In what appears to not be overly surprising Far Cry 5 and The Crew 2 have been delayed. Far Cry 5 has only been delayed a month, which means it is still on track for a late March, 2018 release. The Crew 2 however has been delayed to appear somewhere between April – September 2018.

This is the reason Ubisoft gave:

“Our vision for The Crew 2 has always been ambitious; to really surprise players by pushing the boundaries of the open-world racing genre to the limit. The feedback we’ve received so far from fans and press alike has been hugely encouraging, and we’re grateful beyond words for your continued trust and support.

In order to truly stand by our promise, we have made the difficult decision to delay the release date to between April/September 2018. While we’re excited to share the joys of Motornation with you as soon as possible, we don’t want to do so before the game is ready.”

I do think some extra polish is always welcome and I’d rather see some truly quality experiences than rushed ones. With The Crew 2, I think after the loot crate backlash of Star Wars Battlefront 2 Ubisoft are going back to the drawing board with The Crew 2’s micro transaction system and this is one of the main reasons for the delay.

The Crew 2 is showing a lot of promise and being able to not only drive, but boat and fly as well is excellent.

I love the original The Crew but I have always said that the heavy focus on micro transactions and the randomness of the parts won was pretty crap. Also, there was no ability to sell the multitude of duplicates you got in the game for in game currency. Ubisoft and Ivory Tower always setup The Crew so that players could spend large amounts of real dollars to get the additional cars. It was quite a grind to get them in normal play, although assigning friends to faction missions did help this quite a bit.

I am sure that The Crew 2 will have a toned down version of micro transactions now because EA is still suffering greatly (Star Wars Battlefront 2 has only sold about a million units, compared to Call of Duty WW2 selling almost four million units) from their “pay to win” style look boxes. EA has tried to stem the tide of anger by turning off real life purchasing, plus tweaking the rate at which you earn in game credits, but this has not helped the progression system much. Because of this I am sure Ubisoft are looking very closely at what constitutes a good progression model.

Even Ubisoft has acknowledged that by giving Assassin’s Creed Origins an extra year of polish, it has resulted in a much better game. This is also another reason for the delays, to provide an extra layer of polish.

I’m still very much looking forward to both games, and I think with the extra time they could become even better.