The MMORPG Elements of The Crew

Is Ubisoft’s The Crew a racing game? Not to hear them tell it. They’d rather you think World of Warcraft than Gran Turismo.

“The Crew is at its heart an MMORPG. It’s not just driving around,” Julian Gerighty, the game’s creative director, told Wired.co.uk. “It was hard to pitch this game internally because you tell them it’s a driving game and people think they know automatically what it’ll be like — right trigger to go fast and so on. It’s an MMORPG where your character is the car. The key thing is that we have different styles of car. There’s a customisation system. You go to the HQ, which is the RPG hub.”

“When you think RPG, you think character classes and upgrades,” continues Gerighty. “I like to think of our game as being like a Pokemon car game, with evolution of car types. You’ll go from this full stock Nissan 370 Z, take that and build on it.”

Gerighty says The Crew is so focused on car modification and upgrades for the car equivalent of an RPG “character” sheet that it was tough to get the approval of all of the car manufacturers for the licensed cars in the game.

He does not, however, promise a grand story. To be fair, even a lot of the MMOs that promise that don’t deliver.

“The narrative, as I’m fond of calling it, is no Shakespeare. I’m not going to lie to you,” Gerighty says.

[Source: Wired.co.uk]