Road 66: End Of The Line

Hi, whammy here.

This is Part 2 of The Story Of Road 66 [Part 1 here]. In this post we will go over what happened to the project and Ivory Tower past The Crew's release and the terrible, terrible consequences that followed.

THE CREW LAUNCHES

The Crew's launch was a big success, with it selling over 2 million copies in it's first month. Though, not everyone was happy with it. What I remember is that the game received lots of criticism for various reasons - some valid, but most completely nonsensical. If you have been observing launches of racing games even up to this day, you can imagine how stupid and unfair a lot of the criticism was. The comparisons to contemporary racing games of the time (Need For Speed, Forza) were inevitable (especially due to Ubisoft marketing this Driving Game as a Racing Game), which undermined the game's entire point and permanently soured it's reputation and image amongst gamers.

WE WEREN'T READY FOR IT

It is extremely important to understand the distinction between Driving Games and Racing Games, that's why I always bring it up. Though, to this day I myself don't understand why so many racing game fans hated The Crew - it has an enormous and detailed open world with all sorts of landscapes and areas you'd ever want in an open world car game, the world is truly alive and rich with it's countless amount of pedestrians, animals, and life events, the game has hundreds of customizable cars, the car customization system gives Need For Speed a run for it's money, the driving physics and handling *were great, there's a high quality full story campaign with great progression (that you can play in CO-OP with up to 3 other players from start to finish), the multiplayer gamemodes are some of the most fun out there, the music is great and features several different radios plus an entire original score for the story... What's the problem? Too much good stuff? Or just people's refusal to accept anything new?

Of course, the unfair criticism boils down to a multitude of things, those including the general negative bias against Ubisoft at the time, as The Crew was the last of Ubisoft's 2014 releases, most of which were met with less than favorable reception, which set a precedent for negative bias. And the other big reason for the unfair criticism was: people were just not ready for this game. I don't know how else to put it, players just couldn't understand the game, how it works, why it works, or how to play it. Therefore they formed negative thoughts and opinions out of those misunderstandings. Ubisoft are largely to blame for this, because as mentioned previously - they were marketing this game as a competitor to NFS and Forza, which it isn't.

THE BUYOUT

Let's get back to the only world that matters: the business world! It was clear to Ubisoft that The Crew is a big success, and they will be making future investments into the franchise. And to start off, naturally, they decided to buy out the studio behind the game, Ivory Tower, which was an independent studio before. They were likely in talks about this acquisition before The Crew even released, but now things were getting real, right after launch.

This is where things started going completely south. Let's quickly go over Ivory Tower's publicly-announced general post-launch plans for The Crew first: their plan was to keep updating the game for many years ahead, adding new content, cars, gamemodes, major map expansions, social features, MMO features, UGC features, offline mode, etc. They wanted to realize their true vision for The Crew as the ultimate MMO CaRPG.

CONSEQUENCES

All of this went directly into the trash as soon as Ubisoft started taking over Ivory Tower and restructuring them (I'm sure those of you in the business are well familiar with that term). Most of the original Ivory Tower staff were laid off and replaced with cheap hires (as is common practice for big AAA companies). As soon as 2015 hit, Ubisoft were already preparing for a whole new entry in The Crew franchise. And it had to be a Forza clone, there was no doubt in Ubisoft executives' minds - Forza is the popular thing, and the key to success is in copying the popular thing (if you don't want to take any risks, that is).

Of course, they had to build up to it first. They had to change and rebuild what "The Crew" is, because it was the complete opposite of Forza back then. No better major rebranding opportunity than a massive graphical overhaul & over-glorified DLC pack. They called it "The Crew: Wild Run". The new content was going to be XTREEEMEEE - crazy dragsters, monster trucks, drift cars, bikes (in this "MMO CaRPG"), kooky stunt arenas, etc. Basically the exact sort of stuff they'd come up in a boardroom meeting to excite little children.

The update & rebrand was going to be carried by a complete graphical overhaul. I'm going to avoid saying much about it in this post, as otherwise the length of it would increase by about x100 times. Let's just say, I have lots of unpleasant things to say about the entire update itself as it's terrible, malicious, unfinished, buggy, and removed tons of ambient content from the game. It is objectively the worst downgrade in the history of video games, I say this with full confidence and no exaggeration. We have a channel called "#wildrun-atrocities" on the TCU Discord, it has all the evidence to back this claim up and more. Check it out if you're interested. Here's a sample:

Internally of course, the graphical overhaul was Ivory Tower preparing the game's engine for the sequel, as no studio in their right mind would fully redo their game's entire graphics engine less than a year after it's original launch, just for a graphics overhaul update (especially such an atrocious one). The Crew 2 (2018) retains the exact same graphics engine with the exact same set of features (and even issues), no surprise there. Of course there was also a great opening to make the future sequel look better by intentionally sabotaging the current game, which is exactly what they did... Yet somehow they failed to make the future sequel look better anyway... But I digress.

