The Crew will be supported "for a very long time"

The Crew studio Ivory Tower will support the racer for a very long time, according to studio Chief Operating Officer Ahmed Boukhefila. Speaking at EB Expo in Sydney last week, Boukhefila named World of Warcraft as his personal role model for how an online game should be supported post-release.

Asked whether the expansion model used by World of Warcraft would apply to The Crew instead of an inevitable sequel, Boukhefila said it was too early to say. “Today we’re really focusing on the short term and that is to keep on expanding The Crew,” he said.

"To go into specifics what we want to explore next is to expand all of the online and PvP capabilities of the game, and also all of the exploration. The way we’re going to do it -- and I think it’s one of the teachings of the closed beta -- is we want to do it with the players.

"We have a PvP framework, and we have a world framework, and we’re already working on what’s coming afterwards. I think the most important is to engage with the player to see what works and what should work better."

While the release date for The Crew has been pushed back to December, Boukhefila said feedback from the recent betas have been largely positive. “We didn’t have huge world changing demands from the players,” he said. “It was lots of tiny, or not so tiny but specific demands.”

These included fixes to voice chat (it will now default to ‘off’ when players are nearby), options to remove HUD elements and online play fixes, among other things.

As for player behavior during the betas, players were most likely to skip story missions in favour of free exploration. "Players would start exploring the world very very early, and they’d do it for a very long time," Boukhefila said, adding that the distribution of players across the map was usually even.

The Crew releases on December 2.

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Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.