Hello, open-world driving game fans!

The previous Test Drive installment to set in Hong Kong was Test Drive 6 which was released back in 1999 for the PC, PS1, Sega Dreamcast, and GameBoy Color, now Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is going to take place in this country!

Oh good! Will you get to drive past the shuttered offices of the last pro democracy Newspaper?

Maybe you can powerslide past a bunch of protesters being detailed by the police.

I'm sorry, but setting a glitzy, sexy, driving game in Hong Kong in 2021 or 2022 strikes me as incredibly, disgustingly, tone deaf.

This is almost certainly a hard pass from me. This is like setting a lighthearted city builder like Tropico in Iraq circa 2003.

Yay, English street signs and driving on the left! Test Drive 6 had a surprisingly accurate Newcastle track.

I know that this series is more known for people customization, but... vehicle customization? Will names like Rocket Bunny and Liberty Walk appear in the game?

I ask because I don't see self playing Need for Speed Heat for another 100 hours. I need a new map.

I guess this game's roads will remind me of Gran Turismo 4, Burnout Revenge, and Sleeping Dogs.

Probably they won't include the infamous protesters from 2019.

I guess it won't have many visual customizations as Need For Speed or Forza Horizon series has.

I remembered that Test Drive Unlimited 2 had very limited visual customization options.

Mr Forza, please think about your words when you laugh away something so existential for the people there. It's not just a bunch of people causing a ruckus in 2019 and that has been solved now so it's over and done. It's not like that. The UK straight up had to offer to relocate Hong Kong citizens fighting for independance.

I understood, I initially thought bigsocrates was mentioning the protesters are going to be just generic non-playable characters.

I'm sure you understand that he doesn't actually believe that these things would be part of the game and mostly mentioned them to paint a picture why he is so against this setting at this time. Not everyone has to draw the same lines, but i don't think it's something to lolz at.

Oh, it's my mistake that I've made, sorry about that.

Thank you for rethinking your words. Hope the game ends up being good.

As others here have mentioned, this is certainly a choice given the political strife in Hong Kong at the moment. Hopefully it doesn't happen, but I won't be surprised if the publisher/developer ends up going out of their way to do things in the game to appease China for the sake of securing access to the massive audience there.

That said, the trailer certainly looks nice, but there's no actual gameplay in there. This is the same developer that pumps out perennially mediocre WRC and Isle of Man TT games, so I don't really have high hopes for it.

@chaser324: Honestly, they won't have to bend over backwards to appease the Chinese government for this to be a whitewash of what's going on.

These types of racing games are always travel brochures for wherever they take place. The Forza Horizon games certainly are, and I expect Forza Horizon 5 to be no different. Obviously Mexico has a lot of problems, including a terrible COVID response and of course drug cartels, and we won't see any of that in Forza Horizon 5. Instead we'll see natural beauty and scenic ruins and gorgeous murals in quaint little mountain towns. There's a pinata popping minigame! Fun times for all.

That's understandable given the product and the audience. Nobody wants to see a a protest for the 43 students who were kidnapped and murdered with the help of soldiers in 2014 when they're zooming around the desert in their sweet new virtual McLaren.

That's understandable. And I'm sure the vision of Hong Kong will also be a tourist postcard for similar reasons.

The difference is that Mexico, for all its faults, is not running an authoritarian propaganda campaign to pretend that there's nothing bad going on there and everything is perfect. Setting this kind of game in Hong Kong right now is just playing directly into that. With or without the direct intervention of the Chinese government.

Would you really want to crowbar civil unrest into a racing game? It's a product, not a reality.

@shindig: The best solution would have been to just pick a different setting.

@shindig: Obviously not. I said that about Forza Horizon 5 and Mexico. But as @chaser324 said this could have been set anywhere. If you wanted a slick, modern, Asian city other than Tokyo (which has been done to death) you could have gone with Seoul or even other places in China like Macao (whose reintegration into China has been less fraught and which would match up with the gambling theme well.)

There's something very distasteful about setting a fun, frivolous, game in a place currently going through an authoritarian crackdown and trampling of human rights.

I have a feeling that if I virtually drive sports cars on the Hong Kong highway in this game, it may remind me of this movie scene from Thunderbolt, due to the location.

No there isn't. It's just a location. In a game. About cars.

