The Crew Revived Thanks to Modders

The Crew, the first IP from the Ubisoft brand initially released in 2014, as you probably know, has been unplayable since April 1, 2024, when the software house shut down the game's servers. The title, in fact, was conceived under the "always online" formula, and without the ability to log in, it's not even possible to access the main menu.

Although Ubisoft released a patch for The Crew 2 that allows offline play and also promised to do the same for subsequent chapters, the first The Crew was simply declared dead and buried in Death Valley.

...until today.
A group of Modders has announced that they have finished work and are about to release a Mod titled The Crew Unlimited which, as the name suggests, will allow owners of the first game to return to playing in offline mode. The software is based on a virtual server emulator – which is already available for those who want to install it and try to apply it "manually," but the Mod will be optimized – which essentially "tricks" the game into believing it's receiving the OK to run from the Ubisoft server.

The Crew Unlimited will be released, if no problems arise, on September 15, necessarily only for the PC version of the game: interested parties can visit the project's official website.

The case of The Crew quickly became an iconic example in the war for software preservation fought by various movements, which dispute the fact that software houses can arrogate the right to "pull the plug" on any game they own the rights to, despite the money collected from the sale of licenses. The fact that the solution to the problem could, in many cases, be the application of a simple patch, but that there is a lack of willingness at the source to preserve the work, is an additional reason to be upset...