Games

The Crew: Hands-on with next-gen's biggest racer

Ubisoft's going all-in with this Gran Turismo battler headed to Xbox One and Sony PS4 next year.

Written by Ben Sillis

7 min readPublished on 27.07.2016 · 0:05 UTC

The Crew: Hands-on with next-gen's biggest racer
© Ubisoft

Thought Grand Theft Auto V was big? That was nothing. San Andreas was just one state in a fictionalized USA. Imagine a game set across an entire digitized version of the great nation, with cities, suburbs and wilderness all realized, a country with more than 5,000 miles of roads to traverse, one that takes a full hour and a half to drive across.

Now imagine no more. This is the pitch for The Crew, Ubisoft’s ambitious next-gen driving game out next year for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, which turns Americana into your very own personal playground.

Developed by studio Ivory Tower and Ubisoft Reflections, The Crew takes the open-world formula that publisher Ubisoft has built a rep for with games like Far Cry 3 and Assassin’s Creed, and puts it on four wheels - on a scale that’s never been seen before. Why close an open game world off to a huge audience though? Gran Turismo 6 is headed to PS3 after all, so why not reach a bigger audience with current-gen?

“Honestly, next-gen caught up with us instead, as the project's been in development for a long time,” lead game designer Serkan Hassan tells Red Bull. “This isn't a project which kicked off a year or so ago with the expectation of next-gen hype. It's got a history of almost four to five years in terms of development.” The consoles shifted up a gear to keep up with The Crew, in other words.

Hassan and his team might have been skating to the puck (what if Microsoft and Sony had released their new machines a year ago, or in two years’ time?) but you make your own luck, as they say. Hassan is confident of his vision, and speaks with laser focus, at least when he’s not laughing. He’s a man who knows his cars: the Brit has spent more than a decade making driving games including Moto GP 07 and 2010’s critically acclaimed Split-Second.

“So we were always using a high-end gaming PC as our benchmark, and call it luck, call it planning, I don't know what it is, but we're now in the position where we're getting close to finishing. We've got the next-gen consoles coming out this year, and the great thing for us is in terms of their architecture, they're not too far removed from PCs.”

“In the past experience I've had with working across different platforms, there's normally been some pain somewhere, but [with next-gen consoles] in comparison, even when dealing with the size of the game, it hasn't been too bad. We've been lucky on that.”

Ivory Tower, which was founded in 2007, is based in Lyon, France, so we have to ask - why choose the USA as a setting? Is it is because it’s the home of the road trip, or simply to appeal to the largest audience?

“With America, there's a major couple of things,” Hassan says. “It's not just that it's a single country - there's also so many iconic landmarks and locations, and there's such a rich automotive history too. Ford started there, and you've got all these manufacturers. We’ve got locations that no matter wherever you live, you're going to enjoy driving around them, driving to them, driving through them. So the US was a good start for us, a good place to pick.”

Though it’s a scaled down version of the United States, it will still take you a whole 90 minutes to go from coast to coast in The Crew. Scattered across the endless plains and valleys are more than a thousand landmarks, and even intricately detailed cities. “Our New York City is around the size of Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto IV, so when you look at that as one of our cities, and that we've got 16 cities in the game, it's a big map.”

It’s a driving sim of course, so don’t forget the swathes of back-roads, mountain passes, forests, fields, swamps, canyons and dusty arroyos that make up the rest of the map. As Hassan says, “the amount of space the cities occupy, even when you combine them into a huge metropolis, is still a very small portion of the map,” meaning off-road fans will have plenty to explore.

From our hands-on time with the game, one thing that immediately jumped out at us was the staggering level of detail on offer. Forza and Gran Turismo push current gen consoles to their limits, but The Crew is on another plane altogether: you can see how it’s taken half a decade to get to this stage.

Light glitters off the waves and the bonnet of a beautifully rendered Lamborghini, and the cities themselves are the gorgeous mirages rival developers can only stare at photos of and dream. Driving through New York feels almost claustrophobic thanks to the towering skyscrapers looking over the streets.

You're able to take your car off-road too, of course. Head over to Salt Lake City, we’re told, and you'll find yourself plowing through snowed in lanes with ski jumps galore - we’d have tried it for ourselves, but it would have taken too long to get there. The game’s that big.

Playing the demo, we were tasked with taking out a tuned-up Hummer H2 around sunkissed Miami. You’re free to drive over or through anything and everything in a bid to take down the rogue Humvee: we found the controls tight and satisfying, especially hitting down hard on the accelerator and drifting around corners, but too much speed and careless driving will cause your car to flip and tumble - and since this isn’t GTA, you can’t just jump out and jack another.

One feature we weren’t able to try was the RPG (roleplaying game) progression. Play for longer and you’ll unlock new cars and new customisation options with every mission you complete. With The Crew, petrolheads will have plenty to be happy about: every true-to-life car has 19 different elements that you can fine tune and upgrade as you unlock different parts along the way.

There are several dozen cars on the roster, and Hassan tells us negotiations are still going on to include more. Through the game, you’ll be introduced to five different tuning specs - street, dirt, performance, raid and circuit - each with their own stylings and suitings to different terrain. There’s even an app for your iPad or Android tablet on the way for you to customize your cars on the go.

“You can do some real transformations with these cars, and it's necessary because the range of terrain that we're offering plays into the range of those specs,” Hassan says.

It’s an open world, and one you and your friends can explore together: since you’re always online, and at certain points, you can fast travel from one city to the next in the blink of an eye to join your friends - all without a loading screen. Hassan is proud to say that, “[fast travel] is no more than a few seconds, with no loading bars, no loading screens, and playing the whole game is in that nature. It's very quick and smooth. It's really a combination of having more memory available, and knowing that you don't have to rely on the disk so we can make this genuinely a seamless experience.“

Seamless is right: this is a free-flowing game from the very instant you pop the disc in, as installation happens in the background so you can put your foot down and start exploring right from the get-go.

There is one caveat to all this, mind: The Crew needs an always-on internet connection, a requirement Microsoft originally planned for all Xbox One games, but had to scrap after a huge fan backlash. Hassan shrugs this off - it’s not even a compromise for such a big world, it’s what will make it, he says.

“Players won't be disappointed. They're going to get a helluva lot for their money on launch.”

From what we’ve seen so far, it looks like he’s right.