Don't Expect Any Early Reviews For The Crew

It's been a rough fall for Ubisoft, but the company still has another major release on the horizon with its ambitious racing game, The Crew, on December 2. Perhaps realizing it fumbled media embargoes with Assassin's Creed Unity, the company published a blog today explaining why reviews might be late.

While there will be no embargo on discussing The Crew, the game "will be available to media to begin their reviews when the game launches on December 2." In essence, Ubisoft's making the same argument Bungie did with Destiny.

Here's what Ubisoft had to say:

"We also know that many of you will be eager to turn to experts for their professional advice. You want to read how the pros feel after their carefully considered road tests of The Crew. While we totally understand (hey, we read reviews, too!), The Crew was built from the beginning to be a living playground full of driving fans, so it’s only possible to assess our game in its entirety with other real players in the world. And by other, we mean thousands and thousands and thousands of players – something that can’t be simulated with a handful of devs playing alongside the press.

For this very reason, The Crew will be available to media to begin their reviews when the game launches on December 2. There will be absolutely no embargo on any type of coverage once the game is available for sale. While we fully anticipate that you might see some reviews immediately at launch – largely built around the preview sessions we facilitated during the past months or the limited content of the closed and open betas – they won’t be based on optimal conditions or reflect the finished game. We sincerely hope everyone will take the time to customize their ride as they progress through all five regions, explore every corner of the map solo and with friends, dive into our competitive and cooperative mechanics, race to the end of the main campaign, choose a Faction and compete with your crew in Factions Wars, and so much more."

The Crew is an open world, social-driven racing game. You can see why Ubisoft believes The Crew requires thousands of players logging on at once. On the flip side, it also requires thousands of players taking a risk on launch day. Ubisoft had a really bad November, and its games were clearly rushed out the door. Both Assassin's Creed Unity and Far Cry 4 have notable tech issues, especially on the PC. The company hasn't yet earned back that trust, but it's asking players to believe them about The Crew.

Unfortunately for Ubisoft, why should they?

The online and social elements mean Ubisoft doesn't believe the game can be probably understood until it launches.

"Properly" understood?

Hey Patrick, you put 'probably' instead of 'properly' in the header of this article, hate to be that guy but i just can't watch the world burn like this!

This is incredible. Ubisoft I just... I just fucking give up.

The media should just ban coverage just to spite Ubisoft.

Does this mean only Ubisoft can understand Ubisoft games?

I'm all for having reviews posted in launch/live environments but the marketing speak hurts.

Far Cry 4 has tech issues on PC? I mean ''lol obv'' would be the typical response, but still given how well it performs on PS4, I had naturally assumed there wasn't much fuss on PC, either. After Unity turned out to be kinda messy on all fronts, I figured that they had achieved... parity as it were. If a game's busted, it's going to be busted on all platforms, and vice-versa.

Ubisoft might just be the new EA. Hell, at least EA releases good games now and then. Ubi seems to have a terrible track record this year. And their PR is fucking atrocious. Like, how do those guys still have their jobs?

Every Ubi game released in 2014 has been bad / mediocre as hell. Except for Far Cry 4, which is pretty good, but is basically Far Cry 3. They really need to do something good for next year.

Ubisoft is totally right, I've played the beta for some hours and did not understand it at all.

To me when you race, you are on a closed track. An 'open world racing game' sounds to me like a flashlight that runs on solar power.

I don't really see the problem for games like this. MMOs have had a history of not giving out review copies and this new slate of "MMO-lite" games on consoles aren't that different from MMOs.

I mean... I know Ubisoft has absolutely insane PR problems, but I don't remember people complaining about games like this not handing out review copies before. It seems like people want to add another tally mark to Ubisoft screw up's.

Of course, if you're only complaining about the statement being weird and dumb, then I'm with you on that. Someone needs to straight up clean house with Ubisoft's PR department. 90% of their problems could have blown over if they had better PR and aggressive PR reps around during dev/suit interviews.

The crew will be my racing Game of 2014! I loved the beta on PC!

Im still pretty interested in this open world driving experiment. I played the beta but without friends to do the activities with i lost interest. I guess i just have to wait for reviews

Hah, no way. After ASS:UNIT, and FC4 being kind of busted on PCs, nope. It's the same situation with Ensemble Studios and their Total War: Attila game. No more money to companies that release shoddy products.

@sravankb: Ubisoft, EA, and Activision seem to have a rotation going on.

To be fair, review scores mean nothing anymore. Games that have broken online components get good reviews every day. I'm more interested in quick looks and live performance tests. I don't care how many stars or numbers it gets as we've proven more this year than any other reviews are becoming more and more meaningless.

I never understood why companies couldn't just created some sort of closed early-review server for the reviewers.

That's okay, I only had to play the beta to know I didn't want to drive cars that handle like they have three tonnes of lead weights in their trunks.

