fanmade

The Crew, the Ubisoft street racing game that met an unfortunate end in 2024, may live again. The Crew Unlimited, a fan-made effort to revive the game through a “custom server emulator,” says the work is just about complete and will be ready to launch on September 15.

The server emulator is now “feature complete,” according to a message on the newly launched Crew Unlimited website (via RPS) states. “All that is left to do is to thoroughly test and validate the software, then prepare the release.”

“A lot of our time and effort has been put into the project, and it’s finally coming to fruition,” project lead whammy4 wrote. “We are as excited as you are. Thank you all for your patience, understanding and support.”

The project is a reaction to Ubisoft’s 2024 decision to close The Crew’s servers, rendering the game unplayable as of April 1, 2024. Making matters worse, Ubisoft began revoking game licenses shortly after the servers went offline, a big step beyond simply delisting a game that seemed intended to make double-extra-sure that nobody would be able to play the game again in the future. The Crew Unlimited project member ChemicalFlood said at the time that the team was “deeply saddened by Ubisoft’s choice to start revoking licences to this game when people have paid hard-earned cash for it,” but added that the project would be able to bypass that restriction without having to modify any game files, “so the project is still on track.”

The Crew Unlimited will be available for download from the TCU website, but The Crew itself will not: You’ll need to own the game if you want to play, although the dev team noted in an FAQ that “as long as you manage to run the game files, we have absolutely no way to tell a legit copy from a non-legit one, so we just have to let you in.”

The emulator will currently only work with PC versions of the game, but the TCU team says it might be possible to implement console support in the future. Mod support will be wide open in offline modes, but only cosmetic mods will be allowed when playing online.

The bigger question hanging over all of this is how Ubisoft will respond. Projects like these tend to attract the attention of lawyers, typically followed by cease-and-desist letters, but The Crew Unlimited is in something of a unique position: Ubisoft has taken a brutal ass-beating for its handling of The Crew’s shutdown, including a lawsuit and a European Citizen’s Initiative petition that attracted more than one million signatures. The backlash was strong enough that Ubisoft promised not to do it again with The Crew 2 and Motorfest, and dropping the hammer on a project like this would almost certainly stoke those fires all over again. That’s about the last thing Ubisoft needs right now.

It’s possible that a deal has been worked out: In the “Special Thanks” section of its website, The Crew Unlimited team throws a credit to Ubisoft, “for letting this game happen.” I’ve reached out to the team to ask about the possibility of a Ubisoft-mandated C&D and will update if I receive a reply.

Source link

The developers behind The Crew Unlimited, a community project that aims to make Ubisoft racer The Crew playable again following its unceremonious shutdown last year, have announced a release date.

If you need a bit of a refresher, Ubisoft’s decision to take The Crew’s servers offline in March 2024 rendered it totally unplayable even for those who own a physical copy, due to its online-only nature. That’s since served as the spark for the Stop Killing Games campaign we’ve reported on as its organisers have petitioned lawmakers across the world to ensure companies are required by law to put concrete end-of-life plans in place, when they decide to switch a game’s servers off. It also set a group of Crewers off on a quest to make the game playable again.

For a year or so, The Crew Unlimited’s devs have been working towards that goal. They’ve now announced a release date for their creation, which comprises of a server emulator designed to stand in for those Ubisoft took offline. As per an announcement on Discord from project lead whammy4, it’ll come out on September 15th, 2025, and be distributed for free to minimise the chances of the publisher directing their lawyers to intervene.

“We were trying everything we could, anything to preserve the game,” reads The Crew Unlimited’s freshly published website. “We eventually came to the conclusion that writing a server emulator for The Crew was the best and only solution. This would allow us to effectively implement both an Offline Mode and an Online Mode back into the game, Offline Mode simply being a local server running on your computer while playing the game. Your local server, your local savegames, your game. No one will ever be able to take this away from you now.”

The Crew Unlimited’ll be grabbable from that same site once it’s live, and you’ll need to have owned The Crew on PC before to access it, as the devs won’t be illegally distributing game files. You know, because that’d almost definitely result in Ubisoft’s lawyers coming down like a ton of bricks. Though, the project’s Discord FAQ does see them admit that they’ve got no way on their end of telling a legit copy from a pirated copy, so they’ll have to let all players in regardless, which sounds far from ideal.

In a Discord discussion linked in the FAQ, the devs have made some notes about what works in terms of re-downloading your old The Crew save files. I’d say players may well be in for a tricky time getting things up and running. The devs say you’ll need to start from scratch unless you only want to play offline, and have already used a tool they developed to dump your save prior to the game’s shutdown.

Meanwhile, they also hint that their online server may harbour a few additions or changes. That said, the group insist tweaks outside of any new stuff would be limited to “technical improvements and careful rebalancing”, and that they’d “never change the core experience of the game”.

All in all, even though the project’s been public info for around a year now, with whammy4 having posted videos of them driving around in it to YouTube, it’s maybe worth waiting to see how the release plays out before you give it a go.

Source link

The Crew is set to spring back to life as fan-made server emulator project prepares to launch later this month

Fan-made The Crew revival gets a release date, a year and a bit on from the Ubisoft racer’s controversial shutdown