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By contrast, some of the lighting choices in the original release cast the world with a more stylised appearance. Surfaces now feature material properties that dictate how lighting interacts with various objects - such as metallic paint on sports cars and brickworks across buildings - and the result is that various locations throughout The Crew are now more naturally rendered. The idea here is to allow for both environments and vehicles to appear as realistic as possible. In particular, the switch to physically-based rendering, along with a reworked lighting model are by far the biggest upgrades, radically changing the look and feel of every location across the game.
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Looking past these issues, Ivory Tower has made some positive steps in improving The Crew's visual presentation to a level more in line with other current generation racing games. There's a boost to the presentation here, but we still feel that The Crew falls just a little too short in this area. However, the anti-aliasing solution in play here is less buggy: bizarre artefacts that appeared across edges in the original release are nowhere to be seen in the Wild Run and this helps to add additional refinement to the presentation. Image quality remains spotty, with plenty of jaggies and pixel-popping across fine details and distant scenery.
THE CREW VS THE CREW WILD RUN UPGRADE
This makes sense given how much the online component is integrated into the core of the game, but going into this piece, our questions were pretty straightforward: how much does the technical upgrade affect the core gameplay experience and do both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One benefit equally from the revamped technology?īooting up the The Crew with the Wild Run update, initial impressions are a little mixed. In fact, owing to the online-only nature of the title, it's now impossible to play the original version of The Crew.
In essence, there's a massive revamp here that revitalises the title in key areas - if you're an existing owner of The Crew, now might be the time to dig out the game and give it a whirl.
THE CREW VS THE CREW WILD RUN FOR FREE
While the additional gameplay content (featuring new missions and vehicles) requires a DLC purchase, all of the visual upgrades are available for free for existing owners of the old game via the latest software update. Car handling and physics are tweaked, with improved aerodynamics and grip. There's new content too, including extra vehicles and new missions but more importantly, Ivory Tower has also spent a considerable amount of time rebalancing gameplay. Originally a cross-gen release with visual technology to match, the Wild Run expansion upgrades The Crew's rendering tech to current-gen standards and boasts a whole host of gameplay updates to match. Despite attracting decent reviews at launch, there was a sense that the game was somewhat overlooked - a situation developer Ivory Tower sought to address with the recent release of the Wild Run expansion. It's been a long and winding road for The Crew.