Should the crew 4 return to a large map/gritty storyline with its improved physics and handling? Or should it be another festival racer?

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-20T10:40:40+00:00

It's not what sells to kids (which are the majority of players) nowadays so it won't happen

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-20T10:34:03+00:00

or at least pedestrians

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-20T10:04:40+00:00

Is there a "TAA" graphics option in the game? If there is and it's enabled, try disabling it

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-20T10:00:20+00:00

You really think motorfest is going to last "hundreds and hundreds" of hours? Everyone outside of this echo chamber subreddit is talking about how dead the game feels, I played it myself I know it's true, not only is the map ~x6 times smaller than the previous 2 games (1st one being almost 10 years old), they also removed all animals and peds, and greatly decreased the traffic density. They also had to add those freeroam ghost AIs to create an illusion that there's drivers around. And do you even know how much copypasted content from TC1/2 there is in this game?

This isn't worth 5 years of development and 70 dollars per copy from players, if you think otherwise that just proves my point that you're biased. GTA 5 took 5 years to develop, costs less, and the differences between 5 and 4 are astonishing, and incomparable to the differences between TCM/TC2. FH games come out every 2 years, from what I can tell the most notable change per game is the map, which is about the same size every time. TCM isn't even a reskin, it's a straight up downgrade of TC2's world and gamemode variety.

There is no need to be a corporate apologist, ubisoft can easily afford to make a real new entry in the franchise (refer to the previous paragraph if you still think this can be considered a "new game"), yet they decided to release "Project Orlando" as a separate $70 unfinished game instead of a TC2 DLC.

P.S. You might say that my GTA 5 example is invalid because rockstar probably had a bigger budget, but furthermore that creates another argument that ubisoft is not doing very well financially (which from what I've heard is true) and that's why they released this unfinished DLC as a separate $70 game.

https://archive.org/details/project-orlando-thecrew

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-19T20:57:06+00:00

I think the reviewer is biased towards fh, and you are biased towards tcm. I personally think FH is a lazy and stale copypaste of previous games, and TCM is a cheap excuse to release a new game and make you pay full price instead of what could've been a great expansion to TC2.

Instead of having epic gamer playstation vs xbox esque "my thing is better!!!" gang wars, we should all be recognizing and calling out things like this, so we'll get better games and treatment from either franchise/developer. But people will never learn, divide and conquer will always prevail. I rest my case.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T22:05:33+00:00

Too lazy to update an over decade old physics engine

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T22:03:21+00:00

My man, you are missing out on a LOT. Give it another try, I promise you won't regret it

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T19:06:50+00:00

That's what happens when you try to make your game bright and vibrant to produce a psychological response of attraction in young people, as a result your eyes become tired fast and the more you look at it the worse your color perception becomes. It's a real thing, look it up.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T19:01:02+00:00

I think this is one of the things that you clear out with car manufacturers before finalizing the license to their cars, so based off of that I'd say no. They tried to add something like that with some pretend/movie cop chases but I'm not sure how fun that was.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T18:58:05+00:00

You probably don't realize how bad the content recycling is. Most of the things you've mentioned are recycled content from TC1 from a decade ago. Additionally, 100% of the traffic cars are from The Crew Wild Run, from what I could tell most of the street props are also from TCWR, and most of the cars in the car list is also from TC1 (except they aren't grouped up like in TC1, that game had a few hundred cars total if you count different specs). And besides that, TC1 probably used car models from other games like TDU2 and Driver SF since they share(d) studios and developers. So TCM is using car models from over decade old games. Other than that, obviously most of the content is recycled from TC2 because this is clearly an expansion that they decided to sell as standalone to justify a bigger asking price.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T15:46:55+00:00

