[IMPORTANT NOTE: All of my personal experiences that’ll be detailed here are from the Xbox One version. I’ve only played it on an Xbox One X, which is detailed as an X-enhanced title. All of those should be kept in mind.]
The remaster Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled (CTR for brevity’s sake) is upon us! But…this doesn’t come without some odd news. Yesterday, June 21st, marked the official release of CTR with news of an update ‘fixing’ previous reports of online issues. Said online issues were vague to me, as I only skimmed the article’s title while it was still in pending. I’d already bought CTR and was ready to play it after work. The Xbox One update had already rolled out by that time and the campaign ran just fine. But my first online matchmaking games were grating experiences.
Finding people for a lobby didn’t appear to be much of an issue. Once in-game, it was less of a normal race and more of witnessing every online user (or bot) transport from place to place. What you see with your character is like racing in any other game; everyone else around is consistently pulling Houdini tricks left and right. And this harms racing even further when considering how ill-prepared one can be for any offensive attacks. You can’t really time out when to use a bubble shield against a missile if said warning appears when you’ve already been hit—according to the game. Bear in mind, I’m experiencing all of this after Beenox talked about handling XOne’s “online concerns” via twitter (1).
After 2-3 games, I’d had enough with matchmaking, especially since extended exposure can give me a light headache. Lo and behold, a friend who’d pre-ordered CTR got on and we decided to play a private match with bots. I was explaining this dreadful experience to ‘prepare’ him—and also to vent some more. To my surprise, everything runs perfectly fine for me when I invite. I subsequently won that first race. But I also discovered that he experienced those issues I’d previously discussed. He gets the reins and invites me this time and, sure enough, I’m back to experiencing teleport-racing.
All of this leads me to saying this has to be the worst case of host advantage I’ve personally experienced. People tend to rag on games like Gears of War's (x360) online multiplayer but this is on another level. I’ve only done some light perusing from other sources but I’ve yet to find any link to suggest CTR runs on dedicated servers, which only annoys me more just because this remaster deserves said treatment. Even if not going that route it would’ve been fine if the servers didn’t seem like such a mess right now.
I’ve currently raised complaints on Beenox’s twitter channel and Activision Support’s twitter channel has personally asked me to contact them via PM (2). I intend to do that after this blog goes live because I wanted to bottle these early impression whilst they’re fresh in mind. Perhaps I’ll send a link to this as my response. Last I checked, Beenox said they’re STILL working on these online fixes for the Switch version so I can’t say how much of a horror show that might be (1). But in regards to any of the three versions, I wanted to make this blog as a platform to describe their current experiences as well. Maybe I just had bad luck when I decided to play? Perhaps these issues will blow over in a matter of days, but I was so annoyed because of how quiet critics seemed to be with these issues. It’s like another Gears of War 2 quagmire at launch: where I don't see any prominent site pointing out these objective flaws, leaving potential buyers ignorant in the process.
This blog may be outdated by next week. But what if it holds off one interested buyer from putting down their money until these issues are rectified? I’d say it’d be worth it. Please feel free to share your experience here too.
Links:
1. https://twitter.com/BeenoxT...
2. https://twitter.com/ATVIAss...
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Hope someone found this blog handy.
Better to acknowledge this now: I did self-approve my own blog here. This wasn't done on a whim, as I'd discussed this with Christopher before pulling the trigger. And I actually think this poses an interesting opportunity for us, the admin/mod team, to assist in informing of potentially deal-killing issues like these online problems. I'm still, frankly, flabbergasted of just how big of a blind spot this appears to be for the gaming press at the moment. Like, you're able to spout broken missions & annoying bugs in Days Gone's 1.0 version, yet can't spot inconsistent servers in CTR's 1.0? Just a drop in respect for these guys. To put it another way: had I thought of this blog idea during Halo: MCC's launch I would've rushed to provide my initial impressions in that case as well.
But enough of me blabbering! Please share if you're going through issues as well so we can warn other consumers of these drawbacks ahead of time. Maybe they'll get a 'green-light' in a couple of days. Who knows? Here's a youtube vid that provides visual evidence of what I was experiencing, and goes into greater detail about other bugs: https://www.youtube.com/wat...
Not that it makes your situation any better but PS4 is perfect for me since the patch yesterday
Thank you for posting this. I was considering picking it up today but it might be wiser to wait for a price drop or for a few patches to be released first.
I play on Xbox at two different locations, I have found that it plays great online at one place, and bad at another. It seems to me what matters is the internet connection behind it. I think it just suffers from really bad lag problems. But if you aren't lagging, it's a great time.