I don’t have a horse in this game, but just for devil’s advocate sake: what makes this a “Fuck you” moment compared to when Blizzard didn’t make “Diablo III” or “StarCraft 2” available to reviewers until launch? Purely the recent reputation/actions of the respective companies?
I distinctly remember gamers getting mad at both Diablo III and StarCraft 2 for having always online requirements for even their singleplayer portions. (StarCraft 2 has fixed this somewhat with a 2-week limited offline mode available.) Plus, people did take Blizzard to task over the terrible Diablo III launch experience and subsequent Auction House shenanigans.
Oh, okay. I was thinking of reporter-specific anger over not getting a game until launch. I didn’t realize you were reacting to larger stuff like that.
The PS4 beta is available on the Playstation store with tonight’s update. Thoughts after an hour or so of play, where I’m stuck waiting for installation to complete:
It’s a racing game MMO, possibly “MMO”, where every player character looks like Marc Maron (for some reason) and sounds like Troy Baker (of course). IMDB doesn’t list who voices the player character yet, but does show “Johnny Hawkes” as one of the voice actors. What a tease.
Every “player” I’ve encountered so far has obeyed the rules of traffic and had a name with proper capitalization and no symbols or numbers above their car, so pretty much no one is playing yet. Or, The Crew is the latest instance of broken multiplayer in a major fall release. At least it’s still in beta.
Far too much of the prologue is spent driving for brief amounts of time between load screens and terrible Ubistory cutscenes. These looks so, so expensive. Why would anyone waste their budget on this crap?
The driving model will be controversial. There’s a sense of unresponsiveness to the steering that’s present across the muscle cars, sports car, and truck I’ve driven. It’s like the car won’t commit to turning to the degree I want it to until milliseconds after I move the left stick, which leads to overcompensation with the left stick and oversteering. Will this improve as you level up?
I’ve discovered two progression systems so far: upgrades, which let you inch car stats up by a few points at a time if your level is high enough to equip them, and perks that let you increase other car stats and the rate of earning currency by a few percentage points at a time. It feels ready for microtransactions. You gain levels by earning XP from doing stuff on the map, of course. The scoring system holds you accountable for track resets and sloppy driving, which is great, but doesn’t appear to reward you for driving with the slick dash cam. Boo. I want to be rewarded for using the camera that’s more restrictive, but also more immersive.
I love how The Crew breaks up the potential monotony of driving distances with little events that pop up seamlessly while you’re in transit, like slaloming between markers or driving precisely through the middle of a series of markers. These do a great job of encouraging you to improve your skill with your current vehicle, and reward you with bronze, silver, or gold and an upgrade. Plus, it’s easy to repeat them for a better performance and reward, or get them out of the way so you can reach your destination.
The map of the US is huge, but clearly not to scale. I’ve been restricted to Detroit so far, and it’s detailed enough, but there’s never quite enough traffic on the road to satisfy (I used to hope the problem of insufficient pedestrian and car traffic in open world games would be solved this generation). You can fast travel to events near points you’ve discovered, like every other Ubi open world.
I like enough of what I’ve played of The Crew so far to be eager to read impressions and reviews, but I’ll need my concerns about the progression systems, driving model, intrusiveness of the story, and Ubi formula ennui to be addressed before I consider a purchase. All of the beta content after the prologue is taking far too long to download, so I’m probably done with it for now.
I’m actually okay with this. As a reviewer, and even a consumer, I’d love for reviewers to all be on equal footing in terms of access to review copies. And in a game that heavily depends on online functionality, you need look no farther than Drive Club to see what reviews look like when they’re based on advance copies or publisher sponsored events. How many Drive Club reviews were written based on those few days reviewers had copies before the game went live and fell apart?
Of course, my bigger concern about The Crew is that it’s going to have all that companion app tie-in and microtransaction crap from Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
-Tom
True. The early reports are not encouraging on that issue.
I thought something was wrong with the controls, setup, or it was in my head. I tried the beta for a couple of hours and this control setup is unacceptable for me. Unless something can change I would never buy this game.
You can lower the steering deadzone in the control options which makes the cars much more responsive.
All right, who’s ready to go at midnight?
-Tom, nearly done pre-loading on the PS4Are you going to commenting on your experience, liveblogging style, Tom?
Should be interesting!
Well, I’ve done the prologue and now I’m stuck in the headquarters screen waiting for the install (i.e. download) to finish. Which is probably about 12GBs of data, which means I won’t be playing until tomorrow. :(
So now I’ll take this opportunity to bitch about the driving model. When you dig into the options screen, there are three choices: full assist, something something something, and hardcore. I tinkered around with them and I really like hardcore. My little Nissan kept fishtailing out of control while I got used to not banging around like I was playing some dippy Ridge Racer game. I was careful not to brake too much while turning. I lowered the null threshold for steering. Eventually, it felt pretty good. Hey, I might even go for manual transmission at this rate!
