Unfortunately, even if you purchased the game before this, there won’t be any way to play it. According to its Steam page, it will be playable until March 31st, 2024, after which servers will shut down. Since The Crew is always online, you’ll no longer be able to access it.

Interestingly, the community has been working on an offline patch since October 2023. It made slight progress but is far from fully functional. Stay tuned for more updates on its progress.

In the meantime, The Crew Motorfest is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5 and PC. Check out our review here.

Several players from The Crew 2 also jumped over to Motorfest, with over 42 million vehicles brought over using the Collection Import feature. Ivory Tower managing director Ahmed Boukhelifa said in the press release, “We are thrilled by the enthusiastic response which has broken all franchise records, and we want to thank our community for their incredible support.

“Launch is only the beginning: we have planned regular updates with new themes and experiences and very strong post-launch support with a mix of free and paid content for a long time to come.”

The franchise has seen over 40 million players since launching in 2014. Interestingly, The Crew 2 broke the record for the monthly average of users in July 2023. Perhaps it’s due to new players jumping in early to take advantage of Collection Import. Regardless, it’s good news for the open-world racer, which debuted at second in Gfk’s weekly UK physical sales charts.

The Crew Motorfest is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5 and PC. Check out our official review and learn more about post-launch plans here.

Over 600 Vehicles at Launch

The Crew Motorfest launches with over 600 vehicles, compared to The Crew 2, which had more than 500. It’s not bad, considering something like Forza Horizon 5 offered over 500 cars (though that number has increased drastically since its release). The Crew Motorfest offers vehicles from over 50 manufacturers and across several archetypes like Drift, Hypercars, Rally, Drag and more. However, like its predecessor, it’s not limited to cars – you also have bikes, Quads, Powerboats and Planes to commandeer.

New Additions

While it’s nice that some vehicles carry over, what about new additions? Ivory Tower has confirmed +80 new cars, brands or vehicle types, including new quad bikes and SSVs. New vehicle additions include the Toyota Supra, Lotus Evija, GMC Hummer EV and even electric cars from Porsche and Nissan. Overall, you can look forward to brands like Aston Martin, BMW, Audi, Chevrolet, Ford, Lamborghini, Porsche and much more to make an appearance.

Collection Import

One area that The Crew Motorfest has over Forza Horizon 5 is that you don’t have to earn vehicles that were already in the previous game from scratch. Almost anything unlocked in The Crew 2 will carry over into Motorfest. While you can import cars and vanities, you could start from scratch and do so later.

Of course, not every vehicle – which includes certain car manufacturers, jet sprints, hovercrafts and helicopters – is available in The Crew Motorfest at launch, but it could be added later. Collection Import covers eligible vehicles released before Season 9 of The Crew 2, but some of those released in the same season are coming in December with Season 2 of Motorfest. And no, unlocking a vehicle in Motorfest doesn’t make it available in The Crew 2.

O’ahu in Hawaii

The Crew 1 and 2 offered massive scaled-down versions of the United States to explore. In the first game, it could take 45 minutes to drive from coast to coast (and if servers went down, you lost a bunch of progress, but that’s neither here nor there). The Crew 2 persisted in this fashion but leaned into different vehicle types and disciplines to mix things up.

With The Crew Motorfest, players will explore only one location – O’ahu in Hawaii, which is also scaled down. As such, the square footage is way less than The Crew 2. Nevertheless, it offers a variety of different racing sites, from the city of Honolulu to beaches and even a volcano. Before you scream, “Just like Forza Horizon,” don’t worry – it’s kind of the point.

Improved Handling

If you played The Crew 2, you may remember the overall handling and physics to be a little on the iffy side. With The Crew Motorfest, Ivory Tower has re-spec’d its vehicles to accommodate a new physics model. Each one will feel unique, and you must consider different terrain types, like mud, asphalt, dust, etc. when choosing a vehicle.

Thus far, based on the closed beta, the handling is already much better, though the Drift physics seemingly needs more work. While still not quite at the level of the Forza titles, players have reported that the driving is a big improvement over The Crew 2.

Festival Area

New to The Crew Motorfest, further nudging it towards the Forza Horizon clone status, is the Festival Area. There’s only one, and it offers several functions, including an off-road racing area, a track for Drag races, and more. You can ride on a double loop for some reason, but it looks fun. One of the biggest new additions is the Car Meet, where other players can interact and check out their vehicles. There are also weekly contests for comparing customization jobs.