There have been lots of open-world racing games over the last few years. It might be unfamiliar to you, but it's a pretty well-established formula at this point.

So it's finally came down to the "You guys just don't understand our games!" argument?

I've played Beta, all I know is that the missions were incredibly unbalanced and so were most of the cars I used.

I definitely will not buy a Ubisoft game on launch day. I pretty much never will for any game at this point. Waiting a week is no problem for me.

Whoa they are making a game that could work at launch?

5 stars

How was Unity an embargo-fiasco? It's not like reviews ran a week later. Could people really not hold off for a couple of hours or a day?

Man, I want another Need for Speed Underground/Most Wanted. This game could be it but I don't want to give money to Ubisoft. I don't want another broken and poorly running game to be successful. So I guess I'll wait until reviews hit and if it's great then I might have to buy it. And then I regret giving money to Ubisoft.

Yeeeeah, not going to trust Ubisoft on this. Staying far, far away.

"We also know that many of you will be eager to turn to experts for their professional advice. You want to read how the pros feel after their carefully considered road tests of The Crew."

I'm detecting some snark here.

Lol, based on Jeff's initial "it's decent" review on Driveclub, then shitting on it because of online-related issues at launch...Ubisoft might be hurting themselves here, lol.

@humanity - Lots of people wanted the free preorder bonuses, and the embargo was set AFTER launch, so they had to take a gamble. They lost that gamble, obviously.

Hopefully the Crew is 100% awesome. Ubisoft doesn't need a 2nd broken game in 1 season.

Don't you only connect to something like 8 other players at a time? What difference does it make if there are thousands playing? They used this same excuse for ACU and it's almost entirely a single player game, and Destiny which is also only connecting to a handful of players at a time. I'm not buying it.

If GiantBomb did a 2-4 hour Day 1 livestream of The Crew like they did with Destiny, it would be pretty worthwhile in showing the game's qualities (or lack thereof, as the case may be). That's what I'm hoping for.

Well they did a beta so everyone who played that knows how good this game might turn out to be. No problems here with the later review date, completely understandable and a different case from Unity.

Won't this just lead to people rushing reviews out the door without having spent significant time with the game's mechanics? Accuracy seems like a poor excuse.

Says who? You?

As someone who has played some of The Crew during its beta a couple weeks back: I disagree, Ubisoft.

Either way, lets hope they keep some of the bugs in the final version:

Haven't had any technical issues with Farcry 4.

#XB1MasterraceYOLO

That being said I have low confidence in the rest of Ubisoft's products at this point in time.

i smell another broken game from ubisoft, its becoming there goal now have more broken games then anyone else.

its as if EA and Ubisoft in contest for who can release the biggest broken games and get away with it

Hoping Rainbow Six will be good! Hoping!...despite the fact they don't know the source material that well, by putting a "6" on the team's arms, when they are actually called Rainbow, and Six is their commander, but whatever.

WHAT'S THE BEST VALUE FOR BUYING CREW CA$H? HOW MUCH TIME DO I NEED TO PROPERLY UNDERSTAND THIS?

I think you've have been very kind to ubisoft in this article, we all know why the embargo was after the release of the game.

According to early beta reports, this is another bag of bugs with a game attached to it.

Yeah sure, Ubi, THAT's the reason why you're holding reviews for yet another of your games. The worst part is, I was a little excited for The Crew too.

Fuck off, you slimebags.

We need some more

What are the tech problems with FC4? I've been playing it on PC with no issues at all, apart from some usual open-world weirdness.

@sasnake is Ding Chavez in it because that's all I need for a blind buy

Maybe the press should just stop covering ubisoft games.

This was one of my most anticipated games of the year. Then I played the beta for about an hour and decided "You know what; I'm done." So this doesn't affect me in any way, but it does seem to suggest that Ubisoft once again knows that this game will not do super well critically.

Don't worry guys, you can actually unlock the reviews with Uplay points upon purchasing the game. They'll then be scattered around the open world, only visible once you active the nearby radio towers.

OK so to save some time, can we just say now that its a 7/10 (or a 3/5) and move on

I understand the cynicism on here given recent events, but given that they've been pretty upfront in saying The Crew is in effect an MMO, isn't this actually pretty sensible. We wouldn't expect or want day one reviews for a new MMO as they're prone to being broken as fuck for at least a few days, and most of the mechanics will be meaningless until the game is live. Also they've done a few public betas so there's reasons to hope this comes out less of a hot mess than AC:U. That said, it fucking better had, or that will be a calendar year for Ubi without a big game coming out clean.

and me, and probably tons of other people....

With closed and open betas, I'd be shocked if someone (on PC or console) wasn't getting the chance to play the first few hours of this for themself before deciding if they want to buy it.

PC: online worked months ago; PS4: me and several friends had no luck getting connected into Crews during the last beta but there's the open beta in a few days to test it again.