Is The Crew 2 too grindy?

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I was 2 weeks on holidays until Monday the 2nd of July so I only started playing The Crew 2 yesterday. I'm now halfway through Star level on the way to Icon 1 and I start wondering what I have to think about the progression system in the game.

1. Followers
The followers mechanic looks just fine so far, I would even say it's a bit too fast at these early levels.

2. Credits
The credits system seems fine to me as well but with a giant side-note that I had pre-ordered the Gold Edition of the game and completed all challenges of the rewards program. If I'm not mistaken I started the game with already 32 vehicles in my garage after completing the introduction events for all families and there were I think only 3 disciplines where I did not yet have a vehicle (motocross, drag racing and alpha GP). The only vehicles I bought with credits are a motocross and drag race vehicle so I could start doing events in those disciplines, for the rest I'm just playing with the gifted cars. Still I think even if you got the standard edition without any pre-order or reward cars that you would still manage to do just fine, the prices of entrance vehicles in each discipline are not that high, except maybe hypercars.

3. Vehicle level progression (upgrade parts level)
This is where I think there might be a problem. In the closed beta I felt that increasing vehicle levels by parts was maybe a bit fast and it seems that similar feedback went to Ubisoft from many beta players. I know it's been nerfed but in all honesty I think it's nerfed maybe a bit too harsh. Coming from games like Forza Horizon and Need for Speed payback I would have thought that grinding (repeating the same races over and over again) is not needed. In the other games there was enough content in the form of races to progress yourself to the end-game. In The Crew 2 that doesn't seem to be the case in regards to vehicle parts. Since there are 14 different disciplines, there are also 14 different vehicles to bring to their highest level. A fine example are the motocross races. I believe all 4 motocross bikes you can buy have a performance of 10. The first 2 events are also recommended 10. After doing those and installing the parts my bike was 14. The next motocross events are recommended 15. Now 1 point below the recommendation is hardly a problem but for the 3rd series of motocross events the recommendation is performance 20. I was at 16 or so and had to grind motocross races a while to get towards 20. This grind requirement probably exists in all 14 disciplines so if you want to have a highest level vehicle in all 14 disciplines, that sure will take some time. I find it odd that in a casual arcade racer there is a required grind just to be able to do all the events.

4. Vehicle maxing (getting good pink parts)
After getting max level with a vehicle (I haven't reached it yet) I assume the next step is to get good max level pink parts for that vehicle discipline, which is again more grinding, again for all 14 disciplines (and then once again in september when legendary items are introduced). This is something I don't mind at all as it is a nice way to keep end-game activities going.

So in the end points 1, 2 & 4 seem all fine to me from first impressions. Point 3 seems to be an issue to me though.

What do you guys think about the grind in The Crew 2? If a person is only interested in let's say street racing cars and barely anything else then I would think there is no problem. For 14 disciplines though.... on the other hand end-game for an MMO style racing game should maybe not be too fast either.
 
Well the grind of followers kinda change once you hit Icon rank.
Icon rank 50 is quite doable just through normal progression.

Maxing cars is more of a grindfest as you can get "lower" parts for a car and the pink ones are more of a you can't get them when you want them or you get them when you don't.

Credits, Well that's like nothing to really worry about as you get the best cars sooner the more you have in the long run.

So if it was more of like TC1 where the closer you max the better you can get would be more better IMO.
 
I've not done any Motocross races yet, bikes are less my thing, but I've not had to grind any races to progress in the other disciplines yet. Only others I've not tried so far are Air Race and Alpha GP.
 
So far my motocross bike is the only one I've had to deliberately upgrade to remain competitive in race events. I figure that's down to MX bikes starting out with such a low perf level, which only nets small gains (at first) with how the loot system works.

However, I simply pick up perf part boxes as I drive and fly around, swapping to a vehicle that could use the boost before opening the box. Fast-faving to an aircraft for an aerial scan of the area makes it a brief search, and it seems like you pick those up on radar pretty frequently even without the affix to increase the frequency. Given the choice between grinding drag races to make my car competitive enough for the next event, and doing whatever I want in any other vehicle while making my drag racing car competitive...that's obvious to me. ;)

Once you get to point #4, then I could see grinding being the way to go, and that's not unusual for a game of this scope.

Credits rewards do seem to strike a decent balance between TC1 (which didn't seem so bad to me but there were few cars in the roster I actually wanted) and submerging the player in a mountain of unneeded cash. I like how you can earn the same sort of money as a race event from the photo ops. At the very least, I've had no reason to pay attention to what I'm spending on visual parts or paint unless I just spent almost everything I had to buy the car I'm customizing.
 
However, I simply pick up perf part boxes as I drive and fly around, swapping to a vehicle that could use the boost before opening the box. Fast-faving to an aircraft for an aerial scan of the area makes it a brief search, and it seems like you pick those up on radar pretty frequently even without the affix to increase the frequency. Given the choice between grinding drag races to make my car competitive enough for the next event, and doing whatever I want in any other vehicle while making my drag racing car competitive...that's obvious to me. ;)

Yes I wanted to do that as well (for my air race plane) but it doesn’t work all the time. Just found a loot box in the middle of NY. Was with a car in front of it, I swapped to a plane and I’m flying high in the air again (impossible to land between all the buildings). Swapped to my car again and then just looted it with a monster truck.

Maybe if I swap from car to plane with the menu instead of Fast Fav it will spawn the plane on the ground. Not sure anymore which one I just used.

