The Crew - Open World MMO Racing Game

Games
801

I’m motherloving this game. It is pretty much TDU3, with an eye-rolling crime/racer/whatever plot weaved in to gate your progress. So I bought the season pass just to say to Ivory Tower that I love their work!

Honestly new cars aren’t necessary. You level up your starter car and it is pretty adequate. You probably just need a performance car because the starter is shite, and you can redeem one very cheaply with U credit.

The performance however is a bit wonky. I have issues with 60fps. My RX480 is perfectly able to handle 1080p ultra, but every now and then there is this stutter. Bump it down to 720p it is less noticeable but still there. But as soon as I lock it at 30fps it is smooth. Other people on the interweb have this problem so it is not just me.

I don’t have a wheel, only a gamepad because I’m not not hardcore into racing games, but I configured the pad so that acceleration/brake is not just 1 or 0 like the default gamepad config, I can gently accelerate or brake (using right stick up to accelerate, right stick down to brake). After some workaround it is ok, it is not a wheel but I can accelerate/brake with finesse.

As to The Crew 2… I can wait for a GOTY edition. I was just now playing Witcher 3 GOTY. That little Triss/Yennefer/Geralt love triangle can wait. And I still got a yuuuuge backlog.

802

Been playing this over the weekend. Man there is a lot of grind in this game, and the alternative is to pay to unlock cars and parts. I made the mistake of buying parts (NEVER BUY PARTS), and now I don’t have money to buy a drag racing car. Have to grind or pay real money. I enjoy the moment to moment gameplay enough so I’ll grind. Touring a miniature America while doing a wide variety of driving challenges is a lot of fun.

Some of the story missions are designed to make the player throw the controller at the screen in frustration. Like the cargo collect/destroy missions, or the car ramming missions, or both (I’m looking at you Burn Coburn). Good thing they are ditching that NFS/Fast and Furious wannabe plot in The Crew 2, it is just boring.

803

The season pass has the best car - Ferrari 458 Speciale. I pretty much bought it just for that, and still consider it worth it :)

Also, you do not need to grind, but you need some friends. Then you can send them on fictional faction missions and earn money pretty quickly that way.

804

Hm, may try that faction mission tack. Cheers.

Been rocking with my Ferrari F12berlinetta, may level up 458 Speciale later.

805

After Tom’s review of The Crew 2 and his praises of The Crew 1, I discovered I have a copy of this sitting in my uPlay account and decided to give it a go. After a couple of missions in Detroit, I headed out to visit all the car dealerships. I’m now level 15 from the challenges I found along the way. It’s a lot of fun so far! The drive across the country was very cool – evocative of the places without being constrained by real geography.

If the idea behind letting me try all the cash shop cars was to entice me to buy them, it failed. Maybe it’s because my skill at vehicle handling hasn’t advanced beyond treating the gas and brakes as binary controls (gas goes on, gas goes off!) but I find the hypercars much harder to drive than the basic ones. I can plow into a wall at 160 mph in my free car just as well as one I paid for.

806

The default control with gamepad is broken, because gas and brake are digital. On PC I mapped accelerate to up on the left analog stick, and brake to down on left analog stick. Now I can gently accelerate on bends (just like in real life) to maintain control, instead of decelerating. And there is absolutely no way to have this kind of finesse in acceleration/brake with KB+M as far as I can tell.

You won’t get this problem if you are playing with a wheel though.

807

I’m paying with a 360 controller on my PC. After your post, I checked and I do have analog control on the triggers… I am just really bad at using them like analog controls. How did your steering work if you set gas and brakes to up and down on the left thumb stick? Were you just letting off them in hard corners?

This game is in a weird uncanny valley for me during crashes. Plowing into a building at 150 mph (in the cockpit view at least) mostly just slams the car to a stop. I keep expecting something more dramatic/permanent. (I can’t remember what game I’m thinking of, but the camera pans around the wreckage of the car with ominous music before the screen goes black and you restart that sequence…)

808

Yeah for me triggers also worked analog on PC with x360pad.

