"Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed". As reported by Polygon, that's an argument put forth by a new lawsuit against Ubisoft, filed by two Californian players of The Crew. They're suing the company in a proposed class action lawsuit over shutting down the racing game's servers, rendering it unplayable.
]]>The UK government has responded to a petition asking for "government intervention" to force the industry to keep video games "in a reasonably working state when support ends", rather than allowing them to become unplayable such as when online servers are shut down. The petition was prompted by the closure in March of ten-year-old Ubisoft racing game The Crew.
]]>The Crew, Ubisoft's 2014 racing game, closed its doors on March 31st. After that date, launching the game took you to a splash screen and then presented an error message when trying to advance, because the servers are no longer offline.
Ubisoft have now taken the extra step of revoking The Crew licenses from purchasers and removing it from their library.
]]>Ubisoft racing game The Crew shut down on March 31st, rendering the game unplayable for everyone who bought it since its release ten years ago.
In response, YouTuber Ross Scott has launched Stop Killing Games, "the largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games". The initiative exists to encourage people to petetiion their governments about the issue.
]]>On March 31st, Ubisoft's open world racing game The Crew will be turned off for good. As of right now, no one can buy the ten-year-old racer, but come the end of the month, even those that did buy it will no longer be able to play it.
On April 18th, The Crew Motorfest will arrive on Steam after several months available via the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft's own launcher, providing a new venue to buy the third entry in the series. Or perhaps that should be "rent".
]]>Ubisoft’s open-world multiplayer driving game The Crew will switch off its servers next spring, just shy of the series’ 10th anniversary. The shutdown will leave the car-based MMO impossible to play, with the game pulled from sale ahead of the move.
]]>Kick the tires, whistle at the paint job, spin the keys on your finger like a revolver and then shoot the car with the little laser of unlocking. It’s time to get back on the road. What’s that? Entire country in a state of unprecedented lockdown? I see. Well, lucky for you, we concern ourselves here only with pretend cars, the indoor joy of fictional journeys on virtual roads. Here, my housebound friends, are the 9 best road trips in PC games. Seatbelts on, please.
]]>We've hit the mid-point of the week and the see-saw of time is about to tip forward and hurtle us towards the weekend at an alarming rate. Perhaps more ominously, we will also be hurtling towards the litany of PC gaming Black Friday deals that are headed our way in a fortnight's time.
Before then, however, the deals aren't slowing down one bit and there's another big batch of digital deals to check out right here, right now. Everything from this week's release of Nioh to Cities Skylines and even the absolute gem that is Jagged Alliance 2 is represented across a variety of sites, so consider this a convenient mid-week digital deals roundup if you like. Let's get to it, shall we?
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
The Crew [official site] isn’t a great racing game. The car handling of this open world “MMO racer” isn’t great, there’s UI vomited at you from every corner of the screen, and it launched with so many problems that we never actually gave it a full review. It annoyed John a lot. But Ubisoft have this thing they do. Step 1: Release a mediocre game. Step 2: Make one hundred sequels of it. Thus, The Crew 2.
]]>Far Cry 5 and The Crew 2, Ubisoft announced today, as if you hadn't already guessed. That's it. They have nothing of substance to say about either game. Oh, and would you believe that more Assassin's Creed is coming too? Astonishing. Ladies and germs, we truly are in the runup to E3. Ooh I swear it starts earlier and shoutier every year! Back in my day, E3 was held in secret in dark stone chambers and the only way you could tell what happened was to watch for logos forming in your tea leaves.
]]>Five executives from Ubisoft, including the CEO of Ubisoft Montreal, Yannis Mallat, have been accused of selling stock in the company while knowing about an imminent delay to Watch Dogs and The Crew, back in October 2013. All of the executives have denied the accusation from the French stock market regulator, Autorités des marchés financiers (AMF), and are currently disputing the long-running case, requesting for it to be nullified and seeking damages against the regulatory body.
