Asynchronous challenges rev up The Crew's solo experience

Ubisoft's open-world driving game, The Crew, will be just as fun when played solo as it is when played in multiplayer because of the game's asynchronous challenges, according to creative director Julian Gerighty.

Speaking to Polygon, Gerighty said that he is more interested in single-player games while The Crew's game director is a fanatic about massively multiplayer online games. "The marriage between his direction and my direction is a really interesting one," Gerighty said. "So I'd be focusing on whether this mission is fun if it's a single-player experience, or if this skill is going to be interesting without any of your friends playing it, and the answer is yes because we've added asynchronous challenges."

According to Gerighty, the asynchronous ghost challenges allow you to play with other people even when you're playing alone. There are hundreds of asynchronous challenges, and players will be able to download the ghost of anyone they want, whether it be someone from the top of the leaderboard, or their friends' best scores. As soon as a player beats their friends' scores, their friends will get to compete against the player's ghost.

These challenges also exist within the missions, so even if players are gaming solo, they'll see their friends' scores and know what they need to beat.

"We wanted to drive you through the experience and to give you RPG elements that unlock after an hour and a half so that you're unlocking different classes of cars and you're seeing different parts of the country," he said.

Samit Sarkar contributed to this story.