Size Restrictions? – The Crew

The Crew is finally out!, it’s taken several delays and lots of changes up till now and unlike DriveClub there have been several Open (and closed) Betas for gamers around the world and only time will tell if it was worth all the waiting (and testing) but i can safely say that my 7 hour session last night went pretty darn smooth and way over the expectations i had towards the online part… wonder if this has something to do with DriveClub and Unity day 1 server overload problems, most likely so.
I love driving games and there have been too few driving games released lately, 3 driving games in 1 year are not acceptable but i guess this is because of sales and marketing…

Anyways, the game is out now and it was, of course, an INSTANT buy for me and my expectations to the game was sky high and so far i haven’t got much to complain about really but i will go over the stuff i found last night…
Why do we get all these “hollywoodified” games? i mean, The Crew doesn’t need a shitty “YOU KILLED MY BROTHER!, SO I WILL GO UNDERCOVER FOR THE FEDS” yadda crap but still they just had to squeeze it into it, i must admit i was not happy when i found out that this was yet another AAA game with yet another crappy generic story that we have seen a thousand times before….. My remedy for this story was simply to press “O” button and every time there has been a cutscene after the opening… well let’s just say i have used the “O” button a lot of times, sorry but i am not interested in the story at all.

Ok, story aside there is still other things that made last night not all that amazing, the game has a million things to explain to you before the game have even started, it’s like an anthill after you stomp your foot into it.. ants all over the place… instead of ants there’s infoboxes, text, pictures, chatting.. you name it.. i got so swamped that i am pretty sure that i have skipped a lot of important info, seriously, these designers did a crappy job at making the tutorial for the game.

The garage(s), classes, styles, the map, the missions, the side missions, the challenges, the skills, the perks, the wiki, the co-op club, the medal information and so on, my god.. everything was explained in code basically and in such a hurry that only people with superb memory and concentration will be able to snap up or maybe i am just too old for this kind of information overload..
The Map size in this game is insane!, never before have i seen anything like this, i thought FUEL was huge but nothing like this and best of all is that The Crew have distinguished graphics and design from city to city so you won’t grow tired of looking at the same textures for hours upon hours…

Another problem with the game so far is that it is hard to tell how far into the screen you are and most of the times i took the turns too early or too late and while i am sure this is a design that was made with purpose i still think they should have done it differently, that said, after 7 hours i had no issues with this anymore as i got used to it… i blame DriveClub for this really as that has so amazing driving angles and distances that driving anything else will fell very, very differently…


Draw distance looks amazing compared to the actual amount going on… well only until you actually double check it, this is an Open World driving game where you have the biggest map ever and best of all is that there are NO loading screens to be seen and with such comes things like downgraded graphics and ugly draw distances, it actually looks like PS2 graphics in the far back of the screen but hey, i don’t care as this game is sexy, SUPER SEXY and even better if your car is moving but do not expect it to look like DriveClub or Forza Horizon 2.

1 more thing was that the game kicked me out when the connection dropped, i was playing in Solo Mode and yet the game kicked me out and back to the main menu of the game. why?, there’s no need for this game to be locked online and yes i do know that the game is littered with online features , everything is tracked online but i got kicked out and not just got a warning that the game lost connection and you can drive around until the connection is established again like for instance DriveClub does.
Also when the online lags even in a Solo mode it will cripple the experience with frame drops and judder, i have no idea why it does that really…

Over to the positive stuff again, you can drive everywhere and you can smash into stuff and break it and while you can’t take down buildings it is still fun jumping over corn fields, dashing over swamps and doing silly high jumps all around America and all this with no frame drops nor tearing to write home about, the experience is smooth, the controls work great and there’s no steering lag what so ever so that i have noticed so far.

When a game is as big as this one it requires weather and day/night effects and it’s in here, of course, there’s even a local clock telling you the time any time you want.
Nighttime driving works well as it is neither grey nor deep black so it is manageable to drive yet it feels like it is high time and adds the tension needed.
Driving markers is shown above the car in both day and night time and while i wondered how this would work when i first tried the game i can safely say that this is a great choice due to the variations of graphics etc used in the game locations all across America.

The game is littered with challenges and stuff to do, huge jumps, speed tests, slalom events and so on and while these are side missions it is still god damned good fun and easy to access when and if you feel you’re car needs an upgrade or you need money and so on as it’s the side missions that will upgrade your car most of the time.
You get to upgrade most if not all parts on your car and you also get to have perks too but i have not progressed enough yet to fully understand the thing about the Perks yet other than the stuff i have “bought” like 9% discount in car shops and so on.

This article will be followed up with many more hopefully as the game is such a beast that i have no idea really how all of it will turn out in the end, but story wise this game is done, i will just continue to skip the videos really but for the driving and so on is a totally different case.

Now over to the most interesting thing i guess, i have decided to stream and record me playing the whole game, i will stream every evening on Twitch TV (link in the banner) and upload them to Youtube over the next weeks or so.
Recorded Voice and Videochat are in there too so hopefully it will turn into something fun due to my comments and so on.
15 minutes recording for now and this is actually the second recording but i decided to start with this one now to make it a bit more interesting. part 1 out soon….