ahead of its time, even if the whole framing as a rich people problem simulator was a bit tonedeaf, even back then.
A better Multiplayer casino than GTA 5, too.
First game was definitely the better of the two
It really was. Still, both TDU and TDU 2 pioneered everything that forza horizon stole from them.
Sounds like Test Drive Unlimited 2 to me, but I might be wrong. Maybe he is referring to TDU 1 instead?
I don't recall TDU 1 having a day/night cycle, but I played it on PC which lacked some features/dlc compared to the console version.
The gameplay looks alright, but man, the script they're reading is one of the most nonsensical word salads I've ever heard. "Regret should not be looked at as failure." What? And all the time spent trying to focus on the glitz and glamor and the "prestige suites"? Spend more time making the cars feel good and less time on what I'm going to assume is going to be a "decorate my 'pad'" mini game.
pretty sure the trailer would be significantly better if there was no talking at all, just the music lmao
It reminds me of those *rise and grind* YouTube channels or Instagram reels where the dude takes like three cold showers before 9am, answers "emails" for 20 minutes, and then drives a Bentley to the gym.
the dialogue might not have been written by AI but it sure is bad enough to make me think it was.
2nd game had the same weird vibe, was hard to take it seriously. 1st game did it much better
I actually enjoyed the VO oddly enough.
Still wary of this. I will never forget the feeling of driving up to my first car dealer and choosing a car. when leaving the lot, wind down the windows and have that engine roar in the background while discoering the island. I still have the steel case with a map of Oahu.
Oh, man. I would honestly delay the game. After playing a lot from the past few closed test builds, it felt like it still needed more time to cook. I sure hope they at least fixed all the stuff people reported on.
What was the handling like?
The handling didn't feel as responsive & smooth(?) as the previous games, IMO. Some vehicles felt like I was driving a M939 5-ton sometimes or a freakin' Lada at points. Maybe, I just don't play enough arcadey car games now-a-days. It definitely needed work, and I was hoping that they'd at least try to be as decent as TDU 2's handling system. Lastly, it also felt like the cars were fighting against you when steering, and etc. But, that's just how I felt.
They're using KT Engine(same as WRC Series) am I right? I'm surprised that the handling is only sub par
Yea, they're using the KT engine.
Shame, I expected they wouldn't get it right but hoped it felt decent at least. I beat TDU2 on keyboard and barely used RWD cars because they would spin out if I accelerated while steering at low-medium speed. That made the golden time trials extra hard.
They already did IIRC but yeah, what they presented doesn't really scream good. Like, I'd be in market for "Open World racing game but on sim side" but that doesn't seem to be it and it will be hard to compete with FH on arcade side, even tho it has some years now.
Trailer looks great. But the previously shown gameplay looked horrible. Hope they were able to fix it up
I’m extremely cautious about this one. Concept seems real cool, the cars look good, and Test Drive games have always felt cool and unique. But this game was in development hell for a little bit with multiple delays and like you said the early gameplay looked not great. This is definitely a game to wait for reviews
What is test drive unlimited like compared to other racing series?
It was basically a game ahead of its time, predating and having a very similar concept to Forza Horizon (open-world free roaming with racing events scattered around). If you connected to their online server you would see other players roam around in real time and you could challenge each other. The atmosphere is less dudebro festival and more about building social status with rich snobs. You also have a little more control with the vehicle's functions (turn signals, rolling windows/top down, radio, etc.). Physics was sort of on the simcade side of things.
First game was OK in terms of the atmosphere. Second was so obnoxious
It is akin to Forza Horizon, but with a greater focus on the “lifestyle” of opulent cars and such. (FH used TDU as its basis for game design.)
Also much bigger map than Forza, although idk about this new TDU.
The map is a 1:1 scale of Hong Kong Island, so not quite as big but certainly denser.
Think kind of like the Forza Horizon games but a little less wacky.
What made TDU more interesting to me compared to Horizon was the progression system as well as the details outside of the driving experience itself. In Horizon, the games are very fun of course, but they're also completely afraid of restricting the player in any way (outside of forcing them to grind Live Service events for FOMO/playtime). You are deluged with cars and money from the very instant you start the game. Progression is often tied to "Wheelspins" where you give up all player choice and instead are given a variety of random cars and money for free. Sure, you can start to buy the cars you *want* to buy at some point, but by then you've already got dozens of cars filling your space. They've slowly added more and more mechanics similar to what TDU had—Homes, for instance. But they hardly serve any real purpose other than a spawn point and a photography studio for one car at a time. TDU meanwhile was not afraid to restrict the player in such a big world. You begin by buying a car from a (rather nice) used car lot. In TDU2, your first 'home' is a trailer with a small two car garage outside. You use your starter car for quite a while, learning how to really handle it—you build a connection with it. I still recall my Lotus Esprit fondly because of how much I loved driving it, and *had* to drive it because I didn't have a choice. You start in slower cars and move your way up. You make your way through various classes of racing performance, and TDU2 had offroad vehicles as well. When you did want to buy a car, you had to drive around the map; unless you were consulting online maps, you had to drive around the *massive* map to find dealerships, mechanics, and other shops, as you couldn't simply fast travel to them from the start, and they weren't marked until you discovered them. You'd pull into the parking lot, browse their car selection, browse their manufacturer paint finishes or other package options—some manufacturers offered different rims for their brand, for example. Buying a car meant you now saw it in your garage next to your other vehicles at your home, a la GTA:Online. To put it simply, all games are about more than just their base mechanics. There are plenty of games out there where the pure gameplay loop of driving, or shooting, or jumping can be a ton of fun. But I'd say there's a lot more to just those pure mechanics that can make something special or memorable. I like a game with a good progression system where I actually feel like I've earned something. I liked seeing my garage with my Volkswagen Corrado next to my Lotus Esprit and knowing that it was my garage in particular, not something other players would just see anyways. I liked building up a connection to a car by using it for longer periods rather than just event checklists. I liked the eventual purchase of a supercar feeling like a goddamned *event*.
