The Beta Version of Ubisoft’s The Crew Runs at 30 FPS, But the Retail Game Probably Won’t

There’s no other game set to launch this fall that I am looking forward to as much as The Crew, a racing title largely developed by the remnants of Eden Games, now known as Ivory Tower. The reason for this is that I was a huge fan of Eden’s Test Drive Unlimited 2, having sunk hundreds of hours into racing – and, ahem, poker. Simply because many of TDU2‘s developers are working on The Crew, I have big hopes that the game will be nothing short of great.

Not long after the game’s closed beta launched last week, however, info leaked about the game being hard-locked to 30 FPS on the PC. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the reason for that being a little frustrating. 30 FPS might be fine enough for Microsoft’s and Sony’s consoles, but on the PC, the higher the framerate, the better.  Sixty FPS is typically considered the Holy Grail. Ubisoft could give any excuse it wanted, but no one would ever believe that the game had to be FPS-throttled.

The Crew running at 0 FPS

I contacted Ubisoft to see if the launch version of the game would retain that limitation, but wasn’t given much to go on.

The development team has not yet made a final decision as to the FPS settings for the PC version of The Crew.

That’s not too surprising of an answer, given that game developers and publishers don’t like to give out unknown information about their upcoming games. I do think an exception should have been made here, however.

Despite the response I received, I am of the belief that the launch game will not be FPS locked to 30. Because Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was hard-locked to 60, though, that being carried over to The Crew wouldn’t surprise me. And really, while that’s not ideal either, it’s leaps and bounds better than 30 FPS.

One thing that makes it hard for me to believe that Ubisoft would stick to its 30 FPS hard-lock is that The Crew has an NVIDIA logo attached to it (listed at the bottom of the official website). NVIDIA’s a major sponsor of PC gaming, obviously, so I’d find it hard to believe that it’d attach its name to a game that works against PC gamers by throttling the capabilities of their GPUs.

Ubisoft’s been on the receiving end of a lot of flack in recent months; if a 30 FPS hard-lock is preserved, it’s just going to make matters worse.