Every week up until launch, we’ll be showing gameplay of what is to come in Season 6! That isn’t all though, we don’t want to spoil everything yet but in the coming weeks you can expect Season 7 and 8 work in progress screenshots in a 'Future Outlook' showcase, Season 6 gameplay of the upcoming missions and vehicles, and a Season 6 Feature Showcase livestream where Guillaume and Alex will show you everything going on in TDUSC’s Season 6 while answering questions about the next updates too!
So, are you ready? Let’s get started!
What’s In the Letter?
Season 6
Release Date
Hong Kong Island Rework (Northern Districts)
Community Live Event Week
Side Skirts, Diffusers, Front Splitters & More
Confirmed Features & Content So Far
Confirmed & Upcoming Fixes
Network Improvements
Community Spotlight Winner - February
Winners
How To Submit
Upcoming Communications
March Solar Club Letter
Gameplay
Future Outlook
Season 6 Feature Showcase
⏭️ Season 6
Season 6 arrives next month with more content, features, quality of life improvements, and more! Let’s take a look at this in more detail.
Release Date
The update is planned to release at the end of March, and we’ll announce this exact date next month.
As for the maintenance, it will be mentioned in the Patch Notes, which will arrive a day or two before the release of the update, but expect the usual server maintenance at 9:30am CET and lasting up to 8:00pm CET. As usual, we will keep you updated on our progress during the day too.
Make sure to stay tuned for all the details on the release by following us on social media!
Hong Kong Island Rework (Northern Districts)
At the launch of Season 5, we reworked the southern areas of Hong Kong Island. We aren’t done yet though, as we have worked on the northern areas of the island for the launch of Season 6. With that, we also went back in and reworked some of the southern areas in more detail with new billboards, traffic lights, and intersections!
To be more specific on the Northern side, we’ve reworked a lot of the buildings to offer more variety between the districts. To discuss this in much more detail, here’s art director Stephane Cambier to give us more details!
“We are continuing our sustained efforts to improve Hong Kong Island’s northern districts, focusing our efforts on several subjects:
Such as fixing the height and density of the building, adding more green spaces, which is one of HKI’s trademarks, and creating more diversity in the building shapes and colors.
Huy Nguyen-Tan (our main procedural building artist) is therefore at work to improve all this, and I hope you will appreciate the colossal work he has accomplished so far in this regard.”
Stéphane (TDUSC Art Director)
Similar to what we did for Season 5, you can find a full video of before and after locations all throughout Hong Kong Island’s northern districts coming soon on the Nacon Racing YouTube channel! For now, here's more screenshots!
Oh, and there are some new signs to be found!
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Side Skirts, Diffusers, Front Splitters & More
We’ve started making further improvements to vehicle customisation in TDUSC. We heard a lot of player feedback on vehicle customisation in the game, and we’ve worked to further expand this. In Season 6, you will see the first arrival of this feature, beginning with the official Audi Sport Performance Parts customisation for the Audi R8 RWS (coupe only)! Spoiler, front splitter, side skirt, and rear diffuser, all which can be individually added in the workshop.
We think this is a step forward in the direction of what TDU players love to see; licensed parts and kits, similar to what was seen in the first opus, Test Drive Unlimited 1. We will work on increasing the quantity of this content in the following seasons too, and we are really excited to see what the players think!
Why not see this in more detail with some gameplay around the Northern areas of Hong Kong Island with said vehicle? We didn’t want to leave out the other areas of the map we improved though, check out the latest video on the Nacon Racing channel now!
Community Live Event Week
Remember when we had the community vote on races and liveries to feature in an upcoming Season 6 live event? We’ve integrated the liveries into the game, and we’d like to showcase them!
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Congrats again to SylFR for their beautiful Streets liberty and Faucheureuse for their classy Sharp livery!
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We were originally going to choose one winner, but considering we had a Sharp one win, we couldn’t leave the Streets out too! Give a shout to both livery designers, they killed it!
Confirmed Features & Content So Far
Detective Missions
Each mission has its own story to tell, with lore related to the Radiant, Solar Crown, Sharps, Streets, and even some surprise TDU universe characters being involved…
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You’ll learn about the ‘Fixer’ who is managing an investigation company. Through that, they hired you to do private investigator work.
We wanted to make sure these missions aren’t just tailing like they were in TDU2, and we are confident we’ve done well here! You’ll learn much about these in more detail soon with gameplay, but the screenshots (and driving videos) can give you some details!
Updated Stores
Physical Clothing Stores in Ibiza
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Improved Car Cosmetic Street/Sharp Store in Hong Kong Island.
