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The Crew Motorfest: going full throttle in Hawaii
During Summer Game Fest we were invited to a special Ubisoft event and got to try The Crew Motorfest and Max Verstappen's RB18 racing car in its new Hawaiian-set open-world.
Handling is everything in racing games, in particular, racing games that feature a large variety of vehicles. From classic muscle cars to all-new electric supercars, and everything in between, each needs to feel different. It’s how you engage a player’s skills and adaptability.
The Crew Motorfest, from Ubisoft and Ubisoft Ivory Tower, has this in spades. And we should know because we’ve played it. We've even tested out the handling of Max Verstappen's F1 car in the game. So read on to hear about our experience.
01
Open world racing at its best
What sets Motorfest apart from The Crew and The Crew 2 is we’re now at a single destination -- Hawaii, and in a completely open world with unique biomes and various challenges. And while that’s impressive in and of itself, the studio decided to embrace car culture in a more complete way with this iteration of the franchise, instead of singularly focusing on just the cars.
“For us, it was really an ambition at the beginning of development to continue with the same DNA but with an improvement,” says senior creative director, Stephane Beley, when asked about why the studio leant into Motorfest and not just The Crew 3. “We wanted something huge and set around all types of car culture.”
The game is set up in a unique way with playlists representing different spins on car culture, these can be based around offroading, classic cars, Japan-inspired street-racing to even high-performance professional racing – which is where Verstappen's Oracle Red Bull Racing RB18 comes into proceedings.
Watch the video below to see Max Verstappen blur the lines between simulation and reality.
7 min
From sim to reality
Max Verstappen gets sucked into his simulator and needs to clear different levels to get to the Belgium GP.
While the world itself is open for the player to explore and get the most out of, the playlists allow you to focus on those core cultures and earn rewards through various races, while an interconnected story based around Motorfest itself -- a giant travelling car festival -- ties everything together, ensuring that it never feels like you’re just doing one thing and then the other.
While similarities with Forza Horizon are initially thick and fast, just a few minutes with the game in hands-on mode reveals a very different experience with its own spin on the open-world racing genre.
Street racing is all the rage in Hawaii, apparently
© Ubisoft
02
Exploring the playlists
In order to race the car that Verstappen drove to the world title in 2022, we had to jump into the game’s motorsport playlist, which is a series of races in an F1 car across a number of different tracks, each with different elevations, corners and challenges.
Everything in The Crew Motorfest is handcrafted, meaning you’re not specifically racing on, say, Melbourne’s Albert Park Race Track, but the team has been careful to ensure the unique topography of Hawaii is utilised within said handcrafting, and across the different playlists this shines through. What impressed us most, however, was that even the style of racing was different, list to list and between each culture.
In motorsports for example, there’s no nitro boost and you need to be tactical about your tyres. It might seem like a small thing, and it still certainly leans into being more arcade than simulation, but as an additional aspect to racing (which includes elements such as slip-streaming and precision braking, among others).
A tyre change is also just a matter of hitting the pit within a three-lap race, but if you wait too long, you’ll start to lose grip on the road which can affect the tail end of your sprint. Do it too early and you might be in trouble towards the end. Do it in the middle and you might lose ground and find yourself chasing the spoilers of other racers. It’s a risk-reward system designed specifically for that playlist that leans into that car list’s culture.
There are also difficulty settings which ensure that Motorfest is scalable to different skill levels and player types.
“Each playlist will offer a unique experience to a player,” Beley adds. “And at launch, you will have 15 playlists that you'll be able to enjoy. For us, it was a real evolution of our game to offer the player so much diversity at the beginning.”
Just one of the hundreds of cars available to play in The Crew Motorfest
© Ubisoft
03
The Crew meets Tokyo Drift
While we played the majority of our session behind the steering wheel of F1 vehicles, we also had a bash at a few other playlists. The key standout -- from a car culture perspective -- was the Japan street-racing-inspired set.
In these events, you’re racing around in street machines that have become synonymous with the underground racing scene and you can actually use nitrous here. Using it is another risk-reward game of balance and execution because it has a genuine cooldown and all other racers also have it, so the AI is equally matched and armed.
These vehicles were also a far cry from racing around in the ultra-sticky and fast F1 vehicles, with more weight, boost and the ability to actually utilise the good old drift to your advantage all tied to impressive physics. More importantly for this playlist, we also got a bit more of a glimpse into how the game’s story is going to unfold.
These races took place at night and were a great example of the art direction coming into The Crew Motorfest. Neon-lit tracks and just a great sense of scale and the embedded sense of a fully realised world helped make sure this playlist didn’t feel separate from that world, but rather, endeared us to it.
And the thing is, during all of these you genuinely do get a sense of actual progression and learning, so on top of selling the car culture angle the team has gone for this time, they’re also just super-important to the overall makeup of the game.
There is plenty to explore in the open-world setting
© Ubisoft
04
Aloha, driver
As an introductory moment to the game, you’ll get the chance to taste the flavours of all the game’s different vehicles, surfaces, biomes and just how it’s all going to run. The playlists are one thing, but this is an open-world game and if we’ve learnt anything about these types of games over the past number of years, it’s that players need to keep busy in them.
“We worked a lot on the island to be sure that we had plenty of detail and density of activity,” Beley says. “So you have the exploration, the competition, all the different story missions and then the playlists that will be tailored for you throughout the world.
“You also have plenty of activities just for you,” he adds. “I say once again with the exploration; you will find many treasures if you just explore. Or you will have to take some photos. Or you will go for more of the competitions and then find that with all the different types of leaderboards that you will have around you. There’s a lot to do.
“There are many ways to enjoy, finally, this world around you. We have an activity every 30 seconds. There are plenty of challenges and plenty of playlists. And each time, completely adapted to the playlist that you are playing right now, with your friends or against your friends.”
Adrenaline-charged off-road races should not be missed either
© Ubisoft
05
Bringing the cars from The Crew 2 into the new game
Perhaps one of the coolest features to come with Motorfest is that any The Crew 2 players who worked tirelessly on their car collection can bring them into the new game.
Beley confirmed that all collected cars from the previous title will come across to Motorfest so you can start life on the Hawaiian island with your favourite car. Moreover, these cars have all been painstakingly regeared to work with the all-new physics and driving model that Motorfest comes with. So even your favourites are going to drive differently.
“It was a huge feature,” Beley concludes. “You have to have the compatibility of your save of everything, for two different games at the same time. For more than 600 vehicles and all the different vanities and customisations. All the different parts need to be compatible from one game to another. It was a huge task for tech, art and design -- all at the same time.
“We improved the handling for every car inside the previous game. More than 500 cars have been updated.”
The Crew Motorfest will be released on September 14 this year for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Amazon Luna.
