Ubisoft just recently kicked off Season 8 of The Crew Motorfest, and just after launch, we had a chance to speak with Senior Global Brand Manager Charles Carrot about the new content. In our exclusive interview, we discuss the new features coming to The Crew Motorfest this season, the team’s emphasis on customization, and even the possibility of a Nintendo Switch 2 release.
Check out our full interview below:
Kicking off The Crew Motorfest Year 3 with Season 8, what do players have to look forward to?
I’ll try to be concise and quite clear. Season 8 of The Crew Motorfest is all about street racing. It’s a return to what players actually prefer, like one of the most popular themes in racing games. And for the occasion, we are adding a lot of content related to street racing. It starts with a new playlist. Playlists are like mini-campaigns, like a game within the game, such as a new theme for a certain number of races.
This season, the new Playlist is called Street Riders. In Street Riders, you start with a stock
BMW E46, an iconic BMW car. At the start of the year, you join a garage called the Monkey’s Kitchen. You progress with race after race, and you customize your car more and more. You change the front, the rear, the wheels, the colors, the stickers, and more. This allows anyone to have a very customized car that is truly their own. Street Riders also introduces you to the new customization options that we’re adding in Season 8. The biggest one of those is the ability to Stance your car. If you’re not familiar with this term, it means being able to change the angle of the wheels.
And on top of that, we are adding plenty of new wheel designs, including many from popular brands. We have collabs with a few manufacturers of cool rims from the tuning ecosystem and world. So really, you could already customize your cars in The Crew Motorfest in a pretty big way. But with Season 8, it’s getting even better, so you can really make your car your own.
The team has put a very big emphasis on customization. Regarding that, what went into the decision to change the angle of the wheels with Stance?
We are listening to our players a lot. When the development team is working on new features and new content, they really look at the top-requested features. The Stance feature was really a possibility by our core players, as a lot of the players liked doing that in real life and really wanted to see it on most of our cars. Ultimately, this is the big reason why we decided to add this. It’s also a feature you don’t see often in racing games, so it was a way for us to differentiate, to have something that is unique and that not everyone in the racing game sector offers.
I noticed that there’s a very unique visual flair this season. The visuals completely change in every playlist. What goes into that decision? And with this new season, what can players look forward to when it comes to new kinds of visual offerings?
Yeah, it’s really something we wanted to do, because when you play The Crew Motorfest, you can drive around the open world, and there you have a day and night cycle. You can find these elements in other racing games. For the playlist concept, we really wanted to create small games within the game and to have each with its own identity and look. So, for instance, one of the most popular playlists is called Made in Japan. It only features Japanese cars in the night, neon-soaked, these kinds of things. With our new Playlist called Street Riders, we wanted to really feel that feeling of street racing.
It’s inspired by the typical look that you can see in this kind of underground racing scene. But we are always changing the look. Generally, we have a second place called B&W Motorsports, and that is much more keen on look, more inspired by the pure racing aesthetic. This is also something that changes constantly. For instance, for next season,
we’ve already announced that we’re going to do NASCAR content. On the other side of the car culture spectrum, we’ll be adding next year two RC cars, so remote-controlled motorcars. And so you’ll have that more of a toy-like aesthetic.
Finally, The Crew Motorfest is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. Are there any plans to further expand that and potentially release it on Nintendo Switch 2?
I mean, we have nothing to announce yet, but basically, we want as many players as possible to play the game. You can also play the game through cloud gaming, and even on older-generation consoles, like PS4 and Xbox One. So if it’s something that we can do, we’ll aim to make it happen.
