So after another day of play, exploration, and so on; I'm still largely happy with the purchase of this game. That said, some of the game's warts are showing pretty badly. Not with the core gameplay, just with the online functionality of the game itself. Since the game requires constant online connection, any drop in your connection, or if the game servers have a hickup; suddenly you're tossed back to the title screen and chances are anything you'd have done in the past 5 minutes will not have been auto saved. Normally, if you're just driving around this isn't much of an issue. However, this happened to me once last night just as I was at the climax of an hour long dirt rally race... that was really hard and I was in first place and about to win. 58 minutes of my life down the tubes with nothing to show for it. Wonderful.

The online PVP races are non existent. Joining a lobby is a guarantee to sit there with your thumb up your backside waiting for nothing, for nigh infinity. Ranked matches, unranked matches, doesn't matter. Reports also of The Crew's "Crew" system, the ability to group up with four of your friends or total strangers, is also entirely useless. I tried in vain to join the crew of a friend last night, only for us to be parked next to one another, hitting the accept crew invite button, to no avail. Then the instance died and I was suddenly by myself. That's another issue. You're supposed to always be surrounded by other players. However due to the shoddy connection system to the master servers, most of the time it's just you by your lonesome or maybe 1 to 2 other people. For a game that's trying to be a MMO-CAR-PG, it doesn't feel like an MMO. It feels like a poorly net coded racing game.

The foundation, the game play, is totally solid. As a multiplayer game though, it is utterly borked, and unplayable even. The PC version reportedly is more stable currently, and if that's the truth, then I feel really bad for anyone who has this on console.