It’s kind of funny, in hindsight, what an absolute self-own Ubisoft’s decision to kill The Crew turned out to be. You would reasonably think that pulling the plug on a 10-year-old racing game would annoy a few dozen people; instead, it sparked an entire uprising against always-connected games, a class action lawsuit, a new California law and subsequent Steam disclaimer, and eventually, a promise that the publisher would never ever ever do this again—at least for The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest.
Today, seven months after that promise was made, Ubisoft says it hasn’t forgotten its promise and that work is progressing, and in fact “selected players based on their configurations and previous involvement in the community” will be invited to take part in a playtest set to begin on April 30.
The Crew 2’s offline mode will be a “hybrid way to play the game,” producer Gregory Corgie said in today’s update video.
“Some features will be maintained, others will be adapted. For instance, specific parts of multiplayer modes will no longer be available when playing offline.”
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Well, okay, I guess. That seems kind of self-evident to me—”You can’t play online when you’re not online” isn’t the sort of thing that should require a four-minute update video from the head guy—but I can understand why Ubisoft would want to be as cautious as possible, given how it’s gone so far.
Happily for Ubisoft, there’s some turnaround on that front. Even though the process is taking longer than I would’ve expected (and acknowledging that my expectation is entirely vibes-based, I don’t know anything about programming), Ubisoft is earning plaudits for pursuing the offline mode as a serious endeavor in comments on YouTube and social media.
But it may also be setting itself up for even greater demands in the future. Several responses to the update video call for The Crew, the game that started all of this, to be brought back with an offline mode, and there are also requests to do the same for The Division games and Ghost Recon Breakpoint. I endorse that last one: I play Breakjpoint quite a bit with a friend but every now and then I like to hop in for some solo dude-shooting, and even when I’m alone I have to be connected—so if my internet’s out, I just can’t play at all. It’s ridiculous.
The current plan is to have The Crew 2’s offline mode rolled out by the end of 2025, while the new Crew Motorfest will follow at some point in the future. Corgie reassured players that an offline mode for that game is definitely coming, but for now developers are focusing on supporting it as an active live service game.
