The Crew - Open World MMO Racing Game

Anyone else excited about this? I was watching the Gamespot interview they just did with one of the developers and some of the stuff they were talking about really impressed me. Apparently, the US map will take almost 2 hours to drive across on a highway with a Lamborghini and upwards of 3 hours if you’re driving offroad with a truck and its New York is the size of Liberty City in GTA4. Note that there are more than a DOZEN cities in total. The world is dotted with 1000’s of “skill” points that I guess act like achievements, so you’re rewarded for exploring every nook and cranny of the map. It features dynamic weather (each region will have varying weather), day/night cycles, an extensive car modding system, and you can earn XP to level up by doing a variety of “races” that includes something they call “co-opetition”, which is cooperative racing where any person in your “crew” can win the race, but are awarded accordingly based on things like how much damage they did on say a takedown.

This all sounds really, really cool and I’m not normally a fan of racing games. Also of note, this is an exclusive next-gen title (PS4/XBox1/High-end PC) that they claim they couldn’t have created on PS3/XBox 360.

You can see the press conference trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuSvOYkBx24

Glad you’re excited about it, but I think it sounds like a horrible idea. I predict vast stretches of road with no one else around (though that could be a good thing depending on your disposition). Also from the video I saw, the cars looked really floaty, like they were in hovercraft.

That’s a fair point that I think was sort of brought up in the interview. They mentioned something called “gameplay bubbles” (servers?), with each bubble having just enough cars in it so that you can still find people to do challenges with, but it will never be to the point of feeling overcrowded.

They also talked about a “living” environment and how the cars that you see racing around could be AI or other players, which suggests the game hides that information from you (presumably you could tell if they were on your friends list).

Admittedly, I’m not an expert on the game or anything. I just find it difficult to believe they could have that large an area and have it be hand-tuned to any significant degree.

I want this game so bad it hurts. Or is that lunch coming back to haunt me? Anyway, I loved the demo. This will help me get a PS4 sooner rather than later.

I love the idea of this game, then I think about the last time I played Test Drive Unlimited 2 and experienced that game’s empty servers and it kills my enthusiasm. I’m sure this game will do better at maintaining a population, but then I think about the last time I played TDU2 when it did have a good population and it kills my enthusiasm even more.

I hear ya, but when I think these are the folks who did Driver: San Francisco, I get doubly excited. ;)

No doubt. Add in fast travel so you can quickly jump into the action with friends (or strangers) and I’m not too concerned about population issues. What really appeals to me is the seamless integration of the singleplayer stuff with the multiplayer so I can hop in and out of coop as I please. As a fan of driving games, this is a day one purchase short of disastrous reviews (knock on wood!)

Yeah, this and inFamous sold the PS4 for me.

Ubi explains the Season Pass:

http://blog.ubi.com/the-crew-season-pass/

  • $24.99
  • McLaren 12C and the Ferrari 458 Speciale at launch
  • 12 additional cars spread across four DLC packs.
  • New missions with each DLC pack that everyone will get for free.

14 cars total??? That’s a terrible deal.

And barely a savings over buying them separately for the (also terrible) price of $6.99 per 4-pack of cars.

For me as a consumer who doesn’t care about car packs, this is win win. I can safely ignore the season pass and I’ll still get the other content (missions?) which might or might not be good, who knows.

Just got an invite to the PS4 beta, can’t download until this weekend but curious if anyone else here has given it a shot.

The other thread has several PC beta responses:

My take:

it looks like no steam version for us people in Europe… only via uplay. What’s going on there I wonder? Trying to break the steam monopoly??

See also the Uplay thread. It’s worldwide, and also affects FarCry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity.
My blind guess is that, as was the case with Mass Effect 3, these games will be using an in-game DLC purchase system that is incompatible with Steam’s ToS.

Word is that it may be an error, by Steam and that it was meant to be UK only.

seems it could be world wide.

It’s world-wide. The SteamDB shows that the storefronts for upcoming Ubisoft games were removed yesterday.

If it was error, it could’ve been fixed by now as it literally takes a few minutes to add entries back to the DB.

If you were concerned about the recent Unity embargo issue, Ubisoft has great news for this game. No embargo!

http://blog.ubi.com/the-crew-road-tested/

For this very reason, The Crew will be available to media to begin their reviews when the game launches on December 2. There will be absolutely no embargo on any type of coverage once the game is available for sale. While we fully anticipate that you might see some reviews immediately at launch – largely built around the preview sessions we facilitated during the past months or the limited content of the closed and open betas – they won’t be based on optimal conditions or reflect the finished game.

No embargo! The game just won’t really be available to anyone until launch.

Fuck you.