]]>I've played a few games about roadtrips recently. It wasn't intentional, though I do love the idea of games about journeys, they all just happened to land in my lap at the same time. First up was Overland, a turn-based tactical post-apocalyptic game about travelling across a bug-infested America. Then there was The Crew, in which I competed with Brendan in a race. That also took me across the US. If you'd rather escape the US, check out the excellent Death Road to Canada, which is funny, short and sweet...with lots of guts and headshots.
And there's Jalopy, a game about car maintenance and travelling across the former Eastern bloc. Finally, I spun the Wheels of Aurelia, the most interesting of the three in many ways. That's a game about the conversations you have with people as you drive, rather than the driving itself.
]]>The Crew is free this month from Ubisoft, just two years on from its release. Back then it received mixed reviews. But free is free, and the size of the game’s open world – a huge recreation of the United States – is intriguing enough to entice Adam and Brendan to revisit the racer with a challenge in mind. Who can get from East coast to the West coast the fastest? Ready, set, go.
]]>Ubisoft have announced that the next game they will give away as part of their 30th birthday celebrations is mediocre racing game The Crew, so consider this a warning that you've only got another few days to grab the wonderful, lovely, delightful platformer Rayman Origins for free.
]]>My calendar tells me we're now over halfway through April. The Met Office tells me astronomical spring in the northern hemisphere started on March 20. Yet the weatherman told me yesterday that I can expect highs of a whopping nine degrees centigrade here in Glasgow this weekend. I'd swear it was still winter had the annual Uplay Spring Sale not kicked off this week, with big discounts on the likes of Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Rainbow Six Siege and Far Cry 4, among others. Which others, you say? Find out after the drop.
]]>The Crew has always underwhelmed. Promising a ‘best of’ of the United States, it delivered a game world that didn't feel much bigger than rivals like Fuel. Promising an always-online world of competitive and collaborative racing, in random and bespoke crews, it delivered a broken buggy mess in which on release we never managed to see a single other player in the game world with us. On top of that, its driving was plain, never exciting, never involving.
But now The Wild Run DLC [official site] is out, with a promised graphical overhaul and a bunch of new content to flesh out its echoey maps. Is it making a better second impression? I've mucked about in it for a few short hours.
]]>Ubisoft's The Crew [official site] is an MMO-y sort of a racer, and its first expansion is suitably MMO-y. Wild Run arrived last night with trucks and motorbikes and challenges and other new things for folks who pay, but its launch also updates the base game with new things for everyone. New lighting and a new weather system are among updates for all. The game's timed demo is updated to show off expansion stuff too. It's MMO-priced as well, with the expansion running you, er, £25 - the same as the main game.
]]>High-octane vehicular chases always seem so dangerous to me. Which is why I’m rather grateful for games like The Crew, which allows you to engage in your most absurd speed fantasies without risking being turned into a pancake. And with the The Crew's [official site] newly-announced expansion Wild Run [look, we're catching up on a few E3 things -ed.], you'll be able to diversify this experience even further.
]]>If you're one of those whose bought Assassin's Creed: Unity's DLC Season Pass at launch, you're getting a big fat Sorry from Ubisoft whether you felt you needed it or not. They need your forgiveness. They burn for it. The publisher's apologies for Unity's many and various bugs and performance issues comprises a choice of one of the following: Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, The Crew, Rayman Legends, Watch_Dogs or Just Dance 2015. We already knew that! But now it's actually happening right now go go go go
]]>An odd phenomenon of the last month or so is the disappearance of Ubisoft's end-of-year gaming bonanza from the UK version of Steam. While Assassin's Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, and The Crew are all available on the US and other international versions of Valve's blue-grey shop, in Her Majesty's The United Kingdom, they are conspicuously absent. The games can be bought, at surprisingly huge prices, through the convoluted bizarreness of Uplay, and through other portals like GamersGate or Greenman Gaming, but the most popular and widely used digital distro has an empty shelf. So what's up?
