Ubisoft announces offline modes for The Crew 2 & Motorfest; a stark contrast to The Crew’s sudden death

Ubisoft recently announced that it’s “heard your concerns” about the future of The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest. As a result, it’s confirmed that an offline mode is coming for each game that will allow them to exist in a playable state indefinitely.

The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest are the latest entries in Ubisoft’s MMOCarPG series that began with the now permanently offline and almost unplayable The Crew. At the time of writing, these later games are still online-only, so you can’t play them at all if the servers are down for maintenance or you lose your internet connection. Ubisoft says that it will eventually release an offline mode so that the games can still be enjoyed even if the servers are permanently shut down, which is more than you can say for The Crew right now.

A nice gesture or getting ahead of more backlash?

Ubisoft announced the upcoming offline modes on Twitter. It explains that fans should keep an eye out for more news over the coming months. So we should be hearing about how we’ll be able to play The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest offline very soon, possibly before the end of the year.

The offline modes for The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest will most likely be slices of each game that allow you to play through some of the core content but without many of the online elements. Obviously, this means no multiplayer, but it could also result in a change in the way gear score impacts the experience.

I have to believe that this news is borne from the best intentions, but it’s a somewhat bittersweet revelation given that Ubisoft shut down servers for The Crew, the first game in this same series, and proceeded to remove copies of the game from digital libraries without any warning.

Fans were incredibly unhappy about what happened to the first game. While we all know that live service games must come to an end at some point, although not if Stop Killing Games has its way, it would be nice to be able to revisit them in an offline mode in the future. This would mean that physical copies of these games are still worth keeping, and games preservationists or hardcore fans wouldn’t need to work so hard to create private servers to bring them back in some small way.

Note that Ubisoft hasn’t announced that The Crew 2 or The Crew Motorfest will soon shut down. In fact, the latest game in the series is about to get a whole new island for fans to explore. But this announcement does make it seem like the developer is getting ahead of any further backlash that it might face for closing The Crew 2‘s servers.

The Crew 2 was initially released in 2019 and has had a ridiculous number of new content updates. But The Crew Motorfest is the latest game, and that’s surely where the development team wants to focus more of its time. We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but it’s comforting to know that an offline mode is on the way for what’s left of The Crew‘s legacy.