During a recent showcase for The Crew Motorfest, Ubisoft Ivory Tower revealed it was working on individual offline modes for the game and its predecessor, The Crew 2.
Ivory Tower explained it was “committed” to both racing titles, and that the modes would ensure “long-term access” for players. Senior creative director Stéphane Beley further said additional “different solutions” were being explored.
The first The Crew was taken fully offline this past March after Ubisoft’s surprise delisting of the game late last year. At the time, this was attributed to “server infrastructure and licensing restraints.”
Ivory Tower didn’t provide a specific timetable for the offline modes, but said to expect more information in the coming months.
What is offline good for? Absolutely everyone
All three Crew games are online-only racing titles, which made the first Crew’s fate alarming. As Kotaku notes, this helped lead to Europe’s “Stop Killing Games” movement, which wants developers of online-only games to be required to make titles fully playable offline instead of just delisting them.
The movement’s Citizens Initiative page says these games being made non-functional “robs customers of their purchases and makes restoration impossible. […] Existing laws and consumer agencies are ill-prepared to protect customers against this practice.”
“By destroying [games], it represents a creative loss for everyone involved and erases history in ways not possible in other mediums,” the movement continues.
Developers have become aware of how precarious online games have been lately. Both Rocksteady and Inflexion Games promised to create offline modes for their respective multiplayer games, Suicide Squad and Nightingale.
While the original Crew title is now a decade old, online games can get pulled at any point, regardless of age. The Crew 2 is now six years old, so an offline mode will help keep it around well before it reaches its own tenth anniversary.