I think this is more complicated than "the government in this place is acting badly so we shouldn't set games there." By that logic, we shouldn't have had games set in the US during the Trump presidency. As you mentioned @bigsocrates, Mexico has had its fair share of political problems, some very recently. But Mexico is also a very underutilized setting in games and I have a feeling there are a fair amount of people excited to have a game that will presumably celebrate Mexican culture in some way, and (probably) won't even include drug cartels when doing so.

You can celebrate a place and a culture without praising its government. Is that a fine line? Yes. Do I trust the developers of TDU: Solar Crown to stay on the right side of it? Not really. But I think I'm going to wait and see on this one (especially since I'm a huge fan of TDU1 and 2, lol).

I have sympathy with @bigsocrates position, without the confidence that my relative view is necessarily better than every other's voiced here.

But what did strike me absolute is that the 2:00 advert shown seems mostly a exposition of capitalism, or at least consumption. Nice expensive car-toys, alcohol and raves, diamonds, jewelry and even gambling.

Kind of made me laugh, considering the discussion here. But I've never played these games before, so I have no idea of the quality.

@tds418: This is how I feel about the setting: Hong Kong is a beautiful city, and if it's simply a celebration of the city itself, then I think there is nothing wrong with the choice. If anything, it makes me want to play it more because I've always wanted more Asian locations for racing sims (and games in general).

@tds418: It is more complicated than that, of course, since all governments act badly in one way or another at basically all times.

The difference here is the scope of what exactly is going on right now (the wholesale repression and stripping of rights of 7.5 million people, which is more than the entire population of Norway or Finland) and the way that China handles propaganda by doing things like shutting down newspapers and tightly controlling all media and the like. It's why @shindig's "it's just a car game, bro, who cares, bro?" attitude plays directly into the image they want to project.

As someone who lived through 9/11 in New York City I am very personally aware of what it's like to have media portray your traumatized city while the trauma is still fresh and in some ways ongoing. Obviously a lot of media had to grapple very quickly with how to deal with 9/11 in NYC, and some did it better than others, but the ones that just shrugged and went on with frivolous fun a week after we had been breathing in the ashes from the collapsed towers and the bodies that burned or were vaporized on impact were pretty crappy.

How far is too far when ignoring a tragedy? Would it be appropriate to set a fun dancing game in Damascus without acknowledging what has happened and continues to happen in Syria? How about a funky dating sim set in India in 2021 that ignores Covid? At a certain point it's just plain gross to set a game in the midst of an unfolding tragedy without any acknowledgement of it.

And it's especially gross when the nature of that tragedy involves an authoritarian government covering up what's going on and trying to project exactly the image of the city that your game does.

@bybeach: China has absolutely no problem with rampant consumption, especially in its rich autonomous regions like Macao and Hong Kong. At this point it's not so much a communist country as it is authoritarian crony capitalism, even if it calls itself communist.

@bybeach said:

To be fair to the makers of this game, this is 100% in line with the previous game in the series, which was also about expensive clothes, cars, beautiful people, beach parties, etc. The first 10-15 minutes of the quick look of TDU2 on this site gives you more than enough of a taste of this lol. Thankfully, after the intro, the game was mostly just concerned with driving and less about characters and story. It's just a B-game version of the Forza Horizon festival concept.

I remembered that Test Drive Unlimited 2 got dethroned by the original Forza Horizon for the Xbox 360, due to having superior A.I opponents and a better driving model (Which makes it more playable).

By the way, I hope Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown will be even better than the previous installments of Test Drive games by having a very good driving model, improved A.I opponents, social features, and many other things.

I do wonder if these games give off some kind of tourism boost.

With the setting being Hong Kong, I'm suddenly struck with the thought of this game being somewhat adjacent to 1980s/Millenial nostalgia. This traces back to at least one person's time watching imported Hong Kong action movies when they were a kid.

As someone who has vacationed to the HK SAR and adored Sleeping Dogs, it warms my heart to see this game's Hong Kong setting. However, it is complicated by the (personally) overbearing fact of the city's recent protests from Occupy Central to the opposition against the then-upcoming extradition law (which I believed passed, iirc). I'm sure my distant relatives are okay, or at least I would have heard if they got messed up.

Yeah, I have nothing much to add other than that this game's setting reveal has be very ambivalent. Given my long time in Test Drive Unlimited 2's Ibiza and Oahu, I expect Solar Crown's Hong Kong proceedings to be some degree of vapid. As goofy and/or cringe Forza Horizon 4 is, I appreciated its liveliness.