Just the offline mode at first
Here’s the plan for tomorrow’s launch, as described by Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida:
“Starting on Thursday, all PlayStation Plus members can downloadDriveclub PS Plus Editionand begin playing the offline mode. Also starting Thursday, we will be rolling out online access to theDriveclub PS Plus Editionand will steadily bring more and more players online while continuously ensuring that all game systems are running smoothly. We know that this might be frustrating after your extra wait already, but hope you can understand that we are taking extra precautions to protect your experience when you do get online. We want to verify we don’t overload the servers as we invite millions of PS Plus members to download the game tomorrow.”
Why has gettingDriveclubup and running properly been such a nightmare? Kotakugot an answerfrom Yoshida at E3. “It’s just the number of people the server couldn’t handle,” he said. “The stress-testing was not designed correctly. So it was the oversight. So the team had to go back to the drawing board in terms of server code. And they have been re-factoring and re-engineering server-side to be able to have more people play the game at the same time.”
I never had much interest in the game, but after all of this buildup, I’ll have to try it.