Playlists vs Disciplines

The Crew 2 focused its racing activities on four Disciplines: Street Race, Pro Racing, Off-Road and Freestyle. Each Discipline had different activities, like Jetsprints and Monster Trucks in Freestyle to Hovercrafts and Motocross in the Off-Road Discipline.

The Crew Motorfest opts for Playlists, which focus on different themes, like Electric Odyssey (seemingly centred on the new electric vehicles), Made in Japan (focused on Street Racing and Japanese sports cars), Off-Roading Addict and Vintage Garage (where players progress through different eras of vehicles, starting from the ’50s). There are 15 Playlists at launch, each with unique challenges and rewards, including a Special Edition vehicle upon completing one.

Rewind

If the Forza comparisons aren’t enough, The Crew Motorfest features a Rewind function. It’s hardly new for racing games (look at GRID Legends and F1 23), but it was surprisingly absent in The Crew 2. You could go reset your position with Back on Track, losing time in the process. Going back several seconds and requesting a do-over on certain sections wasn’t possible.

Demolition Royale and Grand Race

For new modes, The Crew Motorfest offers Demolition Royale and Grand Race. The former is a Last Team Standing style race with 32 players divided into eight crews. It’s a little more straightforward than Forza Horizon 5’s The Eliminator since you essentially slam into enemy cars and pick up bonuses, like shields and damage boosts, while also charging your Ultimate.

There’s also the Grand Race, a free-for-all race where 28 players compete for supremacy. While not quite as chaotic as Riders Republic’s races, the higher player count makes it busier.

Seasons

When The Crew 2 launched, it embraced the Season Pass model with 25 additional vehicles, of which three were exclusive, a location for your collection, two avatar outfits and a 20 percent discount for the in-game store. It would adopt a seasonal approach with the Battle Pass-esque Motor Pass, adding new Summits, modes and vehicles to unlock.

The Crew Motorfest offers a Year 1 Pass with 25 vehicles, including two new exclusives, but has planned for seasons from the outset. The focus is on different “car culture” fantasies, with professional drivers, tuners and more showing up as guests, and you can expect new activities. Seasons last four months, with Season 1 focusing on the biggest car brands in the world, while Season 2 is about Hoonigan and its vehicles.

Difficulty Settings

Viewing the difficulty settings from The Crew 2 when it launched is a trip. It’s a long list of “no’s” for everything from multiple difficulty levels to aim assist (for all the….aiming you do in a race?). By comparison, The Crew Motorfest is leagues better. Experience Type allows you to set the AI difficulty to Amateur, Intermediate or Expert (with XP bonuses ranging from zero to 25 percent extra). You can set the difficulty of events, Auto Braking and Auto Steering, turn Rewind and Nitro on or off, toggle Steering Assist for airplane handling and more. It’s not the most in-depth, but still a massive improvement.

Accessibility Settings

In the same vein, the accessibility settings are a big jump forward from The Crew 2. Subtitles, color-blind modes, text size, racing line opacity, changing button holds to presses, camera shake, a high contrast HUD, motion blur – it’s all in Motorfest. Also, while The Crew 2 allowed partial button remapping (some controls couldn’t be changed, regardless of platform), The Crew Motorfest supports full button remapping for all peripherals.

Over 800 Car Parts

Ivory Tower confirmed that The Crew Motorfest would have over 800 car parts at launch, 20 percent more than The Crew 2, with options for customizing engine sounds, from the realistic to the exotic. There are supposedly “millions” of combinations, but we’ll have to wait and see just how in-depth the customization can be.

Race Creator Mode

If there’s one feature we would have loved to see Motorfest take from The Crew 2, it’s Race Creator. Introduced as part of Season 9, it allowed players to create and share their races. It allowed for modifying settings like weather, traffic, time of day, restrictions on certain brands, and even placing up to 1000 checkpoints. Hopefully, it debuts in Motorfest sometime in the future.

The 25-minute footage is very reminiscent of Forza Horizon, right down to the XP awarded for near misses in the open world. Players explore O’ahu island in the Hawaiian archipelago, with the world map briefly revealed. A Street Race at night is also showcased, with players able to set the difficulty and even borrow a car based on the restrictions.

Leveling up grants rewards, but there are also drops like car customization items to win. Speaking of customization, players can adjust various parts of a vehicle, like the bumper, spoiler and color, while equipping different Perf Parts to raise their Performance Level.

