The Crew Motorfest will bring open world racing to Hawaii this year
A racing festival? Whatever next
Test Drive Unlimited was set on a Hawaiian island modelled after O'ahu and the Forza Horizon games each focus on a festival of racing events. If those two games were to come together in a high speed collision, the mangled wreckage might look like The Crew Motorfest, Ubisoft's newly announced game about a racing festival on the island of O'ahu. The reveal trailer is below.
My strained metaphor breaks when you watch this, because it doesn't look like mangled wreckage, it looks like a pretty racing game.
There's not a lot of concrete information about Motorfest yet, even if you go a step further and watch the 'behind the scenes' developer video. It's the new game in The Crew series, it's set in Hawaii, and it's aiming to release in 2023. That's almost it.
The added detail is that there's a closed beta beginning tomorrow. You can register to participate on The Crew site. Only 2000 PC players will be let in for this first test, but it'll run for a period of weeks and there will be several future phases during which other players will be accepted in.
The Crew 1 and 2 were both similarly open world racing games. There was some fun to be had in going on tourist trips across those worlds, although they mostly aimed for scale of landscape and variety of vehicles rather than rivalling other racing games in terms of the handling model. It was a bit broken at launch too, and far from a smooth multiplayer experience.
Ubisoft remain embroiled in several running controversies involving an allegedly toxic workplace culture. In recent weeks, they've also cancelled games and hinted at layoffs, apologised for a CEO letter, and had employees at Ubisoft Paris walk out in protest.