809

I use right stick for steering. You have to give up looking with the right stick, but for me it is completely fine, normally you don’t have time looking left or right anyway. Alternatively, you can use left analog stick left and right for steering, and right analog stick up and down for gas/brake.

It takes some getting used to, especially because in shooters all 4 axes of movement is mapped to one analog stick. But the finesse in acceleration is something you can only get with analog control, AND by separating the steering axes from the gas/brake axes.

I’ll give you my gamepad mapping for driving, perfected over the course of playing the game to finish:

LB - gear down (forget manual clutch, modern super cars are clutch-less manual anyway)
RB - gear up
LT - Handbrake
RT - Nitro
D-pad: up for horn, left and right for left and right view, down for back view (the rear mirror in the cockpit view is famously broken.)

Also map d-pad to navigate smartphone menu

Left analog stick up/down - accelerate/brake (alternatively, motorcycle forward/backward)
Left analog stick left/right - blank (alternatively, if you use right analog stick for gas/brake, this will be steering left/right)
Right analog stick up/down - Motorcycle forward/backward (alternatively, accelerate/brake)
Right analog stick left/right - steering left/right (alternatively, blank)

Also map left analog stick to navigate console menu

X - change camera view
Y - Notification (This is a system wide notification pull down button, quite useful IMO)
A - back on road (also map this for menu confirm)
B - change mini-map view (also map this for menu cancel)

Select - Map
Start - Smartphone

There are some more quirks but this will do basically.

810

This is on sale on the playstation store for $15 right now. I’m thinking about picking it up but there were some complaints about controller issues on the ps4 (I don’t have a wheel). Anyone have any insight? What’s the player base like now? I sure would like a good driving / racing game right now.

812

This video compares Crew 1 and 2 maps, it is insane the amount of locations that got removed and downgraded from game to game

Like, I would expect sequel to improve stuff but apparently Ivory Tower have a different opinion

813

I can’t wait to see a post mortem for The Crew 2 some day. I’d love to hear the skinny on what went down and how and why.

814

Oh geez, you’re not kidding. What the heckfire.

815

I have been playing on the PC version and there are usually a few people online. Maybe 50? Looks like the PS4 version uses a separate server, so that’s not very helpful for you.

I actually like how empty it is. I see a couple of players a night close to me. It would probably be more annoying if I wanted to play PVP, but I don’t. The one time I tried, I got destroyed by people with max level cars vs my level 20 crate… Unless the multiplayer features are make or break for you, I say give it a try.

816

AFAIK PvP everybody use the same car at the same level. The skill you bring (e.g. higher top speed) can be different though. Some skills are PvP oriented, so you may want to respec or buy extra skill points (through grinding money, don’t bother using real money unless you feel like a whale).

817

I may be confused about what I was doing. Maybe not PVP, but the multiplayer races that unlock at level 20? I was able to enter them with my current car and I got matched against people with way better cars. Maybe there were only four people trying to race so we got thrown together?

Either way, by the time the first place car crossed the line I was almost 2 minutes behind. In a sub 10 minute race, that’s pretty disheartening.

818

play the Crew 1.

819

Not unusual for a newbie. PvP people have been playing since maybe 2014, so they know the tracks very well. The other day I got my first 1st place, only after maybe 100+ PvP races.

820

I’m pretty sure I was competing against 1000+ level cars with my 400ish one. No doubt inexperience played a huge role too. I’ll try again once I’ve reached max level.

For now I’m enjoying just driving around doing missions and challenges as they come. I agree with Tom that this is a better driving game than Forza Horizon 3. The driving physics may be slightly better in that one, but The Crew feels a little more laid back and less like a dudebro power fantasy.

821

When you are competing in a race, you are given the same car with the same level. So e.g. when you are competing an off-road race, even if you don’t own any off-road car you can still compete.