The Crew Motorfest is out later this year for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5 and PC. It’s rumored to have 80 to 90 percent of the vehicles from The Crew 2, with owners of the latter able to transfer their vehicles over. Stay tuned for more details at Ubisoft Forward Live, where Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is also confirmed to appear.

There will apparently be more information at the next Ubisoft Forward (whenever it happens). While the new release window for Motorfest is unknown, the dataminer said that Mirage could release between Q4 2023 to Q2 2024. Furthermore, the latter is running on an “old” Assassin’s Creed engine, which they believe is based on a 2019 version of the same.

If true, this is all rough news for Ubisoft, which is reportedly expecting Assassin’s Creed Mirage to perform well. It was rumored to release in August 2023, and at this rate, it could launch as late as June 2024. Stay tuned for more updates on it and The Crew Motorfest.

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The sequel is about Motorfest, a “one-of-a-kind festival” focused on the best experiences in car culture. It’s set on O’ahu island in the Hawaiian archipelago and is once again an open-world racing title with Honolulu, volcanos, rain forests and beaches to race through. There are hundreds of “legendary vehicles” to drive solo or with friends, and several events, challenges and “tailor-made races” to complete.

The Motorfest program will receive more details in the coming months. In the meantime, the Insider Program offers a closed test with multiple phases. The first phase is for PC only for its quick iterations, that too for 2,000 players. However, consoles will gain access in the final phases while the number of players is increased. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

The Crew 3 is rumored to be called The Crew Motorfest. Codenamed Project Orlando, it was supposed to be DLC for The Crew 2 before becoming its own game, as per insider Tom Henderson. He reported last year that it has a new driving engine and would be a reboot for the series. Dataminer @ScriptLeaksR6 also spotted the branding and logo for “Motorfest” via in-game license plates, billboards and more.

The same datamining indicated an announcement this week, so this recent tease lines up. Ubisoft also said it had a “large” unannounced premium game launching sometime between 2023-24, so it could very well be The Crew Motorfest. As always, so stay tuned for more details.

Tomorrow. 5PM UTC/9AM PST.

— The Crew Motorfest (@TheCrewGame) January 30, 2023

As spotted by Insider Gaming, as per dataminer @ScriptLeaksR6 on Twitter, The Crew’s next game is going to be officially titled The Crew Motorfest, with the in-universe “Motorfest” branding and logo allegedly appearing in the game on license plates, billboards, the game’s menus, and more. The game’s logo also seems to have leaked- check it out below.

Internally called Project Orlando during development, past reports have claimed that The Crew Motorfest allegedly started development as DLC for The Crew 2, before evolving into its own full-fledged project later on. Insider Gaming claims that the game is set on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, and has been built on a new engine.

Allegedly, as per datamining of the game’s insider program suggests that an official announcement could be made as early as next week. Ubisoft has previously said that it has an unannounced AAA game scheduled for release in FY 2024 (April 2023-March 2024), and The Crew Motorfest is reportedly that title.

We’ll keep an eye out for more details on the game in the coming days, so stay tuned for further updates.

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New weather and color grading will be available on all platforms in the new season. Those on PS5 and Xbox Series X can also look forward to the long-awaited 60 FPS boost update. Improvements to handling and a new campaign developed with Formula Drift champion Chris Forsberg are also incoming.

This season will kick off Year 5 – two additional seasons are planned with new vehicles, rewards and challenges coming. There will also be “new ways” to venture across the world and some “highly requested” features from the community. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

The Crew 2 is currently available for PS4, Xbox One, PC and Google Stadia. Check out our official review for the base game here.

Ubisoft recently announced that The Crew 2’s season 5 will be getting a second free-to-play episode, titled American Legends. The second episode update will task players with exploring American folklore and discover legendary vehicles from the late 60s to the late 80s. Players will uncover hidden stories inspired by the era, traveling the country searching for hidden treasures.

The episode will also feature a new Motorpass, which will feature 50 tiers of new exclusive rewards, both free and premium, including vehicles like the BMW i8 Roadster Steller Edition, the Chevrolet Camaro SS Bend Edition, and more.

The Crew 2 – Season 5 Episode 2: American Legends is available for all owners of the base game on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation5, PlayStation4, and Stadia, and PC through the Ubisoft Store and the Epic Games Store.

Check out the trailer down below.