Welp, I tried:
EDIT: And it managed to crash Steam. Presumably the experience is better when the servers are running, but that was even less encouraging than a mediocre trailer of Tron motorcyle cinematics.
-Tom
Ubisoft has rolled out a new update that turns The Crew 2 into a battle pass type deal.
As announced at Ubisoft Forward, every Motorflix Season will bring a new theme and gameplay experience. For Season 1, the setting is a fictional series where a mysterious outlaw group foolishly decides to steal from private bank Vault Corp.
In Episode 1: The Chase, the outlaws must be stopped by Vault Corp’s elite Interception Unit before they escape the city – with players in the starring role of lead Interception driver!
Interesting idea. Take the canvas of “The United States as an open world” and put new stories and themes on it every season. Going by Tom’s reviews, I wish they were doing this for The Crew, not The Crew 2.
Yeah, because the thing everyone loves about The Crew is the story…
Also, they’re missing a trick by not making one of the cars the Porsche from Chase HQ.
Yea, based on Tom’s review I decided to never give this a second glance. But that was quite a long time ago. Is it worth some attention now?
I haven’t played since the latest update, however.
-Tom
from your story
That is so God-awful ugly it makes me want to play the game just to hopefully blow it up.
Insight from /r/games 13 days ago:
Update removes contracts (daily way to earn “CC” aka premium currency) in favor of a battle pass, which has a price of 80000 and players can get only 20000, and if you buy it, you can get 40000. With contracts you could get 20k CC in about 2 weeks with bad RNG, while with this system you are locked to gain the same quatinty every 2 months.
On top of that, a few months ago they released a premium-only currency car and was met with negative feedback, they later made a statement that no more vehicles will be locked behind premium currency. They just announced now 3 cars will be locked behind the pass.
Avoid.
–If you’re not familiar with the game, is still sold at full price and has a cosmetic store for this premium currency, and no, it still gets new items even with the battle pass. Also, the company basically ignores any good feedback, or if they listen to it, then immediately backtrack on said feedback, the game still has CLOSED BETA problems present.
This is still getting updated?
Huh. Anyone around here playing it?
So I went back to this after playing Motorfest, and is having a decent time. Driving around in miniature USA is still great. Driving from coast to coast is still great. But it is indeed worse than The Crew 1. There are so little skill challenges, whereas in TC1 it is choke full of them. Some people will find that busy work and Ubisoft probably listened to those people, but without those busy work the world is just too empty, may as well do a Horizon or TDU. The graphics is not good, textures are fuzzy, even if there is tons of geometry (high rise, canyon etc.)
So I have been play this instead of Horizon 5, and it at least holds my interest. Once I’ve accepted that this is not Horizon or the Crew 1, but more like Steep, then it is fine.
The biggest differentiator from Horizon is the loot/parts CaRPG. High end/legendary parts have set bonus, different sets have different kind of bonus. Like double the amount of nitro, or double level up rate. Levelling up will grant various gameplay bonuses. Basically they transposed all the modern ARPG mechanics like in Diablo into a racing game. That also means that high level players have a lot of advantages against newbies. In Horizon if you drive well and use a car tuned by someone else to be top of the class, then you can win against high level player. Not here though, just like in ARPG if you gear is crap.
It turns out I really like the loot chase in the Crew games. Taking a stock car and slowly turning it into something monstrous is a lot of fun for me and makes the car feel unique and special. In Horizon, you just buy the parts and tuning as soon as you get a new vehicle, so there’s no real feeling of progression.
The downside to the Crew approach, as you said, is that you can’t compete with high level players. I mostly play them as single player games anyway, though, so I’m happy with the tradeoff.
One thing I really dislike is the grind, in terms of loot and credit. You have to repeat a few races that are profitable over and over, or pay real money, otherwise you are not going anywhere in terms of better parts (ironic given this is a game about going almost anywhere). It is ok for free-to-play but not a full price game.OTOH in Horizon you are spoiled for choice.
Obviously Ubisoft learned their lessons from the first game. IIRC in TC1 you never really run out of money, because just driving around doing skills will give you enough. Here the economy is skewed to use real money, which is the asshole thing some developers do for their full price game.
Now that it dawns on me, I’m going to go back to Horizon 5. If they are as miserly in Motorfest as in here, I’ll have to give Motorfest a hard pass.
Yeah, that’s what I liked about TC1. You did a specific event to get a specific part, guaranteed. You might not be strong enough to do it yet, but you didn’t have to grind anything, you just went and got a different part that you could get, which would make you stronger so you could get the part you wanted.
I… er… played TC2 a lot instead of Horizon 5 lately. Once I’ve turned on or off various driving assists, it is ok. Car speed is a bit too OTT anyway, like driving S2 998 cars in Horizon all the time (i.e. not very technical). Ubisoft Ivory Tower really doesn’t understand that driving slower cars has their own challenges, and there is joy in overcoming those challenges. Unlike Horizon it has boats, planes, and bikes, which I play and like a lot.
Different cars actually have very different characteristics but you can’t tell as long as you have low quality parts with different properties mess up the driving experience. Only when parts ranking is the same do you really appreciate the different handling and acceleration, and by default you can’t do such like-for-like comparison.
Money and parts grinds are still painfully slow, though they add quite a few free cars so it is fine. I have close to 700 cars in Horizon 5 and I probably used at most 100 of them anyway, so there really isn’t point of having a large car collection.
Graphics wise it is still pretty fugly, even compared with TC1.
I got this through PS+. My son wanted to install it because it looks like Need For Speed Unbound, which he’s been having a lot of fun with.
It’s been okay so far, but I really hate that you have $$ and the Bitcoins as currency in the game. Such bullshit.