2014’s The Crew was the first project for developer Ivory Tower, which was founded in Lyon, France, in 2007 and later acquired by Ubisoft in late 2015. While it may have been the debut game for the studio, a number of Ivory Tower’s staff formerly hailed from Lyon’s Eden Games (including Ivory Tower’s three founders) and had previous experience on the first three instalments of the V-Rally series, the PlayStation version of Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, and the trendsetting Test Drive Unlimited. As such, there was a good deal of optimism around The Crew.
While The Crew was a racing game of impressively preposterous proportions – with a map that spanned a condensed version of the entire continental USA – it was admittedly shy of perfect.
Its unprecedented size (an environment so big it took several hours to drive around) took a clear toll on its finer details, and contemporaneous rival racers like Forza Horizon 2 and Driveclub were far more handsome options. Its rubberband AI was regularly exasperating, with low-level opponents still able to rocket past high-level cars they should have no business keeping up with. It also had a surprisingly stingy economy, where you could find yourself at the level cap, out of story missions, and still without sufficient credits to actually buy any of its most-desirable cars.
However, despite this, its staggering size really was something to behold and, thanks to that, it was undeniably brimming with racing opportunities and exploration potential.
Of course, the operative word here is ‘was.’ The Crew was a whole bunch of things. But it’s not any of those things anymore.
Because it’s gone.
Long-time racing gamers are no doubt accustomed to the idea that their favourite racers won’t be available to buy forever. At least for games featuring licensed car models and tracks, there’ll be a wad of signed contracts somewhere that place a time limit on a publisher’s ability to sell them. Even the biggest racing franchises have been victims of these automotive langoliers, munching through the history of the genre and chewing up anything past its expiration date. There are more racing games that you can no longer buy digitally – or new at retail – than I have space here to list.
For the most part, however, you can absolutely still play them. Used copies can still be bought, traded, and stashed forever in your personal collections. Digital owners can still re-download them from the cloud. Right this second I could easily boot up my copy of Project CARS 2, or Forza Horizon 3, or Driver: San Francisco, and play any one of them indefinitely.
Alongside “upcoming server infrastructure”, “licensing constraints” are the other reason cited by Ubisoft for The Crew’s shutdown. What I don’t grasp is what exactly makes The Crew any different to… every other licensed racing game I’ve ever owned. I simply don’t understand why Ubisoft’s inability to continue to sell The Crew also means nobody can play it anymore, either. It’s like Codemasters sending hired goons to my house to confiscate my old copies of Colin McRae. Being delisted from sale is a disappointing but otherwise normal circumstance for racers with expired car licenses, but since when are publishers under obligation to nuke all existing copies of them from existence?
The Crew hasn’t just been delisted, it’s been deactivated. Entirely. That’s a full-price game, with microtransactions and DLC, that no longer functions. Not just the multiplayer and co-op; the single player functionality has been killed too. With The Crew requiring an internet connection to run – even when playing entirely solo against the AI – the moment Ubisoft switched off the servers The Crew was kaput. This is a game that was possible to play alone from beginning to end against the computer, without ever engaging with the multiplayer. Hell, the entire prologue of The Crew couldn’t be done in multiplayer.
We were told that this was going to happen. Ubisoft delisted The Crew from all digital storefronts late last year and confirmed “the game will not be accessible anymore” after March 31, 2024. But the advanced warning doesn’t make this any more palatable.
In July last year, the Video Game History Foundation published a study on the commercial availability of classic video games in the US, discovering that only a dismal 13% of video game history is available in the current marketplace. The remaining 87% is regarded as essentially inaccessible to those who don’t maintain antique hardware, can’t travel to a physical library software archive, or won’t download pirate versions. The Video Game History Foundation describes these games as “critically endangered.”
As it stands, however, The Crew is beyond endangered; it’s extinct.
Always-online games are clearly hugely problematic when it comes to game preservation. I’m not going to pretend for a moment that I know how The Crew works under the hood, but from an external perspective it’s hard not to question why a satisfactory compromise wasn’t available. 2017’s Gran Turismo Sport, for instance, was also an online-only game. Parts of the game could be accessed offline, but you weren’t even able to save your progress. However, when Sony pulled the plug on online services for GT Sport in January this year, developer Polyphony Digital published one final patch for the game that removed this requirement.
This meant that GT Sport’s single-player modes would still be accessible after the servers vanished, and that players would still be able to access the campaign and any previously purchased DLC. Going forward they would also be able to save their progress locally. The arrival of this update bodes well for Gran Turismo 7. After all, GT7 has a similarly rigid (and, admittedly, equally unwelcome) online connection requirement to access most of its content for now. It does, however, seem safe to assume that when GT7 comes to face its own retirement, it’ll probably receive the same treatment. I don’t get the feeling that Polyphony Digital would be content in having an instalment of such a storied series rendered completely unplayable, forever. GT7 players, in this instance, can probably rest easy that all their progress won’t be lost in the ether.
The same really can’t be said for The Crew 2 or The Crew Motorfest players. The erasure of The Crew certainly sets a poor precedent for its sequels, at the very least. Are there now players reconsidering spending any more time (or, importantly, money) on The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest considering history now suggests that, at some point, everything they’ve done will probably be deleted along with the games themselves?
In a baffling twist, multiple players of The Crew have reported finding evidence of an offline mode in The Crew, with potential local save functionality. Digging around in The Crew’s code, hidden menu options that reference options like ‘Play Offline’, ‘Save game’, and ‘Load game’ appear to have been uncovered. However, speculation that this could mean The Crew’s single-player gameplay would survive the server shutdown – much like GT Sport did – has amounted to nothing.
Of course, like an island full of female dinosaurs figuring out how to breed, it does feel probable that a fan project will find a way to bring The Crew back to life in some capacity. Following the shutdown of EA’s underwhelming free-to-play MMO Need for Speed: World back in 2015, enterprising fans were eventually able to resurrect the game in 2017. It remains playable today and, to its credit, EA has made no attempt to intervene over the past seven years.
In contrast, in the wake of The Crew’s shutdown, Ubisoft is actually under further fire for making additional actions that would only hamper any future fan revival. Since the server shutdown, some players are now reporting discovering their digital ownership of The Crew has actually been terminated, removing the ability to even re-download the game files in the event of a mod that makes it playable again. Will that fan fix ever come if a significant part of the potential community for it won’t even be able to retrieve the game software for it? A Need for Speed: World-style second coming no longer feels inevitable in this instance.
The Crew isn’t unique in the driving MMO space. There are other examples of driving MMOs that have gone through server shutdowns and remain playable as single-player experiences. Test Drive Unlimited’s server connection was severed well over a decade ago, and yet I’ve booted that up on several occasions while working at IGN for retro coverage purposes. It’s still playable solo, which is honestly how I played it back in the day.
So was The Crew.
The total decommissioning of The Crew is a serious step back for game preservation. Despite what you or I may think about The Crew overall, it was someone’s first racing game. It was someone’s favourite racing game. It was special to someone, for some reason. And now they can’t ever play it again, regardless of how much time they sunk into it, or how much cash they dropped on DLC.
They don’t have to be okay with it, and nor should we.
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can chat to him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.
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