Hello everyone, whammy4 here.For over a year by now, I've been working on a The Crew mod, very creatively named "The Crew: Unlimited", or "TCU Mod" for short. The point of the mod is simple - to undo as much post-launch damage done to the game as possible, along with other technical improvements and bug fixes. The mod vastly improves the visuals, environments, materials, car physics & handling, audio and restores lots of removed ambient content.If you may, here is a quick demo reel of the mod's visual and audio improvements thus far:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ug_SWoBmQ
BACKSTORYSince the TCU Discord was founded in 2023, we've been slowly finding and documenting changes introduced in "The Crew Wild Run" update (November 2015) in a separate channel. After a few years, we now have most of the changes documented - in total, they paint an extremely grim and depressing (and/or infuriating) picture of a beautiful, extremely rich, detailed and very technically impressive passion project video game that was deliberately and maliciously downgraded, brutalized, broken and left to die by Ubisoft post it's launch. I confidently claim it to be the worst video game downgrade of all time, Watch Dogs E3 doesn't even come close to what has been done here.
I don't even know how to begin properly explaining the true extent of the damage done by this horrible update, about everything imaginable got completely ruined - the artstyle, visual design, rendering, world detail, world regional effects, regional weathers (~40 unique regional weathers removed and replaced with 2 global sunny/rainy weathers), regional/state street props, variety of traffic cars and pedestrians, variety of roads, car physics, car handling, (all) audio, GUI, general stability... And let's not forget the incomprehensibly embarrassing cutscene physics freakout glitches. There's no doubt that no Quality Assurance was done for the update at all. To call the game "fully playable" in it's post-Wild Run state would be a stretch.The craziest part to me to this day, is how Ubisoft & Ivory Tower actually managed to trick and manipulate us The Crew players into initially believing this is not just not-a-downgrade, but rather an upgrade. Go back to any old 2015 video showcasing the Wild Run graphics update, most old comments will be praising the update instead of pointing out how terrible it is. Read Ubisoft & Ivory Tower's marketing and patch notes for Wild Run, they straight up drop lie after lie with no shame (or consequences).PURPOSEIn no way, shape or form, are we still playing "The Crew" - we have been playing a cheap, soulless, broken and deliberately low quality knockoff. There's no comparing the quality and the feel of the original product VS the post-Wild Run version(s). TCU Mod is here to mitigate this, and bring back The Crew as close to it's former glory as possible.It's still not the original, but you will have a much better, more satisfying, very beautiful and much more meaningful experience, and you'll know you're still playing "The Crew".VISUALS & DESIGNRight off the bat, I have to point out that the engine-level differences are so drastic between pre and post-Wild Run, that simply porting the graphics and other related data (like the weathers) is impossible. The rendering pipeline has been fully rewritten to go from the traditional phong model to the newer industry standard PBR model, and the sky/fog shaders have been replaced with similarly pseudo-realistic procedural counterparts. The individual weather configurations have went from providing dozens and dozens of artistic options, down to only a few. That's the price you have to pay when choosing pseudo-realistic automated/procedural graphics models over more traditional artist-friendly graphics models.This means the visuals (and weathers) have to be fully redesigned by me from scratch. I have, shall we say, locked-in, and used up all of my (way over a-) decade of experience with art, video game development and visual design to the fullest extent. I only hope the results speak for themselves:
If you take a closer look at The Crew's original aesthetic, you will see that the game was deliberately designed to look like a painting, a dynamic ever-changing one, depending on where you are in the game world.
Wild Run went the complete opposite way, where all of the visual design has been offloaded to the pseudo-realistic shaders to say what should look like what, and every region looks the exact same and has the same global weather (that's just complete negligence on the developers' end). Also take it from someone who's been datamining the game for over a year now - the Wild Run developers were absolutely clueless about what they were doing.
With TCU Mod, I will be restoring the painterly, beautiful and ever-changing nature of the original game's visuals, along with as much removed ambient content as possible.
I'm designing weathers for TCU Mod following in the game's world zone order: Midwest, East Coast, The South, Mountain States, and lastly the West Coast. That's why I'm mostly showing off the Midwest for now. I've got lots of exciting new weathers and looks to create and show off in the near future!This is as far as I'd like to get into it all in this introductory post. Starting from now, I will be posting TCU Mod updates and more in-depth/educational posts about the technical and artistic challenges I've been overcoming along the way. Despite my many years of prior experience with these things, I have learned (and continue to learn) SO much more throughout the development of this project, and I'm looking forward to sharing all my knowledge with all the artists, designers and developers out there.TCU Mod is not just an improvement mod to me, it's an artistic statement. It's a statement about the futility of chasing realism and all that pseudo-realistic graphics tech, a statement about embracing art and creativity (instead of actively killing it), a statement about embracing human imperfection, because that's what puts soul into art. Video games are art after all, right?GALLERY
CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI'd like to acknowledge and thank the guys from the community that have contributed their help and work to TCU Mod - having TCU Mod be a greater community effort is what I always wanted.I also want to give shoutouts to probably the most important person in The Crew modding history - FTIW! You sir basically made modding the game possible (and convenient), and we are forever grateful for that.