]]>As an act of hubris, it was a pretty bold one. The Crew's lead designer, Serkan Hasan, told The Metropolist that he was "confident in the stability of the game and its performance," and that his team "have what it takes to make [this] a successful launch." These are words I don't expect we'll hear uttered again from anyone for a good long while. What a silly thing. The online racer launched with many - including me - unable to see any other players, let alone actually form crews.
]]>Ubisoft's The Crew is now out, via Steam in the US and UPlay and something called "shops" in other parts of the world. Ubisoft, after the PR disaster of trying to impose post-release embargoes on Assassin's Creed: Unity reviews, have taken the rather bold step of informing customers not to trust early reviews. This is because they've withheld review code from journalists until just before launch, and then insisted that no fair opinion of it can be gained until it's been played for dozens of hours, the end-game reached, on populated servers. Indeed, no fair review could be written in a day - especially one where, surprise, there are server issues - but impressions can certainly be had of those opening few hours. I've written mine below.
]]>Update: "We are looking into it at the moment," an Ubisoft representative has told us about the later vanishings outside the UK. Meanwhile, two dear readers in Finland and Germany comment that the games have disappeared from Steam for them too.
When Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity, The Crew, and Far Cry 4 all vanished from Steam in the UK earlier this week, the publisher made cryptic mention of being "in discussions with Valve". What's so weird or special about the UK that our Steam wouldn't get Ubisoft's big fancy Christmas lineup? Turns out, we're not so special any more. These games are vanishing from the US and Australian stores too, VG247 noted, suggesting something bigger than a regional quirk is afoot.
]]>U-boo-soft, more like. It looks like the developer of Far Cry 4, The Crew and Assassin's Creed Unity won't be releasing any of those games through Steam in the UK.
Speaking to PCGamesN, the publisher confirmed that they have been in discussions with Valve about Assassin's Creed Unity, "but for the time being the game is not available via Steam in the UK. In the meantime, UK customers wishing to purchase the game digitally can do so by visiting the Uplay store, our retail partners or other digital distributors." The Crew and Far Cry 4, meanwhile, are listed on Steam throughout the world but not in the UK, suggesting they might befall the same fate.
]]>The Crew will see players zooming around a huge map of the United States and teaming up with friends for various feats of speed-freakery. We sent Brendan to take an early look at Ubisoft’s ‘MMO racer’.
The open-world racer was perfected on PC in 2009. I’ll let John and Jim argue over whether it was Burnout Paradise or Fuel that holds the honour. In terms of videogame history debates, I’m happy just to get the date right. Ubisoft, on the other hand, are not a company to let such claims rest. In a couple of months they are releasing The Crew, an MMO racing game with 6000 miles of reconstructed USA to zoom around. The titular Crew is, in keeping with an emerging Ubi-trend, you and three pals, each sitting pretty in your souped up Ford Mustang, Ferrari, Lamborghini or Other.
]]>I've been quietly excited about The Crew for a while. I've never been much into racers, preferring the arcade to the realistic and most other genres to either. Split/Second is the only one to truly capture my heart, and that love did not endure. Here, though, the combination of open world and the titular friend-clans making it easier to race with people I know are tempting. The latest trailer focuses on that aspect, going through what's pitched as an average day in the game.
]]>Get a load of this. In The Crew, you travel around a vast expanse of terrain for the shear joy of it, which means it's not really a "game" at all. It's one of those dumb 'walking simulators', only one in which you move quicker than in, say, Proteus. Still, Ubisoft continue to scrabble desperately to convince us that their artsy-exploration project is worth covering, most recently with this trailer touting its "social" features. Speedwalking with friends? Ugh.
]]>There's a narrative arc to my interest in most racing games: at first they seem to support my interest in driving and exploration, and then slowly, bit by bit, these racing games reveal themselves to be dependent upon racing. So it is with this trailer for The Crew, Ubi's looming open world racing game set in a shrunken, greatest-hits compilation of the entire United States. Open world! Exploration! Drive about and stuff! And then comes the missions, the modes, the multiplayer; joyful things for someone, but not for Sunday drivers like me.
