Ubisoft racer Crew escaped another shutdown after fans resurrected him in server-emulated form earlier this year. According to the modders of the revival project The Crew Unlimited, due to the bug, the game would stop working after 2029. Luckily, they say a solution has been found.
“This may be one of the most important updates we have ever released, or perhaps THE most important,” the post reads. fast from lead developer Whammy4 about the latest update to The Crew Unlimited server emulator, 1.3.0.0. They noted that shortly after releasing version 1.0 of the server emulator, the group realized that if the date on the PC playing it was set to anything after June 2029, the game would simply stop working.
“As you can imagine, we were extremely concerned (how many deaths is this game going to have to go through? Is two not enough anymore?),” Whammy4 explained. “At first we hoped it was just a bug on the TCU server, but it turns out it wasn't. This is an issue with the game client itself and is not intentional, but rather a bug. Through our research, we've narrowed it down to the Summit calendar system (from the Wild Run 2015 update) or the Crate daily mission system (from the Calling All Units 2016 update). The likely culprit is Summit, although nothing in the summit calendar data mentions anything about June 2029 or 2029 in general.”
The good news is that the team says they have found a “not perfect but working fix” for this potentially deadly bug, which they call “Y29K”, by making some changes to the server emulator software. In this way, a crisis is averted, even if it appears that more work may be required to try to find a better solution in the long term.
Here's hoping The Crew can survive for a few years without any existential threats from here on out, even if there was a silver lining to its initial closure. sparking a worthwhile debate about what deprecation of online gaming should look like in the future.
