2014-04-08

Often in open world games, settings and backdrops are expansive, but in reality there isn’t very much to do in them.

This isn’t the case with The Crew.

Imagine a virtual world larger than Grand Theft Auto V, Forza Horizon and Red Dead Redemption combined and encompassing the entire United States. A quick look at the game’s massive map reveals a United States dotted with activities. From end to end, the map spans over an enormous 7000 miles of road and 15 cities. 0_9m681xv3

Oh, and it’s stuffed full of fast cars and challenging races.

This is the setting of Ubisoft and France-based developer Ivory Tower’s massively multiplayer online racing game, The Crew. During a recent press event at Ubisoft’s office in San Francisco, I had a chance to sit down with The Crew for approximately three hours and explore the game’s massive world.

“Massive” being the key word here.

“It really depends on what car you have,” said Stéphane Beley, Ivory Tower’s co-founder, design director and producer.

“If you go off-road, it will take two or three hours [to travel from each end of the map]. If you take a more efficient racing car, it will be either one hour or 45 minutes. [In this demo] You saw going from New York to Miami took about 20 minutes in a pretty fast car.”



Fast cars and pretty vistas are what The Crew is all about.

Even if you’re driving around casually exploring The Crew’s map (something I spent much of my time doing), skill missions, shown through little triangles on your mini-map, are scattered everywhere.

They involve tasks like driving as fast as you can for a period of time, or weaving in and out of poles in a timed slalom race. They shake up the monotony that often sets in from driving around aimlessly, and do an excellent job of filling out the map.

“We want to let the player be free to play the game as they want,” said Beley.

“If you want to play solo, or competitively – it’s really up to you. We have a fast travel system if you want to go fast or if you want to go right to a competition.”

Each spec — the word the game uses to classify the type of car you’re driving –- whether it’s street, dirt, perf, circuit, or raid, controls differently. Every vehicle in The Crew can be customized to fit into these various categories.



I had more fun with off-road vehicles during my time with The Crew than any other spec of car.

For instance, at one point in the game I took a Street spec vehicle off-roading through a forest and frustratingly found myself unable to find a path back to a street.

Cars can be heavily customized with new paint jobs, decals, and various parts. Altering your car’s components gives it a point score and a level, much in the same way you’d level up a character in a traditional massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Vehicle damage also surprisingly isn’t only cosmetic and actually affects the performance of your car.

From what I played, missions seem quite varied and can be played competitively/cooperatively with a group of up to eight players online or on your own.

One particularly challenging mission involved smashing into and taking out another car while bouncing over rolling sand dunes on a beach. Every time I came close to nailing my opponent with a direct hit, they’d swerve out of the way at the last second, adapting to my movements. While most of my time with The Crew was spent playing against other members of the media, the game’s AI seems like a formidable and intelligent opponent.



The Crew’s AI is vicious and unrelenting.

Scoring either a bronze, silver or gold medal depending on your performance while completing missions and skill tasks, awards you with a new part for your vehicle that can then be equipped on the fly, without having to go back to a garage to add the new item. This keeps you engaged in The Crew‘s world and removes the need to constantly return to some sort of home base to upgrade your car.

A great feature for multiplayer-shy gamers is that while other players will always be present in The Crew’s world, you don’t have to interact with them if you don’t want to. It offers up the same multiplayer-single player experience games offered byDefiance and Need For Speed Rivals, although playing with others is more fun.

One hundred other players are visible on The Crew’s map when it’s zoomed out but everyone playing the game is in the same world. To prevent massive traffic jams, within a 2 km radius, only eight players are actually visible in The Crew when driving.

While the preview didn’t include much of The Crew‘s plot, it seems simple and involves a tale of revenge. But in a game like this, story isn’t that important.

You can also see Test Drive Unlimited’s influence in The Crew, another quasi-open world racing game released a few years ago on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This makes sense because Beley, as well as many of the studio’s other members worked on the impressive, but ultimately underwhelming, title.

Surprisingly, damage actually affects your vehicles performance.

“Test Drive Unlimited was really a rough draft of what we had in mind,” Beley said. “I only worked on the first one and not the second, but my first time vision for The Crew was in Test Drive Unlimited. It took us a long time to develop the technology to create our world.”

Beley also showed off a type of race that looks like it could be a ton of fun online.  In this mission, players are tasked with racing between checkpoints, all strewn across a vast section of the U.S. Midwest.

My vehicle, equipped for off-road racing, bounded across hills, launching through the air repeatedly, barreling towards a checkpoint many miles off in the distance. The freedom and expansive driving area, as strange as it might sound, was almost relaxing. While I played this particular mission on my own, I couldn’t help but imagine how much more fun it would be playing with a group of eight other people.

Ivory Tower’s The Crew looks extremely promising, even for players who are usually relatively uninterested in the racing genre.

However, the big question is whether or not an MMO racing game can hold players’ attention for longer than a few hours. I had a great time with The Crew during my play session and the title’s varied missions and skill tasks always kept things feeling fresh, so hopefully this is the case for the entire game.

The Crew doesn’t have a solid release date yet but Beley said the game will be released at some point during the 2014 fall season for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.

Follow me on Twitter: @Patrick_ORourke.

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