We chat to Ivory Tower as they gear up for The Crew's first major expansion

A year on from launch, Ubisoft and Ivory Towers’ MMO racer The Crew is set to receive its very first major expansion next month. Wild Run abandons the game’s slightly dodgy story elements, and returns the focus to what it does best; namely letting you loose on the streets and countryside of America in all manner of overpowered vehicles. I chatted to producer Stephane Jankowski to find out what’s in store for players.

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GameWatcher: How much of the new content in Wild Run was added in response to requests from the community?

Stephane Jankowski: It’s either direct requests or things we discovered by looking at how the players were behaving in the open world. When you create an open world like this you never know how the players will behave, you just say “okay, here are some toys, have fun”. You can’t imagine what you’ll discover at the end of the day. Like the salt lake, which you saw in the demo? It was somewhere that we saw was a huge hot point of activity, there were a lot of players there. We thought, “what the heck are they doing there, there’s nothing there. It’s plain, completely flat.”

Well in fact players were just racing against each other and trying to beat their high scores, going from zero to one hundred as fast as possible and things like that. So we thought okay, let’s give them new toys so they can have even more fun here. So now you have the drag racing. And seriously, everything in Wild Run has been built in the same way, so we’ve been looking into how the community has been receiving The Crew and how they have been playing it, and trying to make it even better and friendlier for them.

GameWatcher: That must be an interesting design challenge. Players want to create and do their own things, but you also have to impose some kind of structure on all that.

Stephane Jankowski: Exactly, exactly. And you’ll see with Wild Run we are proposing two ways of dealing with that; you have The Summit, which is more of a structured thing, where you have competitions and challenges and so on, and you’re exposing new content to the players. Really trying to give them new ways to have fun in the dozens of activities that we have. Then you have the other way, where you have FreeDrive Challenges and Stunts, and you just say “okay, you want to have fun today? Go ahead and enjoy yourselves.” Really going into that idea of creating your own story. You want to have fun together? Please do!

GameWatcher: Cool, so as for the new vehicles, obviously the monster trucks are huge fun to drive, but it’s the bikes that are the most major new addition. How did you find the process of adding in a vehicle that handles and drives so differently?

Stephane Jankowski: The funny thing about motorbikes is that it’s a very long story, we had them in mind for a long time. We started to think about Wild Run and what we wanted to bring in, and we thought “come on, motorbikes? That’s going to be really difficult.” But we took the engine, took the 3D models of the cars off, added the 3D model of the bikes and just played with no real change. And actually, it worked. It was so fun, seriously, everyone was around the screen of our tester watching it. Then we switched the cameras around, added a proper first-person view, and okay, we have something very, very cool here. So that was the start, and we’ve done a lot of work to make sure that it all fits, and it changes the way in which you explore the world. When you take a dirt version of the bikes and you start climbing hills and going to places you’ve never been before, it’s really fun.

GameWatcher: How do the bikes slot in to the missions and the story? Can you use them just as you would the cars?

Stephane Jankowski: Actually you can replay, or play if you are a new player, some of the story missions with bikes. Not all of them, because missions like the takedown missions, you can’t really do that with a bike. Some missions we didn’t want to change, but everything that is compatible you can do on a bike. So you find yourself in some situations that are quite unique. For us it works really well, it was a lot of work but we’re happy with the results.

GameWatcher: Can you tell us a little more about The Summit? I think people know that it’s essentially a kind of monthly competition, but how exactly does it work?

Stephane Jankowski: So it’s a recurring championship, that is happening in several different steps. You have qualifiers twice a week, with different sets of objectives and challenges you need to complete. The higher you come in each challenge, the higher you will be in the qualifier, so there’s a certain amount you need to win. And then there’s a big, final Summit at the end of the month, and here you have special challenges that are really, really cool. If you get to the top here, you’ll get some very cool exclusive rewards. So some cars, you can only win here. It won’t be in the stores or as DLC, if you see it driving past you on the street, you know this guy’s good.

GameWatcher: So essentially, if we’re looking at The Crew as an MMO, this is your end-game content?

Stephane Jankowski: Yes, definitely.

GameWatcher: Obviously this isn’t a story-based expansion. Is that something you decided on after fan feedback, or was there an initial idea to continue with story content?

Stephane Jankowski: We asked the question ourselves. We like the story we had, we had an interesting character and we could have continued the story, but we wanted to focus on instant fun. This is something we heard back from the community; they liked the story too, but the real novelty and strength was outside the narrative. Where you can just go wild with these adventures that you create yourself. So we wanted to give the players toys and tools for that side of the game.

GameWatcher: So you’re also releasing a patch alongside the expansion with some visual upgrades. What can players expect from that?

Stephane Jankowski: As a Crew player it will change your life, seriously. The free upgrade that’s going to happen alongside the launch of Wild Run is free for everyone, and it includes visual improvements, the weather system… the entire feeling of the world has been changed. It’s changing around you. NPCs have been remodelled, everything looks great. It’s very cool. On top of that, it’s just one big community, so though some content is obviously exclusive to Wild Run, everyone can still play with their friends whether they have the expansion or not.

GameWatcher: Is this something you’re looking to continue going forward, this idea of releasing free upgrades alongside the paid content?

Stephane Jankowski: Yes, definitely. This is something that the community has appreciated a lot, and we’re super happy to provide new content, new upgrades on a monthly basis. We’ve stopped this for a couple of months while we focused on Wild Run, but now we’re going back to monthly updates as soon as the expansion launches. We want to continue to work closely with the community on new content, and new improvements.

Thanks to Stephane for chatting to us. The Crew: Wild Run is set for release this November 17.