PAX East: In The Crew, America is Your Playground

How Ubisoft's massive, upcoming MMO racer sunk its teeth into me.

by Marty Sliva
April 11, 2014

The Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world MMO racer, is built around some of the wildest scope I’ve ever seen in a video game. At its reveal at E3 2013, Ubisoft declared that you’d be able to race across the entire breadth of America. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, you’d be able to jam through major cities, go off road wherever you desired, and experience a map the size of which hasn’t been seen before in the racing genre. Obviously, a lot of us took that bold claim with a grain of salt; there was no way the game could be that big...right?

Well, after spending two hours driving from Detroit to Miami with a quick layover in Manhattan, I can safely say that The Crew is just as stupidly huge as Ubisoft said it would be, and man if that doesn’t get me excited.

The Crew tows a great line between the arcade-madness of the Burnout series and the rigid simulation of games like Forza and Gran Turismo. As someone who prefers their racers in the flavor of the former rather than the latter, this is a balance that I can definitely get behind. Cars control with enough leeway to allow me to weave in and out of traffic and make gravity-defying drifts without having to devote a few years of my life to tutorials.

So yeah, about that scope. The Crew’s ability to let you seamlessly zoom out the camera to a view of the entire country, scroll over to any area you want, and zoom back down to find your car right there is incredible. Dozens of major cities are represented in the game, along with a ton more smaller bergs across the country. Ubisoft claims that it takes a few hours to drive from Los Angeles to New York City, and honestly, I believe them. I also really appreciated that despite the cities obviously being truncated, they still maintained the flavor of their real-world counterparts. From the sun-baked neighborhoods of Miami to the barren industrial yards of Detroit to bombing up and down hills in San Francisco, each city had a unique look, feel, and tone.

Aside from traditional “Point A to Point B” races, The Crew features a nice chunk of different challenges that liberally pepper the world like those found in Burnout Paradise. These range from slalom stretches that test your precision handling, to missions where you’re asked to take down a rogue truck as it barrels down an ocean-side beach. Of course, The Crew is ostensibly an MMO at heart, so all of these can either be done solo, or handled with a titular crew made up of your buddies from across the globe.

What's really cool is that the dynamic of each challenge changed depending on whether I went at it alone, or with a group of friends. For instance, trying to take down the runaway truck by myself was a tense, tough trial were I continually had to adjust my angles and manage my boost to try to T-bone the guy. On the contrary, playing with a group devolved into a chaotic, competitive chase where we spent more time trying to screw each other over rather than actually complete the objective. The way The Crew adapts to the number of people in a given challenge has the potential for some very interesting scenarios.

During my time with The Crew, I couldn’t shake this one thing that the game’s creative director Julian Gerighty said right before my demo. “This is an MMORPG that just so happens to feature cars.” While this statement could easily be disregarded as a clever marketing tagline, Gerighty is right on point with what The Crew is at its core. Leveling up your car through missions, updating it with new gear (aka, parts), and completely customizing its aesthetics feels like you’re carefully fleshing out the character sheet in a D&D game. Remember what I said about scope? Yeah, when The Crew comes out in the fall, I'm all on board for seeing just how massive Ubisoft's version of America really is.