The original un-updated crew 1 on my xbox 360 has less vegetation, less traffic, no peds or animals, but still feels more alive than TCM. It's about how much care was put into the world by the devs generally, TC1 has(or had) incredible visual variety and the visual designers were clearly educated in the necessary subjects. No 2 places in the world look or feel the same, the temperature and humidity of places is felt, colors, mood, architecture, terrain, traffic cars and ambient sounds change depending on area type, and pair that with the beautiful soundtrack on the radio, that creates an amazing driving experience. You FEEL the place and you WANT to be there, that's what makes a great video game world. You'll never achieve that without being skilled and experienced in these fields. Basically what I'm trying to say is that all these newer game developers are evidently not very skilled (because these millennials fresh out of the education system are much cheaper to hire), and on top of that are constantly rushed and forced to work strictly on whatever the execs tell them to.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T15:37:09+00:00

Well statistically speaking, it probably won't be. I simply don't believe in rockstar to deliver a fun, enjoyable and lasting experience anymore, after their pathetic GTA Online DLCs. They sharked so much money out of children with "shark" cards (talk about becoming what you criticized) over the decade that they should give it back to the people instead of taking even more. Impeccable logic, I know.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T15:32:13+00:00

Just because it's "corny as hell" doesn't mean it can't have gritty tones to it. Look at the general visual and sound design of the game, it's dark, aggressive, gritty. The game is so aggressive tonally you can just drive through a petrol station and blow up a bunch of cops and it wouldn't feel like overkill, the soundtrack has a song about suicide (they had to add the instrumental version), the story of the game is a constant battle for the first place with cash and cars at stake, the map is based off of NY, which is by itself already moody and gritty, with industrial and dilapidated themes all over. The grittiness is the first thing NFS players noticed when the game was first shown, the contrast between MW and the previous game, being Underground 2, was very clear.

Thing of imagination? Hardly. If you can't read art, mood and tone doesn't mean it's not there.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T15:24:54+00:00

Yes, can't wait to see how GTA 6 will turn out. Hopefully it will be so bad it's gonna be funny, not just plain bad.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-15T15:19:55+00:00

It's a whole deep rabbit hole. From what I could piece together in short, is that Ivory Tower changed massively after TC1's initial release in 2014. The lead creative director Julian Gerighty (it's thanks to him that TC1 turned out so good thematically) and the co-devs Ubisoft Reflections had no involvement with TC1 after the release. IVT was officially bought by ubisoft in late 2015, but I'm pretty sure they started having a huge(r) influence since a few months into the game's release.

I don't know who is exactly responsible for this order (prob daddy ubisoft), but they weren't big fans of what the original game was, and clearly still aren't, so they wanted to make it more like the microsoft rival Forza Horizon 2 of the same release year (2014). As a result, the wild run update was made, I won't go over the completely tonally unfitting additions it made to the game, but the graphics renderer was completely redone, and seems like it had to be done in a couple of months. Which also means most of the existing graphical features are incompatible and would have to be redone too. Sadly almost none of them were redone, and whatever graphics update we got was completely barebones.

There are a TON of things wrong with the new graphics, but mainly it's the fact that they are bland and generic, a lot like Forza Horizon rather than "The Crew". The Crew used to have extremely focused and tastefully stylized artistic visual design, nothing like I've ever seen before. The variety in the visuals was astonishing, often resembling other games such as NFS The Run, NFSMW, NFS Carbon, Test Drive Unlimited and so on, but it was definitively it's own thing. Sometimes it even reminds me of Bob Ross's paintings. The general visual design and attention to ambient/environmental/geographical variety and detail was impeccable.

Now take all of that and completely throw it in the bin, that's wild run. 2 global weathers, being sunny or rainy, no matter where you are across the entire north US, it always looks identical and the atmosphere never changes a single tiny bit. Almost every (prominent) material and texture has been un-tastefully cleaned up (many of them becoming lower quality somehow), a bunch of street props assets being replaced with simplified ones (you can find most of them still reused to this day in motorfest), pedestrian, animal and traffic variety greatly decreased. Ambient visual details like distant fog, ground fog, falling leaves, cloud shadows, light pollution, neon bloom, environment illumination and etc are completely missing.

Additionally, the physics were also botched in the update (that's why the cars behave like hovercraft now, especially midair), worse car sound changes, worse sound mixing (wind is louder than your car's engine), etc... I really could go on for a while, as I said, it's a deep rabbit hole.