THE PSYOP

So on November 17th 2015, that's exactly where we end up: The Crew has been permanently and irreversibly replaced with the Wild Run version (as it's an online-only game), the game is now ugly, very buggy, unrecognizable, doesn't feel nor work right, and it's artistic richness completely annihilated and destroyed, with seemingly quite a personal spite.

And the people loved it! All thanks to Ubisoft's illegally deceptive marketing:
- Removed 40+ unique regional weathers from the game, and replaced them all with 2 global sunny and rainy weathers? "Dynamic Weather System"!
- Destroyed the game's carefully crafted artistic graphics, and replaced them with a terrible, buggy and unfinished PBR renderer? "Stunning New Graphics!"
- Removed over a hundred ambient assets such as traffic cars, pedestrians, unique regional street props, ambient effects, etc? Broke a multitude of achievements by recklessly removing content, making the game impossible to complete 100%? Let's not mention that...

This goes on. I have never ever seen a psyop so aggressively effective, that it somehow convinced the vast majority of the playerbase that Wild Run is not just not the worst video game downgrade of all time, but that it's a massive upgrade and it even "saved" The Crew. Even I fell for it back then. Ubisoft took advantage of our enormous ignorance, and we were all played like complete idiots. We were scammed out of the actual game we paid for.

The whole Wild Run incident deserves a post of it's own, likely multiple in fact. That's coming later.

THE SLOW DEATH

After Wild Run, Ivory Tower was for sure actively developing The Crew 2. In 2016, they released another expansion to The Crew called "Calling All Units". At this point it's pretty much inconsequential because of the immeasurable amount of irreversible damage already done by Wild Run. Calling All Units was the last beating down given to this corpse of a game. Judging by the quality of content, it was developed by approximately 3 interns that were paid in chickens instead of money, while the rest of the team was working on The Crew 2. It added even more permanent issues and bugs to the game, as if Wild Run didn't add enough. One of the new bugs Calling All Units has added is the game not playing any story dialogs and phone calls in freemode, because of the Calling All Units DLC-advertisement phone call (that plays every time you enter the game) completely blocking and breaking them. No surprise most post-2016 players think the story in the game is terrible, because they missed on over half of the dialog. How can such a terribly game-ruining bug slip into an AAA game? Was there any QA at all? (No)

After a painfully abysmal 2 year run, The Crew was finally abandoned pretty much right after Calling All Units, and left to rot and die by Ubisoft. Remember the original Ivory Tower post-launch plans? They couldn't even get properly started on them because of the Ubisoft takeover (and consequentially, Wild Run). Ubisoft started killing the game months into it's life because their ultimate goal was to make "The Crew" franchise into a Forza clone (I'm sure this is obvious more than ever now), and the first game was an obstacle in their way.

THE CREW 2

The Crew 2 came out in 2018 to an unsurprisingly negative reception from the existing playerbase. But it didn't matter, because at that point, the old playerbase didn't matter. With The Crew 2 being a kid-friendly live service microtransaction game, you can imagine what kind of new playerbase it amassed - the exact kind Ubisoft wanted all along. The exact kind any corporation wants for their big cashcow live service title.

The Crew 2 is not a sequel to Road 66 and has absolutely nothing to do with it, which applies to The Crew Motorfest also. Therefore, we will not be going down that route.

THE END OF ROAD 66

The next and last event in the Road 66 story happens on March 31st 2024, when after 7 years of rotting as a corpse, The Crew was completely shut down and became permanently inaccessible to everyone. No offline mode or server binaries were ever released, despite the fact that a developer offline mode existed in the game from the start and kept being utilized & updated by the developers until the game was abandoned.

After an intense ~6 year development cycle, so much work, so much talent, so much artistic genius, so much passion - the game gets destroyed, desecrated, spit on, abandoned, then killed off. Ivory Tower's ambitious post-launch plans were not realized, the game did not get to become the ultimate MMO CaRPG they wanted it to be - it became an abomination, then eventually forgotten, until it was put out of it's misery.

This is the end of the story of Road 66.

...At least officially. A divine intervention was coming.
Find out all about it in Part 3!