Ramblings

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~~Title:The Crew~~
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<WRAP centeralign accent><fs xx-large>The Crew</fs></WRAP>\\
<WRAP centeralign>"The Crew is a revolutionary action-driving game developed exclusively for next-gen consoles. It takes you and your friends on a reckless ride inside a massive, open-world recreation of the United States."</WRAP>
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Reviews
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Mixed
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Developer
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Ivory Tower
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Composer
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Joseph Trapanese
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[[Extraction]]
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Yes, Full, Most except sound files are for a foreign game engine
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<fs xx-large>//**"**//</fs>
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© 2013 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.
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<fs xx-large>//**"**//</fs>
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<WRAP centeralign>~The Crew website. If only this didn't include the right to actually, you know, **play the game**.</WRAP>
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<fs xx-large>The Crew</fs> is a mediocre at best 2014 racer developed by Ivory Tower and published by [[Ubisoft]]. It's up there on the list of jankiest racing games that I have played (and that list includes [[Moorhuhn Kart 2]]) - and it's really fun. I always loved cruising around in the 1:36 recreation of the [[United States of America]] jam packed with long straights to speed through, evading cars, then curvy sections that require braking accuracy, and dealing with the whacky geometry issues and general physics jank that produce the funniest interactions, at times [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9-TvR4RBW8|randomly flinging you across the map]] as you reconsider your life choices. The physics of The Crew are very "bumpy", which means lots bouncing off objects and taking airtime. For example, if one wants to take the racing line around corners in The Crew's urban environments then one will be cutting over sidewalks. Sidewalks in The Crew are slightly elevated and will add upward momentum to the vehicle. Most low hanging cars will actually briefly lose contact with the ground because of this, which means the player will have pre-empt some of the turning so that once the car regains contact to the surface it steers and brakes more. Braking early and drifting into the sidewalk to fly past the corner into the perfect race line around it is extremely satisfying, and the game is littered with these things. Even the off road cars that handle surface height differences more easily will gain that upward momentum, which reduces their grip slightly, briefly.\\
When not going around corners, the player will be going fast, and given the right car they will be going 400km/h fast. Every car, even the slower ones, seem to have //just// the right amount of handleability, the cars always feel responsive but always not so good that avoiding traffic becomes easy. Collision physics in the game are quite janky in general, but one actually gets used to it as some point and plans around it/uses it to ones advantage. It's an engaging experience in its own right.\\

I have been playing The Crew ever since its release and I've grown quite nostalgic to it. The Crew was there during some of the most important phases of my life (so far), it was always there as a neverchanging, neverjudging companion. It's like that one person who was always there in your life but you never really got to meet. It's like you have shared a big part of your life with them without ever actually sharing anything with them. Now that you realize this, just their presence alone makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. You learn to appreciate the unchanging nature of their presence. A grasp at a little bit of [[continuity]].((I actually played Mario Kart Wii for much longer, but because I //did// ever seriously get into //that// game MKWii feels more like a part of myself rather than an external thing I can turn towards.))

====== Gameplay ======
So, you've got your most average racer ever, perhaps even below average because of how boring the cars handle. Crappy story, mediocre progression system, acceptable multiplayer. It's why I say in the lead and [[https://steamcommunity.com/id/ultracomfy/recommended/241560|my own review of the game on Steam]] that it is "mediocre" and should be avoided. I believe that the average person probably will not appreciate the //specific facets// of the game that I like. Because, I like the game mostly for very specific, hard-to-put-into-words things. I guess the best way to put it is "I like it because of it's sandboxy feel". //I// like the game because the world and the physics are built in a way that encourage experimentation. The game encourages you to take skips over a grass field or even entire mountains.


{{youtube>HXXAUEXxla4? | Live Improv by ULTRACOMFY}}


Really, just watch the video and pay attention to the minimap to see what the game //suggested// is the route I should take versus what I ended up actually driving, ehem, "driving". Now, this was a major example, worthy a YouTube upload, but for me essentially the game is just series of much smaller of these optimizations, and it's in figuring out and executing these optimizations that I find a lot of fun (beyond just the general racing experience).


