Ubisoft developers confident The Crew's launch won't repeat past disasters

DriveClub is a racing game whose online features were broken for weeks after launch. Ubisoft published Assassin's Creed Unity, so defective at launch that some are getting a free game as an apology. The Crew is an online racing game published by Ubisoft, and its developers seem to realize that, to gamers, those aren't two great tastes that taste great together.

Serkan Hasan, the game's lead designer, acknowledged to The Metropolist that any online game faces "potential issues" at launch but expressed confidence that the team has prepared the game's servers for its launch. The Crew just ran a console open beta from Monday to Wednesday, and it was preceded by two PC closed betas over the summer.

"For The Crew, we've reaped the benefits of a long term beta program, designed specifically to push our infrastructure as far as possible in real world situations, with thousands of players from all over the world playing the game at the same time," Hasan told The Metropolist.

That's a little more confident than the tone taken earlier this week by Ubisoft's official blog. In a bit of goal-post moving, Ubisoft warned that day-one reviews might dwell on problems that have become common at launch, especially for games with heavy online components.

The Crew launches on Tuesday. For more on the game, see our preview from E3 2014.