Something I look forward to is us bringing back
The Crew 1. We plan to have our offline/online server emulator out by December for the game's 10th anniversary. This will probably end up being my favorite game as I had a lot of fun with it even before the shutdown. Plus since it's in the community's hands, that means mods and improvements to the game. We have the tools for it, even.
The Crew 2 and
Motorfest just suck in comparison to this game, and I'll never forgive Ubisoft for taking the game away instead of giving it an offline patch or something so that it's still playable when it reached EoL. The server stuff has made excellent progress, too. As someone who's a massive advocate for game preservation, online-only games suck and so it's nice when we can work together to preserve it despite that. Especially since 90% of
The Crew was singleplayer anyways, so you didn't even need a connection in the first place. But alas, if you're not on the internet 24/7, you can't play the full-price game you purchased. You can't even leave the title screen (there's a title screen and then a main menu, you can't even access the main menu to customize settings or do anything) without that connection. The shutdown of this full-priced game sold under a perpetual license was one of the factors that kickstarted the massive
StopKillingGames campaign (
FAQ) that
I've been helping to establish (which reminds me, should probably post an update there soon on what's been going on).
Now for those who don't know, the game is/was a racing MMO (only in theory rather than in practice unfortunately) that takes place across a scaled-down version of the contiguous United States (approximately 1:34 scale or the size of real-life Rhode Island). The primary focus was roadtrips and co-op play, and never driving alone. You could form 4-player crews with friends and have adventures and complete missions together. There were various vehicles to choose from and specs alongside them. Here's a view of the full map. Despite being scaled down, it's still a massive map, and there's a lot of detail they put into it despite that.
Stock vehicles were known as "Fullstock". Fullstock vehicles have no nitrous and can't be customized with visual parts, only the paint and livery can be customized. You can take any Fullstock car to a tuner where you can apply a spec to it. Street spec vehicles are designed for winding roads and are great for general street races. Dirt spec vehicles are better for going offroad, and drive faster on dirt than on tarmac. Raid spec is like dirt but there's no speed nor handling penalties regardless of terrain, and can take a beating. Perf spec is similar to street but a larger focus on reaching top speeds rather than handling. And then there's Circuit spec, meant for closed courses. The amount of customization is pretty massive too, not only letting you change bodykits, rims, paints and liveries, but even changing the license plate and interior colors of your car.
Less than a year after the game came out in December 2014, the
Wild Run expansion was released in November 2015. A few new vehicles were added to the game. 3 new specs were added (Drift, Drag, and Monster Truck, which are exactly what they sound like) to add more variety. Motorcycles were introduced to the game. The Summit (a PvP race event) was also added to the game as well as various activities. The expansion also came with a free "graphics update" to the game (ugh... more on this later).
The game was developed by Ivory Tower. Ivory Tower was made up of developers who originally worked on the
Test Drive Unlimited series. And it certainly shows. However at one point, I'm pretty sure it was before the
Wild Run expansion came out, Ubisoft basically fired everybody over at IVT and replaced them with completely different people. Which is a real shame, and former IVT developers have discussed their frustrations about it quite a lot. It might also explain why
Wild Run sucked (again, more on this later). The people who've developed
The Crew 2 and
The Crew Motorfest aren't even remotely the same people.
I'll always prefer this game over the other sequels. Ubisoft set a really good precedent with its themes, style and gameplay, even though the story was okay. But then in the sequels they basically took everything they had already established and threw it all away for something more generic and colorful, a la
Forza Horizon's car festival. Some people didn't like it, which was fine, but I have a feeling many would've received it better if they had only known ahead of time what would eventually come after in the sequels.
I can't wait to have roadtrips again along Route 66 with my buddies. And maybe there's a chance I'll see some of you there too?