Still, the game remains the one I'm most excited about, which is just straight up weird. Come watch the informative trailer.
]]>I'm not cruising around inside The Crew's closed beta so I'm going to analyse the content based entirely on the video below. It's the video that has finally pulled back the curtain for me, revealing the man yanking the levers that create the illusion of 'open world driving'. What I've learned is that The Crew is very much in the Ubisoft open world mould, which means lots of icons scattered across a map, a thousand different tasks jostling for attention, and what looks like just enough connective tissue to tie focal points together. But is it a grander take on Burnout Paradise or something more akin to Assetto's Creed?
]]>The triple A team of Alice, Alec and Adam have spent the last 24 hours absorbing every trailer and piece of footage that has emerged from E3. Now they gather together with Graham 'G-Man' Smith to discuss their findings. Does the imminent arrival of a GTA V port please them? Are any of them still wearing socks or has No Man's Sky blown them clean off? Is Cuphead really the game of the show? And will Valiant Hearts' dog-in-a-war bring tears to their eyes? Read on for answers to all of those questions, and remarkable insights into the Oculus Rift and much more besides.
]]>Among all the sarc and snark that E3 inspires, it's easy to forget the spark of excitement that causes us all to give a damn in the first place. A few games overcome that for me, and I'm as surprised as anyone to discover that The Crew is one of them. It's an Ubisoft racing game developed by a team made up of former Test Drive Unlimited devs, and it aims to provide a contiguous, scaled-down version of the United States for players to drive across. For that ambition alone, I'm looking forward to it, and there's an impressive new timelapse video of the game's world below.
]]>I'm sure Ubisoft's enticingly open racer The Crew will provide oodles of entertainment if I can just make it past the title screen without face-planting into my steering wheel due to paralytic title-born boredom coma. The Crew sounds like the most generic thing in the world, and in some ways it looks the part too. The promise of having the entirety of the (truncated) United States open for traversal, however, is simply too tempting to resist. I am conflicted but hopeful. It'll be out this fall, and there's a new trailer below.
]]>Although everyone likes to throw around genre tags, it's occasionally worth stopping to acknowledge they don't really tell us anything. Take The Crew, Ubisoft's upcoming open-world driving game. 'Open world' in this case means a lot of interconnected roads that have mission boundaries placed atop, a much larger but less sexy version of Burnout's Paradise City. And as for the driving, I can't think of a single other racer that plays out in quite this fashion.
Forgive the pun, but The Crew's in the title. Let's explain that joke, in painful detail, below.
]]>Ubisoft's upcoming open-world racing game The Crew might not let me do a Fuel, but it nevertheless sings to the road-hungry part of my soul. But why? But because it looks slick as all hell. Evidence: Newshounds VG247 caught up with the downed pheasant of pre-release hype at Gamescom last month, and produced a video, which you can watch below.
]]>I spent a couple of hours playing FUEL with a friend last week. We hopped online, spawned some quad-bikes, and just drove across whatever part of America we were supposed to be in. It had nice trees. So I'm really interested in The Crew, Ubisoft's open-world driving game set in a Frankenstein's monster of America, particularly the 'social driving' features. I know 'social' isn't a cool buzzword, but if all it means is I can see what a friend's doing on a map of America and plonk my car down next to theirs, then I'm perfectly happy to do so. I hope it means I can plonk my car down in front, though. Mwahahaha. Mwahahahahaaa! MWHAHAHAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Hah!
An encouraging video of The Crew has just skidded into first place in my heart, and it is below.
]]>Oh dear, did someone forget to put all their product managers in the same room at any point? Ubisoft have managed to announce both The Crew and The Division on the same day - confusionpocalypse is surely inevitable. Presumably The Local Ombudsman Committee is being saved for tomorrow.
If it helps you to keep track of which one's which, The Division is prefixed with 'Tom Clancy's' and is an RPGy thingy about shooting people, while The Crew has no prefix and is about driving across America. And sounds absolutely brilliant in concept. ROAD TRIP!
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