Content of the chests have been moved to the different Clan clothing stores on Hong Kong Island and Ibiza (car customisation, stickers, clothes, etc.)
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Increased Outfit Slots
Normalised Alyss GPS Voice (as seen in cruise videos)
Voices added to Casino
Hong Kong Island Rework
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& much more to be revealed next week!
Vehicles
Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Black Series (Online Store)
Lamborghini Temerario (Solar Pass Level 15)
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Pagani Huayra Roadster (Italian Dealership)
Pininfarina B95 (Solar Pass Level 50)
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Bentley Continental GTC Speed (Online Store)
Soon we’ll be showing you gameplay and screenshots of the Season 6 vehicles, while also revealing the Solar Pass Level 1 vehicle!
Confirmed & Upcoming Fixes So Far
We mentioned a few fixes in the last letter that are arriving in Season 6, but let’s cover those again, and also mention some more!
Wheel Animation Desync On Wheels - With the implementation of multiple inputs, we’ve fixed the issue where the wheel can become desynced.
Ferrari Portofino missing interior trim options - The Portofino now has the correct interior options!
Gas Station AR not being disabled - Gas Stations no longer have AR when you have the AR feature off.
Cancelling an emote with an object makes the object stay in motion - We’ve fixed this issue so you can no longer throw multiple objects in the game, although we understand some players had fun messing around with this bug.
Ford F150 Adventurer/Nissan GTR The Tyger/BMW M4 Competition PUMA upgrade pricing - We fixed the upgrade pricing of all the vehicles affected
The Ferrari 488 Pista has the incorrect reverse/turn-signal lighting and interior/2D lens model - The 488 finally has its signature turn signal design!
Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE rim model - We’ve fixed these rims so they are more accurately reflected with more depth.
While using an H-Shifter, the vehicle incorrectly produces a 'rev match' dynamic/sound when the gear select is in neutral too quickly (with auto-clutch off) - A well awaited fix, those who who use auto-clutch off, and especially those who use h-shifters, you will no longer hear the rev match noise!
Impossible Speed Challenges - All Impossible Speed Challenges can now be completed!
FSR3/XeSS/DLSS 99% is actually better quality than 100% - A very specific bug, but those who use the highest option of your upscaler, should see a slightly improved sharpness/clarity.
& much more to be announced in the coming weeks and the patch notes!
Of course there are many other bugs that will be fixed for Season 6, and the team at KT is working very hard on making sure this season brings an increased level of polish compared to the previous seasonal releases. We will continue to let you know some more fixes in the coming weeks, especially the improvements coming to sound, such as the Agera RS having a much better cockpit sound.
Another topic we’d like to mention is the reports we have been getting about PS5 controller vibrations not being able to be turned off. Here are the details on this quality of life improvement, where the vibration comes from, and what you can do to turn off vibration currently.
There are two types of vibrations on the PS5 controller, that being the adaptive trigger vibrations, and core controller vibrations. Core controller vibrations work by changing the in-game settings value from 0 through 100. You will feel these vibrations mainly when the car hits the ground (suspension effects), or when crashing the vehicle (crash effects), and a few other scenarios.
Adaptive trigger vibrations can be felt mainly from the triggers, and can be felt when shifting gears, when the car is near a redline, braking with ABS triggering, and many other scenarios. The ‘overall vibration’ setting does not turn this feature off. Instead, use the PlayStation OS by going to the controller settings and turning off or reducing the ‘Trigger Effect Intensity’. This will turn off or reduce the vibrations felt.
We however understand that this is a setting that players expect to find in-game, rather than using the PlayStation OS, and we will be working on adding this to Season 6 Update 1. For now, use the PlayStation OS ‘controller settings’ section.
Stay tuned in the coming days and March Solar Club letter for upcoming bug fixes and improvements in the future letters, some of which are well awaited by the community!
Network Improvements
The network team is hard at work at many of the upcoming features arriving in TDUSC in the coming Seasons. We mentioned in the last letter, but the team is now focused on rewriting our servers code to increase stability, players visibility, and data reliability, which is mandatory for us to add cross region and crossplay in the future of TDUSC’s life. Of course, the team is also working on the Official Racing Center features (which brings a matchmaking playlist for ranked and unranked as a social hub), and Housing, which has many networking features regarding player sociability.
In Season 6, there are some improvements you can expect to see though, such as some fixes regarding session & group stability, and other issues concerning things the team saw with the PlayStation Plus arrival.
To discuss this in more detail, here is Sylvain from the network team again!
