14 DAY TRIAL // Atari made its plans for Test Drive Unlimited well before the game hit retail, suggesting they would aggressively pursue its online potential via a continuous stream of low price content updates. To this end, the publisher even dropped the initial purchase price to $39.99, making the title about $20 cheaper than most Xbox 360 games available on the market. It appears this move hasn't gone unnoticed, as sales are blooming and customer satisfaction only leads to a greater success of additional content. The first wave is close to reaching the virtual stores as this week welcomes two generous additions to the Test Drive Unlimited garage. The Audi RS4 Quattro and the Nissan Skyline GT-R34 will complement the auto library completely free of charge, via the XBL Marketplace.
The patch mostly involves online fixes for the game, problems that weren't anticipated due to the massive success the game's multiplayer features. Thus, Atari deals with the problem of progression being lost, issues with CLUBS, connections issues (message TDU servers unavailable), difficulty to find friends, and problems in drive-in.
Although these problems are of vital interest and need to be addressed, most of them stem from server overloads during the peak hours. Not even the publishers themselves expected such a huge influx of players as servers reach dangerous unforeseen levels. Invitations to clubs are being lost, players are unable to resend them and generally speaking, everything is overcome with lag. Atari announced they are working on increasing the server limit along with fixing some software issues with the present patch. The fix checks for lost invites and allows you to re-invite a player if the invitation was permanently lost. Lookup efficiency is said to be increased when server capacity is close to full. Currently, filters only work on the map and not while driving, no longer an issue after the patch deployment as players will then easily be able to see their in-game friends and start new races together.