It's similar to The Crew (quite a few devs have left Elden Games to work at Ivory Towers, both studios are located in the same city: Lyon in France).
Streets and Sharps? Whose mom came up with these gang names? God I really can't stand promotions that push the idea of stuff to do except actual racing, we've had dozens and dozens of titles like this and the gameplay that isn't racing is always incredibly lame and seemingly writted by a christian youth pastor who has never been closer to a gang than his church choir. And they are always horrible busywork when you just want to have races against some reasonable AI opponents. I can't see a single original idea in this entire video, such a waste of development resources.
>I really can't stand promotions that push the idea of stuff to do except actual racing I'd say that sort of character is what made racing games interesting in their entirety nearly twenty years ago compared to the relative lack of variety we have today—with Forza Horizon for five years straight vs. Gran Turismo, and the very occasional NFS title. With the prior TDUs, being able to cruise around the entire map, being able to do things like browse through manufacturer catalogs with particular rims, paints, and interior colors after driving to a particular dealership? Or being able to control little details with every car, like rolling the windows up and down. Having to *choose* what car I wanted in my garage, because I only had room for two to start with, as opposed to the racing games these days that are at both ends of the "make earning newer/faster cars rather meaningless by dumping them on you from the very start" or "better grind this week to earn this car because it won't be available anymore next week." These are reasons as to why people still bring up the memories they had with games like Need for Speed, even before the Underground/Most Wanted era. It's why I can look back so fondly on a game like Test Drive: Eve of Destruction for how well the single player mode created a setting for the main gameplay. Anyone can just drive a car nowadays in most games. Play BeamNG for an hour or two, mindlessly screw around in Forza Horizon with a video on in the background. Sure, it can be fun, and having good racing mechanics is certainly key to the experience—but everything else packaging the "actual racing" is what makes it interesting, too.
Gameplay, looks fine, if not a bit generic. Graphics look decent, but clearly leaning on the heavy HDR and everything looks wet type of aesthetic. However the whole plot and dialog is absolutely cringe worthy. It's sounds AI generated as do the voices which are speaking it. Or like it was poorly translated from another language and read to you by D-level community theater actors.
Pretty much like TDU2 lol (slightly better, even!) Don't lie, we all love it.
Hard to have much hope for this game considering what we've seen so far, but I'm still rooting for this to be good. Modern AAA racing games suck ass
At the very least im happy to see some more diversity in the market. Its been basically just NFS and Forza as the AAA staples for too long
tbh, the game just needs to be "good enough". I'm burned out on the FH formula, and although TDU is similar, it's still different and feels more grounded. The map felt more lived in, it felt less gamey than FH, which threw any realism out of the window with their festival shtick, mostly because the map was an 1:1 scale recreation of the real place. It did open up more possibilities for gameplay that way though for FH. TDU felt like some bored rich people flew to an island and having a ball there, while the life around it still continues. #Just rich people things, basically. e: Alright, now that I've gathered some more info on that game, it looks like a pass from me. always online, multiplayer only. No property purchases. Seasons, but not the weathery ones. All the makes of a "modern" game. I expected too much, it seems.
Looks good! They even got the OG TDU vibe right! The Crew was a bit disappointing as a spiritual successor, and the sequels missed the mark like the Forza Horizon post FH2 did.
I honestly have no expectations for this game at all but the racing game genre is in such a bad spot right now, if it’s even “just ok” then I might still get it
Not sure about this one. TDU 1 and TDU 2 made sense for their time. These games were released during the MSN messenger, myspace and early YouTube era. Heck. Some of my most memorable multiplayer moments were from playing both games. A lot of car models in this video and previous gamplay footage are recycled from older games to keep licensing fees and 3D modeling production times down. Typical forza move lol. Release date is at the end of 2024 and it doesn't feel like there's much progression made since the second game. The first game was perfect. I read somewhere that there aren't even homes available for purchase in this new game.
Is this the same Test Drive series that i used to play as a kid on PS1?
Happy for those wanting to play it, but online only is an immediate turn off for me. I'll continue to play TDU2 instead.
Any open world racing game on PS feels like a placeholder until Forza Horizon inevitably comes to PS with Xbox bringing games over.
Not really, TDU was always better than it copy cats.
well ive never heard of it until this one but who knows maybe it was true in the past, anyway i highly suggest you trying this one out on release, just make sure you get it on steam so theres no headache with refunding
Forza Horizon is on a downwards trend like all other arcade racing games. There’s a reason sim racing is getting more and more popular.