“PlayStation Plus was a huge milestone for us, especially following the initial release of TDU. We worked hard the last few months to make sure that anything works as expected and that our infrastructure will be able to handle every new player. And it also gives us a lot of new data and insights to check regarding our applications ! In Season 6 we will introduce several fixes regarding our Session management system, mostly linked to what players see as "Lobby error" or group errors.
Now the team is fully focused on the ‘servers v2’ part of the job, where we will rewrite a lot of our algorithms to improve stability of network connection, reduce the latency, and make sure that players will be able to see each other a lot more in the open world part.”
Sylvain (TDUSC Lead Online Programmer)
🖼️ Community Spotlight Winners - February
Yup! It’s time to announce the winners for the month of February!
Winners
There have been some amazing pictures sent in for this month's Community Spotlight, but here are the top 3 voted photos of the month by the TDU team!
Discord member Crixus-style wins this month's Community Spotlight with their amazing photography of the Citroën 2CV!
Discord member Marc-Vincent shows off their Audi TTRS in the beautiful Ibiza sunset!
Discord member Bochel84 brings out the DeLorean DMC12 for a picture perfect sunset location on Hong Kong Island!
Congrats again to the winners! You all win 5,000,000 Solar Coins and 100 Diamonds!
How To Enter
First, join our Discord which can be found at Discord.gg/TestDrive. Once you join our Discord, you’ll see a channel called ‘tdusc-photos’. Here, you can send the best pictures you've taken in TDUSC, but make sure to put #communityspotlight2 in your message post!
Here are the rules:
Each month there will be a theme!
Pictures must be high quality and not edited outside of the game or taken with tools that are not native to TDUSC's in-game photo mode
Only 1 picture is allowed
You are only allowed one post per month; however, you can delete your post and make a new one to replace it.
3 photos will be selected by the TDU team to win each month
The best picture will be showcased in the in-game news section in TDUSC
Note: Posting in this channel means you allow your picture to be used by Nacon/KT for promotional use.
February Theme
Paris Fashion Week - Your photo must feature you in your Solar Hotel garage, dressed to impress, next to a car that matches! Good luck!
🗞️ Next Communications
That’s the end of this month's letter, but what can you expect next? Here’s some of the upcoming news materials arriving between now, and the launch of Season 6; in no particular order.
Gameplay
Over the next weeks, you can expect to find cruise and race gameplay of the Season 6 vehicles such as the beautiful Pagani Huayra Roadster, abundant with many interior and exterior manufacturer options, fully working dynamic wing, and a beautiful sound of the engine!
March Solar Club Letter
As usual, you can expect another Solar Club Letter next month around the middle of the month!
Future Outlook
Here you’ll find a lot of new information about Season 6, Season 7, and Season 8 with more work in progress images and videos of housing, the Official Racing Center, Live Event enhancements and Solar Pass enhancements. We think the TDU community will be happy to see what’s coming ahead for the future!
Season 6 Feature Showcase
As usual and similar to our Season 5 showcase reveal stream, we will be going live with TDUSC’s Game Director, Guillaume Guinet. We’ll be announcing this date in the March Solar Club letter, which is planned to release around mid-March.
❤️ Final Message
We are hard at work continuing the improvements for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, and we once again thank you for your continued support! Guillaume also has a message to share for the TDUSC community!
“Hi everyone! I’m incredibly excited about what’s on the horizon for this season and the ones to follow.
Detective is turning out to be exactly the Role Play experience we imagined! I’m so proud of what the team has done; we’ve poured our hearts into crafting unique stories for every mission to give you a true taste of the private detective life.
As for Housing… I honestly can't believe what the team is pulling off right now. It is absolutely "wow." The ideas are flowing, and I’m dying to share more details with you all soon!
In the meantime, we have a ton of great content and surprises lined up. It’s going to be a long, incredible journey together.
Again, we want to thank you for all your feedback and support. It truly motivates us to push our limits and deliver the ultimate "Test Drive Unlimited" experience. I hope you have as much fun playing it as we’ve had building it!
"One last thing… We all love the Pagani in Season 6, right? But how about some sweet 6 cylinders for the upcoming seasons? Maybe even one of the most highly anticipated cars for enthusiasts everywhere?
🇯🇵 & 🇩🇪
That’s all I can share for now—gotta run!”
Guillaume (TDUSC Game Director)
As Guillaume teased, we have a lot to share in the coming weeks, so stay tuned to all of our socials and join our Discord to not miss a thing! See you again soon! 🙂
The TDU Team
