Game intel
The Crew Motorfest
Time to get ready for what's coming next, Festival-goers! With Ubisoft Forward fast approaching, we wanted to thank you all for an amazing first year, your co…
The Crew Motorfest just laid out a surprisingly ambitious Year 3 during The Crew Showcase 2025, and it hits several pain points fans (myself included) have been nagging about since launch: deeper customization, more expressive street culture, portable play, and actual tools for player-made content. It also leans hard into brand collabs and a new Year Pass, so there’s plenty to be excited about-and a few flags to watch.
Season 8 launches Year 3 on November 5 with Street Riders, a playlist built around a secret crew called “Monkeys’ Kitchen” that treats the city as a stage. The hook is “free races with no set routes,” which sounds like the kind of checkpoint-to-checkpoint chaos that made old-school street racers sing—choose your line, cut corners, improvise. If Ivory Tower nails traffic density, shortcut readability, and checkpoint pacing, this could be the first Motorfest playlist that really captures that late-night street energy rather than theme-park sightseeing.
Customization finally grows up: stance tuning arrives, and more than 40 new branded rims join the catalog. This is the right move. For a game pitched as a car-culture festival, the lack of granular aesthetic tweaks has always felt off. The studio says rim materials and colors are now editable, which should play nicely with stance work and liveries—here’s hoping alignment and camber aren’t just visual fluff but feed into handling presets in a subtle, believable way.
On the brand front, Season 8 doubles down with a BMW-themed playlist, spanning heritage to modern tech, capped by an exclusive BMW M2 CS. I’m always down for curated brand tours when they teach you something about the cars beyond specs. The catch? “Exclusive” can mean time-gated, paywalled, or playlist-locked—Ubisoft hasn’t clarified how players earn or buy the M2 CS. Cool car, but I’ll reserve the hype until we know if it’s accessible without jumping through monetization hoops.
Two strong quality-of-life beats landed alongside the content hype. First, The Crew Motorfest is now Steam Deck Verified, which matters more than a logo—Valve’s stamp usually means clean UI scaling, correct prompts, and stable performance settings out of the box. It’s not a 60 fps guarantee, but it means portable Motorfest without fiddly workarounds. Second, Ubisoft quietly did right by preservation: The Crew 2 now supports a hybrid online/offline mode. For a series that’s been tethered to servers since day one, that’s a big nod to longevity and a rare live-service W.
There’s also a refreshed progression and ranking system for The Grand Race, which is overdue. The current loop leans spectacle over skill expression; a clearer path with meaningful ranks could make large-scale races feel competitive rather than chaotic watchlists. Add a new Friend Pass that lets owners invite up to three friends to play free in Crew mode (with no time limit), plus a free car for logging in within three days of the showcase, and you’ve got a smart push to get lapsed players back on the island.
The Year 3 Pass promises 21 vehicles, with 4 on day one and the rest in monthly drops. The press line mentions “165 released in monthly drops,” which reads like a typo—if it isn’t, that’s a tidal wave of content that raises obvious balance and economy questions. Pricing wasn’t shared, and that matters. Motorfest has flirted with bloat before; more cars only land if acquisition paths are fair and progression isn’t diluted. One nice touch: owners of Year 1 or Year 2 Passes get a bonus hypercar, the Cadillac CIEL Concept (2011). It’s a slick nod to loyalty, even if it’s still part of a spend-to-own ecosystem.
Starting in March, Season 9 is pitched as the franchise’s biggest yet: a NASCAR collaboration, a Track Forge editor for building and sharing custom circuits, and RC cars for free roam and events. The NASCAR piece is interesting—not because “stock car in Hawaii” makes obvious sense, but because Track Forge could enable the ovals, rovals, and chicaned sprints that make the license sing. If Ivory Tower delivers robust sharing, discovery, and moderation (think Trackmania-lite inside Motorfest), the editor could be the content engine this game’s been missing.
RC cars are the wildcard. They could be a novelty mode you try once, or a physics remix that makes familiar roads feel new. If the handling model captures that twitchy, grippy feel and the events lean into scale tricks—drifting under parked trucks, squeezing through culverts—this could be more than filler.
If you bounced off Motorfest because it felt like Forza Horizon with thinner culture, Season 8’s Street Riders and stance tuning are the first signs of a stronger identity. Steam Deck verification adds a practical reason to return, and the Friend Pass removes the “convince your crew to buy” barrier. The open questions are all about access and balance: How is the BMW M2 CS earned? What’s the Year 3 Pass price? Will Track Forge be cross-platform with easy curation? Ubisoft has momentum here—now it needs to prove the systems respect players’ time and wallets.
Season 8 doubles down on street culture with free-route races, stance tuning, and a BMW spotlight, while Steam Deck verification and a Friend Pass make it easier to play. Season 9’s NASCAR tie-in and Track Forge could define Motorfest if the tools and sharing are robust. Watch the Year 3 Pass details and “exclusive” car access before you commit.
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