The Crew: Ubisoft’s racing MMO is fully featured but lacking soul
Stace Harman takes to the open roads of the USA in Ubisoft’s The Crew and finds a game with plenty of content but a lack of character.
”There is certainly no shortage of things to do and activities to pursue and this variety of tasks and freedom of approach is essential for a full-priced racing MMO if it’s to keep players interested beyond the 20+ hours of campaign mode.”
Despite a wealth of content and game modes, some truly expansive landscapes through which to burn rubber and a whole host of customisation options, there’s currently something missing from The Crew.
It’s something intangible but stems from what feels like an overall lack of identity. From the unexciting title to generic NPCs, the world of The Crew feels at once packed with things to do but lacking in ideas in how best to motivate you to take part.
That’s a shame because it’s clear that the developers at Ivory Tower have poured an awful lot into ensuring that players of this open-world racing MMO will have plenty to do, see and explore at the game’s launch and beyond, it just needs to find a better way of getting you excited about it.
Perhaps it’s because one of The Crew’s core strengths is actually the absence of something, rather than the presence of a specific feature. While there is a loose narrative underpinning the whole experience, it’s the lack of a rigid structure and absence of constraints across its open world that stands as a key selling point.
As such, if you want to work your way through the story missions – that see you infiltrating a gang to take down local crime bosses on the way to an ultimate showdown – you can do so but if the first thing you want to do is take off cross-country to make the purported 90-minute drive from one side of the USA to the other, you can do that too.
”There’s certainly something liberating about being able to take-off in any direction and encounter varied landscapes from the bright lights of Vegas and Detroit’s industrial areas to the natural wonder of the Rockies and Yosemite National Park.”
“The key question for us throughout has been how to make sure the player has options,” explains Ivory Tower co-founder and The Crew producer Ahmed Boukhelifa. “We want to make sure that whatever the player is doing they’re having fun and also getting a taste of other experiences along the way.”
This translates to a wealth of varied activities that exist to help you earn experience and subsequently level-up your cars, which are being touted as the true characters of the game. While missions have you chasing down off-road quarry or street racing against rival gang members, the smaller skill challenges range from slalom runs to catching air by launching yourself off ramps.
All of the challenges can be completed solo or with fellow members of your crew and more or less everything you do from skilful driving to multi-part story missions earns you XP and currency. This ensures that progression is constant and the warm glow of positive reinforcement radiates from each and every task you perform.
As with more traditional MMORPGs, the aim here is to level-up in order to access increasingly challenging missions that yield better and rarer gear. In The Crew, this gear comes in the form of gear boxes, fuel injectors, exhausts, engine blocks and the like. In total, there are 19 elements to improve and tweak, 11 of which are performance related and 8 cosmetic.
All of these are rated across a wide range of stats that improve both your overall level and allow you to drill down to tinker with specific attributes that ultimately affect how your car handles, much like customising a character build to ensure that it’s tailored to your liking.
”We have a development plan for the game that goes on for years, so it was all about defining what is the content that we need to get the players engaged and to the point where they are satisfied and happy to pour 20, 40 or 60 hours in to the game as it stands at launch.”
Missions and challenges dotted around the map tell you what you’ll be rewarded with, which is usually a wad of XP and currency along with a specific car part, while your performance during the challenge dictates the rarity of the part you win – bronze, silver or gold. This allows you to target specific challenges for the parts you want, rather than endlessly grinding in the hope of finding that elusive golden gear box.
You can also buy parts using dollars or Crew Credits – earned by taking part in social challenges – but the best parts are predictably and prohibitively expensive, so earning by playing is the most appealing option for progression early on.
Each of the licensed cars comes in a default Full Stock loadout, which is the equivalent of the car dealership model but there are a number of different specs that allow you to kit out your cars for different road conditions and range from circuit to dirt and performance to street specs. These specs adjust the base handling of a car, which can be further tweaked by obtaining those all important engine parts.
As you might expect, this tweaking takes place in your garage, which is similar in function to Need For Speed: Rivals’ hideouts, and a planned companion app will use your save game to allow you to tune your car and plan where you’ll be heading next from a tablet device while you’re away from the console or PC.
There is certainly no shortage of things to do and activities to pursue and this variety of tasks and freedom of approach is essential for a full-priced racing MMO if it’s to keep players interested beyond the 20+ hours of campaign mode. It’s in this area that Ivory Tower has been focusing the most time and effort since making the painful decision to delay the launch from earlier this year.
”Right now, The Crew is an interesting proposition but feels like it’s underselling itself and that its fully-featured driving experience, varied and detailed landscapes and wealth of content is being undermined by its lack of a strong identity.”
“With this game we have completely changed our mindset because of the nature of the online experience and so now launch is just the beginning,” says Boukhelifa.
“We have a development plan for the game that goes on for years, so it was all about defining what is the content that we need to get the players engaged and to the point where they are satisfied and happy to pour 20, 40 or 60 hours in to the game as it stands at launch. We’re also looking at adding 20 additional hours of content every few weeks with new missions and it’s really on this part of things that we’ve used that additional time to work on.
“You have to take the time when you’re launching an online game against competitors; it’s vital that you have established quality content for that post-launch window.”
Based on current evidence and Boukhelifa’s claims of planned content, The Crew is going to work hard to keep you entertained. There’s certainly something liberating about being able to take-off in any direction and encounter varied landscapes from the bright lights of Vegas and Detroit’s industrial areas to the natural wonder of the Rockies and Yosemite National Park.
However, playing in a simulated environment with a handful of press and developers is a poor substitute for playing online with thousands of other players and it’s here that The Crew could really excel. It just needs to better promote the social elements because while it’s admirable that you can choose whether to play alone or in a group I can’t help but feel that if you’re going to call your game The Crew then the benefits of playing with others should be more evident. After all, that’s a key part of any massively multiplayer online experience.
Right now, The Crew is an interesting proposition but feels like it’s underselling itself and that its fully-featured driving experience, varied and detailed landscapes and wealth of content is being undermined by its lack of a strong identity. It’s evidently a well put together title but currently feels a bit soulless; Ubisoft and Ivory Tower will need to work on better selling the concept as we get closer to launch later this year.
The Crew is set for release on PC, PS4 and Xbox One this autumn.
