Since this was officially my first time getting my hands on The Crew at my own leisure, and not constrained by a time limit on the E3 show floor, the one thing I always wanted to do was to see just how big the map of the US is in the game. Given that it's a scaled down map of the US, instead of a direct recreation, I was curious to see just how long it would take me to drive from one major city on the East Coast, to another on the West Coast.
For my run, I chose to drive from Midtown New York, to the middle of Los Angeles. Once I had my route selected on my GPS, the game told me it would 71 miles to get there. Ok, now I'm finally getting that sense of scale. But surely, it couldn't mean 71 actual miles could it?
The car I used to test this out was a 2013 Nissan 370Z, which was on average traveling at around 150mph on long stretches of road. During my trip, I only got in one serious crash that added on only about 10 extra seconds, and got into two police chases, one that was over in a matter of seconds as I was able to outrun them on a crowded highway, and the other which lasted for a good 5 minutes. Neither police chase took me off my GPS route, so it didn't really have any effect on my drive. I also used nitrous sparingly, so it also didn't affect my time. Lastly, I followed the GPS the entire time. I didn't take any shortcuts through terrain.
This was my route (Click to make it bigger)
My final time from Midtown New York to Downtown Los Angeles took me a whopping 39 minutes.
That's impressive on many levels. Firstly, the fact that it took so long while going at nearly 150mph for more than 80% of the way means that the map certainly has a grand sense of scale. The last time I was this impressed with the size of world in a racing game were the two Test Drive Unlimited games. Where The Crew shines in comparison to those two is the diversity of the environment.
The Crew Closed Beta is currently live through this Friday, July 25th.