====== Planned Obsolescence ======
Now, ever since first playing the game and understanding its [[Digital Rights Management#Always on DRM|Always on DRM]] I knew that one day it would come to be that the game - the entire game - would be shut down. Unlike other games like [[Mario Kart Wii]] where Nintendo would cease support for //[[multiplayer]]//, The Crew requires a server connection //at all times, even for [[Single Player|solo play]]//, and because Ubisoft is not going to run the servers for eternity, it was clear from the get go that playing The Crew was going to be limited to whatever date the execs at Ubisoft were willing to pay the servers for. Apparently, this date has now been hit and they released a blog post announcing the official delisting of the game from stores and the cutoff date by whenst the servers //will// be shut down, making not just multiplayer inaccessible but the entire game. You will not be able to get past the title screen.

It is probably one of my earliest childhood lessons in learning not to get too attached to things, and 10 years later now I am glad I didn't. As it was certainly an experience to try to subconsciously ignore that one day everything I made in this game (except for the memories) will be lost, I am not too strongly invested in the shutdown. It was predictable, the whole thing, //including// the community outrage that was sparked with the announcement of the shutdown. While I do hope that a community-made offline patch for the game will be made, I have little hope that yelling at Ubisoft will make them reverse their decision about not making one themselves - including but not limited to for legal reasons, right? The blog post mentions licensing issues and I could see that that would be a valid argument. Assuming the licenses //were// limited to 10 years then it would hardly be worth the financial and legal effort to extend them just to support a game that's long died and was never a big hit to begin with. But other games had licenses and those are still playable - I don't know how much that licensing claim would actually hold up.

Anyhow, the hope is that the community (excluding me - I just barely got into video game [[extraction]], I'm not going to get into hacking anytime soon) will figure something out. Apparently there is technically an offline mode in the game already, and there are arguments being thrown around that it //must// still be in the game because an "offline" mode is "used" at the start of the game? Maybe.

====== The Crew Unlimited ======
I care about The Crew, so occasionally I try to check in on the progress of a potential community patch or tool to make the game playable again. This involves mostly googling "The Crew offline patch" and seeing if any new results come up, anything I have not seen. Usually it returns mostly cheap online press coverages of The Crew's shutdown, but it also includes this [[https://steamcommunity.com/app/241560/discussions/0/3879346999810591752/|Steam forum post]] in Dutch((I changed the link for you so it displays in English or your local language.)) which I like to check in every once in a while. I did not read the original post and, well, I should have. So, inside one of the responses to the post I found a link to a community that allegedly is working on such a thing (the original post didn't originally say that, did it??). The community mentioned here is [[https://discord.com/invite/gUczTkphGE|The Crew Unlimited]] and seems to be today's best shot at getting The Crew up and running again. An online server emulator, this tool does not crack the game to force it to allow online play, it merely emulates an online server without touching the game's files at all (or mostly, anyway, probably). They even say that this emulator would most likely even be able to facilitate real online play due to how the game is structured. Progress is slow, but predictable and steady and they((The people working on it.)) are making vague pointers pointing towards a potential working tool by '24 or '25.((Vague of course because they don't want to promise and then not deliver.)) This is much faster than anything I would have hoped for. Since then, I am keeping a keen eye on the progress of that tool and I am happy to see that there seems to be a very significant interest in keeping the game alive. You see, for as much shit as I talk about The Crew, maybe it wasn't as dead as I thought.\\
Interestingly, the community is largely unknown about and very hard to find. The link in that Steam post is the only way I know about to find that Discord server, and I have linked an invite to its Discord server up there and will [[https://discord.com/invite/gUczTkphGE|link it here again]]. I have also responded to [[https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Crew/comments/18mpgb8/comment/l0bisf4/|some poor souls on Reddit]] who I'm sure wish they had known about this earlier.