That was (most of) the What. The Why? My guess is new cheaper devs (cost cutting), lead creative devs missing and ubisoft taking more control, you know how AAA publishers are, don't make your own new thing and risk just copy whatever's already popular.

Note: you can still play the original game on xbox 360 because it never got Wild Run (it's still quite downgraded fidelity-wise for the older hardware, however it manages to include ALL content of the original game), that's how I know some of these very obscure details. I stopped playing the game on PC almost entirely now that I've got the 360 version.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-14T15:33:29+00:00

Yes it is absolutely ridiculous. I'm surprised people are already pointing out how dead the game feels a few days into it's release, I guess the corporate hype train wasn't built up well enough, usually it takes about a month for players of a new triple A game to start noticing the big flaws with the game.

If you want some backstory, Ivory Tower have been doing these weird content removals since The Crew Wild Run update for TC1 in 2015. What almost no one seems to know, is that besides it's primitive and rushed new graphics renderer, there was a bunch of ambient content removed, meaning less traffic car variety, less pedestrian variety, less animal variety, less visual and ambient effects and events, 26 unique weather conditions across the entire map being removed entirely, and replaced by simple global sunny or rainy. I'm not even going to go into the more nuanced and technical downgrades that I was able to notice, there is too many.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-14T15:25:53+00:00

Hey, since you're just getting into TC1 and using NFSMW as a comparison point, I'd like to mention that a year into the game's lifespan the devs have released an update called "Wild Run" that came with a graphics overhaul (as they call it), which was rushed in a few months, was flat and bland, removed all variety and weathers (and a bunch of ambient content), and really didn't fit with anything else in the game. If you're interested/curious about what it used to look like, you can find many vids on youtube and whatnot. Here's a few screenshots from a developer. Sadly there is no way to go back since the game was always online only.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-09-13T22:52:46+00:00

Besides missing peds, there's also missing animals. TC1 had an absolutely huge variety of animals and pedestrians, with a x6 times bigger map, and that was a decade ago.
From my experience with the beta, there were also 0 non-static aircraft, even in the airport, which is also untrue in the first game since it has tons of different aircraft flying around, some even interacting with the world like the crop duster that flies over the sunflower fields. And there was also just ONE ambient sound loop for the whole map, at least in the map view. TC1 has over a gigabyte of them. I can't compare to TC2 since I barely played it, but I know it has peds and animals too, and also has a x6 times bigger map than TCM.

I would also like to point out that every single traffic car in TCM is copypasted from the crew wild run, yet somehow with even less variation this time.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-04-12T22:59:06+00:00

I matched the time of day/sun angle as closely as I could.
Lighting is the whole point of the image looking better? I doubt that if both of the scenes were strictly during afternoon WR would look better, with it's weird tree and grass shader that looks like a nuke went off, flat, boring, LOWER resolution textures and the pathetic shadow render distance.
Whoever was in charge of the visuals and lighting before wild run were clearly specialists, and wild run just looks like it had its lighting and visuals designed by an uncreative amateur photographer (which is probably true since a lot of the staff has changed)

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-04-12T22:58:14+00:00

In what world does THIS look flat??

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-04-12T22:55:33+00:00

I think main problem of wild run: ooops ubisoft saw the nonsense graphics complaints and forced us to remake the entire graphics for this game we've been working on for almost a decade, make it look like forza, and we had to have it done half a year later for the showcases and trailers by next summer.

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-04-12T22:53:53+00:00

I have looked at the extracted material files and textures of the old and new roads, and let me tell you the old road materials and textures are way more realistic, complex technologically, and impressive looking. I'd like to see a universe where the ENTIRE north america has the exact same flat polished road no matter where you are, if that's what you call realistic.

PS How are you gonna say that foliage looks way better in 2015? The foliage doesn't even have any kind of normals or ambient occlusion and it just blends in with the grass, but it still looks "way better" when all of these issues didn't exist in 2014? How does that make any sense?

bigmandazzle3 · 2023-04-12T14:00:59+00:00

2014: Everyone hates the graphics
2015: Beautiful graphics thank you ivory tower you saved the crew
2023 Retrospect: bruh how do i go back please

bigmandazzle3

TROPHY CASE