The Crew sees a modding team step in with a workaround for Ubisoft's online-only approach to the title

Ubisoft shut down The Crew’s servers on March 31, 2024, making the always-online game unplayable. However, a dedicated team of modders has stepped in to revive the game through The Crew Unlimited, a fan-made project that allows players to play The Crew offline starting September 15, 2025.

The project lead, Whammy4, announced via Discord that The Crew Unlimited Launcher will launch on September 15 and will be distributed for free to anyone who owns a legitimate copy of the game, minimizing potential backlash from Ubisoft. 

The Crew Unlimited: A project born out of necessity?

The Crew Unlimited started as a small project in December 2023, shortly after Ubisoft announced the game's server sunset. The team of five core members had captured the game’s network data before the servers went dark to reverse engineer its infrastructure.

The server emulator or launcher tricks the game into functioning as before, with the initial 1.0 release focusing on offline play via a local server on a player's PC, while full multiplayer features, including co-op story campaign and PvP, are scheduled for future updates. The project also supports DLC content such as Wild Run from 2015 and Calling All Units from 2016.

In a dev blog on the project’s site, the team explained why they wanted to take The Crew’s preservation into their own hands: “We were trying everything we could, anything to preserve the game. We eventually came to the conclusion that writing a Server Emulator for The Crew was the best and only solution.

This would allow us to effectively implement both an Offline Mode and an Online Mode back into the game. Offline Mode simply means a server running on your computer while playing the game. Your local server, your local savegames, your game. No one will ever be able to take this away from you now.”

Whammy4 further iterated that the emulator will allow modding support and allow improvements like rebalancing and further technical improvements in the future, but for now, it will maintain the game’s original artistic vision of The Crew’s expansive open-world map.
 

No official word from Ubisoft just yet

Ubisoft, on the other hand, has no plans to officially implement an offline mode for the original Crew, but announced that it would implement offline modes for The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest amid the backlash surrounding the first installment.

Ubisoft has previously earned the ire of gamers due to draconian EULA terms that caught the eye of several publications and even the Stop Killing Games movement, which has widespread grassroots support in the EU.

While it is unlikely that Ubisoft would directly intervene here, given that users playing The Crew Unlimited do have a license to the original title as a prerequisite, it may alternatively take a leaf out of Nintendo's more litigious book to safeguard what it could potentially see as a threat to its IP.