Oh, but wait, why should I? As I can tell, there’s no incentive to drive on hardcore. In multiplayer – and, gosh, it occurs to me I have no idea how they handle multiplayer if I’m set to hardcore and everyone else is set to full assist – aren’t I just handicapping myself? In fact, in the game at large, aren’t I just handicapping myself? I’m just making everything more difficult for the sake of the added personality of a meaningful driving model. I guess that’s the point?
But this is a game design with these MMO-style bits of gear and a perk system that adds +3% traction here and +5% braking there. But the full assist mode just dumbs it all down, right? Wouldn’t you want to encourage players to use the more complex driving model so the upgrades matter more? Shouldn’t I get an xp bonus or something for the harder driving model? Because on full assist, this really does seem like a broad and easy arcade racer. Of course, I’ve only messed around with a starting car in the prologue, so I shouldn’t really cast aspersions on how they differentiate the different car “classes”, and upgrades.
Oh, and a bit of advice when you start playing. Just power through the dopey story missions until you get to your headquarters. All that stuff you’re doing before you get to your headquarters is prologue. Don’t get invested in exploring and leveling up until you’ve really reached the full-on open world after the prologue. It’ll take, maybe, a half hour if you power through it.
-Tom
I could use a great new car game - I really hope this could be it :-)
Edit: I had NOT seen Tom’s post for some reason - Thanks for the great write-up Tom!
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Do you like it though? Is it better than Driverclub, are you reviewing it if you can.
Seems even now there is very little info out there, no reviews.
I have a choice between PC and 360 version? Are they all separate games on on the same server. Sorry for all the questions but you are the only person I have seen that has posted anything remotely interesting.
As mentioned upthread, there were no advance copies given out to reviewers, so all the reviewers got access to it today like everyone else (unless you’re Tom, and do the midnight launch thing last night).
I should have my mitts on it today as well, or maybe tomorrow since my wife is home from work today.
I am hoping for a quick first look from a few sites. As I am 5 hours + ahead here maybe there will be some European sites with something up but may have to wait until tomorrow.
Also I am assuming any NDA for the beta versions is over so more feedback can come out, just makes you hope we don’t get a repetition of Driverclub and unison ts track record recently does suck as well.
Well I bit the bullet and picked it up. Lucky I have a quick DL speed so it’s down and installed (PC Version) First it runs great on a i5 quad core@4 8 gig ram and a HD6970. Playing at 1920 res and most things on high and it runs nicely at 60fps. Probably could up the settings but will fiddle with it later.
I think the game looks pretty good, really reminds me of Test Drive. I am now in my Headquarters, chose the Nisaan z350 car, the other 3 choices are all US cars, seemingly bigger and bulkier, but you get plenty of opportunity to test drive them all and see what you like. I got the best lap times in the Mustang but it didn’t appeal that much.
The handling certainly isn’t sim level but it does seem ok for me, I am on Sport which is the middle of the 3 levels and it seems pretty good, i mean I am no great racer and too heavy on the sim doesn’t appeal to me anyways.
One thing I really like is the blue line in the sky to follow for the races and way points, I really suck at is getting lost while street racing or end up crashing while watching the mini map rather than where I am going, this works really well.
It took about an hour to get to the HQ but I did do a few races a few times as well as a fair bit of test driving, so pretty impressed so far, no server issues and loads of real people on the streets driving about as well.
One thing due to the story is you don’t pick your character but then i suppose your car is your toon rather than the driver but would have been nice to have him as me rather than some beard, weird, hippy, glass wearing nerd ;p
Please stop making this game sound interesting. Fool me once (Driveclub)…
I’m tempted but am holding off till you suckers figure out if it’s good or not. And no one here has commented on XBone yet… (plus Game of Thrones is coming out this week to boot).
— Alan
Some people are streaming The Crew now through Steam’s new feature.
So I played this in Beta for maybe an hour or so and it seemed pretty ‘blah’ to me, but maybe that was because I was only in the tutorial. I think i got to the headquarters where you could pick your first car and that was pretty much it. The driving model seemed very off to me with the car feeling very floaty and unresponsive which made driving on crowded streets kind of a pain. Granted i only got to drive one car so i cant really say how other cars might have felt, is there a wide variety of cars in this game and do they all drive differently? Also what is the mission structure like, does it force you into that lame story from the tutorial or does it open up after that fist section? Finding any info on this game right now is tough thanks to Ubi’s review policy.