In a community, you know what you can do, where you stand, where you can evolve to - we really wanted to try and recreate this feeling of utter adequacy: where you have lots of choices, lots of things to do, but where it's easy for you to find your place and do what you want when you want because they all make sense. But let's go into details. There is one thousand miles of road to explore, with hundreds of challenges, car dealers, houses and clothing shops. When you're logged to Xbox Live Gold, you won't be the only player to cruise around. You'll see the seven players that best fit your profile, and you'll see everyone on the island map. To put it in gamers' terms: the technology behind this unique experience is somewhere in between Guild Wars and WoW. In Guild Wars, when you leave the town and go for a quest, you'll be playing in a peer-to-peer session with your team. In WoW, you're always connected to the servers, like all players, so there's virtually no limit to the number of people around you - except the server's capacity. In Test Drive Unlimited, when you're in free-ride, you're in an eight player peer-to-peer session. This way, as you drive, you'll keep meeting new players driving on the same island as you are. This dynamic recreation of the peer-to-peer free ride sessions is done transparently to the player: we monitor every player on the island through servers, and create, refresh and adjust those sessions in real-time from the servers. There are a lot of advantages to this design, the biggest being that there is virtually no limitation to the number of people that are on the island at the same time. One of our servers can reference over 60,000 players at the same time - and they'll be duplicated as necessary to increase this number to 120,000 or bigger. This also means we'll have a true worldwide community, and that the Dublin Ferrari Club or the Yokohama Suzuki Devils will have no way to escape your wrath. So you can drive online with your friends to explore the Oahu island - or meet new people. In order to make sure the people you meet are ones you'll enjoy playing with, our server uses multiple criteria to create those free-ride sessions: friends first, same skill, same vehicle category. And of course you can always chat with the microphone with whoever is driving along. But let's move forward and bring on some competition: you can challenge anyone you see - just flash your headlights and you'll send an invite for a race. This amount is notified with the challenge invite to all contenders. But you also have a ranking for the instant challenge: Based on ELO system, it gives you a clear image of your place in the community. But instant challenges are not the only way to compete with fellow test drivers. Over a hundred dedicated challenges await you on the island, in race and speed modes, either straight from the Oahu roads or from the club lobbies. Another idea we had was to make sure anyone could easily find online players through free rides and intelligent preference-based filters , and also to make sure everyone would find a place in our rankings - not only the very best. Like in real life sports, for example, if there were only one ranking, only the very best teams from the first division would matter. But with numerous championships, you can be an amateur and still fight to make it first in your series. That's the idea behind the numerous rankings we developed in : make sure anyone could find their place and get a meaningful ranking to fight for. We've seen to it that you'll have an ELO ranking for the instant challenge. You'll also have a ranking for every single challenge, plus overall rankings for all solo categories time, race, speed. Moreover, online, in addition to the ELO Instant challenge ranking, you'll get rankings for the online challenges on your own, but also with your club in the inter-club rankings. And you'll even get a ranking for you in your club with the intra-club ranking. Online challenges and rankings will of course be very important parts of your online life in Test Drive Unlimited - but they won't be the only ones. We already discussed the clubs integration in a previous feature. Let's now discuss the drive-ins and the Trade. The drive-ins are places on the island you can drive to where you can access challenges Time or Speed created by other players. The game mode editor becomes accessible once you've won enough achievements in the game, and allows you to edit challenges on the island with the same freedom Test Drive Unlimited designers had: Select Time or Speed categories, edit default parameters traffic, police, collisions, penalties for leaving the road, etc. You pay the prize when you post the challenge online for other players to play it. Every player that wants to try it out must pay the fee. The best player after up to seven days gets 90% of the reward plus collected fees, and you get the remaining 10 percent. The drive-ins are therefore very unique places where you can indirectly challenge and be challenged by other players - and make or lose lots of money. Official challenges created by Test Drive Unlimited designers will also be available from those drive-ins. Last but not least, another online interaction you'll have with other players is through the trade system. Accessible from your house, it allows you to sell or buy online your cars or bikes. It works like a stock exchange: you pick the vehicle you want to sell, set the price and post the order. The car for sale appears in the online stock, for anyone to buy. This will be especially useful for the classic cars, whose availability in the game can be quite limited - especially if you're looking for some scarce interior options. So you've seen there will be lots of features and options - hopefully you'll see that you can really play the game your way and build your path among all these things you can do. And one last thing I did not mention yet: even though we did try and pack up the game with droves of features and stats, we could not put absolutely everything in, and that's where the Test Drive Unlimited community website comes in, where you'll see nice features like player's profiles, extended stats and monitoring tools monitoring of top challenges, of quotes of your most wanted cars in the trade area, etc. Test Drive Unlimited is scheduled to release in September 2006 for Xbox 360 and October 2006 for PC, PS2, and PSP.