Also pretty annoying that the whole map is revealed. I really liked the “fog of war” in TC1 so that it forced you to go out to exploring.
 
Yes I wanted to do that as well (for my air race plane) but it doesn’t work all the time. Just found a loot box in the middle of NY. Was with a car in front of it, I swapped to a plane and I’m flying high in the air again (impossible to land between all the buildings). Swapped to my car again and then just looted it with a monster truck.

Maybe if I swap from car to plane with the menu instead of Fast Fav it will spawn the plane on the ground. Not sure anymore which one I just used.
Fast fav is the one that will swap vehicle types on the spot, so you can favorite a plane from the menu and then fast-fav switch to it. 👍

Also pretty annlying the whole map is revealed. I really liked the “fog of war” in TC1 so that it forced you to go out to exploring.
No!! :P In this kind of game that makes me want to eliminate every last shred of fog. In TC1 I started out riding straight lines through the trees on a raid bike and eventually finished as much as I could by just fast-travelling over and over again, placing myself to take out chunks at once. Annoyingly, there were still some fog I couldn't reach because it was over water.

I was hoping I wouldn't have to do that again in this game. I want to explore for exploration's sake, with no messy patches of fog left behind by my wandering to taunt me on the map screen.
 
Icon 16 now and the game feels VERY grindy. Earlier today I had a race in my Audi TT TS around car level 230 or something and ALL THREE parts that dropped from a race were actually lower level than the ones I already had. Stuff ain’t exactly progressing that way.

Here is an overview of my vehicle level vs next incomplete event recommended level:
- street race: 239 vs 140 (but that’s because I grinded the strip a lot)
- drift: 139 vs 115 (not sure it’s doable yet since I’m not a good drifter, might need to grind the 110 races more)
- drag race: 336 vs 335: same, will probably need to grind the 330 race a bit more
- hypercar: 226 vs 210, just wasted a friggin 20 minutes on this crap rubberband AI. So I can’t even start in this discipline.
- rally raid: 79 vs 70, since I barely managed to do the 60 reco events, probably grind needed
- motocross: 19 vs 20 and I already grinded this before, more grind needed
- rallycross: 109 vs 105, can give it a try but after 2 events the next one is reco 120 so for sure grind needed either now or then
-aerobatics: 131 vs 70. For some reason this one seems fine and I never grinded aerobatics.
- jet sprint : 34 vs 20, I absolutely dislike these twitchy boats and spend a lot of time doing a reco 10 race so worth a try but probably grind needed
- monster truck: 26 vs 15 I expect this will work for at least the 2 following events, not sure about the reco 20 after that
- powerboat 158 vs 135 but I grinded this quite a bit too, might still work for the next 2 races though
- touring car 240 vs. 220, not sure but should be doable if I know the track layout
- air race 157 vs 100, these events are so disgustingly annoying and irritating I stopped with them. Using all my live event crates now to get parts for this since there is no way on earth I will ever finish that first event with my stock plane (Pilatus PC-21).
- alpha GP, haven’t started this yet, can’t be bothered with still so many other disciplines going

So in the majority of disciplines I need to grind for parts for sure. Maybe for some I can still do the next 2 races but the ones after that will probably be too hard then. No way I can feed all those series from live crates, that would be way too slow.

With the Uber Dam (for powerboats) and The Strip South (for street race) I found 2 races for 2 disciplines that work well to grind. White Mountains was okay for motocross as well. But it is still a grind. In the end there are far too few events for each discipline in regards to how fast your vehicles progress from parts IMO.
 
Why sink extra effort into levelling up for Drift or Aerobatics? All you have to do is earn points. Or Monster Truck -- there's at least one event in which you race in a MT, but the parts I collected running each of its events one time were enough to win no problem.

To update my previous observation, powerboats and drag racing are two other disciplines besides motocross for which I've had to put in extra time to upgrade. I'm taking my time with the game so I haven't done much in Street Race, Rally Raid, Jet Sprint, or Alpha GP, and nothing with Hypercars yet.
 
For drift and aerobatics, having a faster (upgraded) vehicle results in faster speed and a higher score overall since these events are on a timer. Being faster out of the straights for drifting, or flying faster towards that next bridge you need to fly under does help.

I’ve been playing most classes a bit but the grind is kinda meh. Even with street race cars I’m now just below 280 farming the first race in Vegas over and over again with the Porsche 911 with mostly blue/pink parts that either increase loot or fans. Doing the race 5-10 times can still result in absolutely crap rewards, often a dozen of green/blue stuff (often below your highest parts level) and not a single pink one (and if one drops it’s probably not even max level).

I like the game but the grind and lack of variety per car class is really annoying. Not the most annoying thing, that is the crappy rubber-banding.

Was really looking forward to this game but if the grind & poor AI don’t change soon then I don’t see myself playing this anymore once FH4 is out.
 
I have like 100 hours in the game and just yesterday got all disciplines to recommended level for hard events
 
I didn’t even play The Crew 2 this weekend at all. Partly due to the World Cup and the nice weather outside, but a big part of the reason is the grind and the annoying rubberbanding AI. Seeing how I went back to good old FM7 and played a decent amount of that I would say The Crew 2 surely has a BIG problem keeping me (and probably others) engaged with the game.

* My first street car is at 280 now but there is no reason to grind for more 280 parts for more vehicles since in September we get legendary items anyway. So no motivation to continu that series.

* Motor-cross, rally raid and rally cross are decent fun to grind, but I already beat the boss and got the helicopter so I rather focus on the other families first.

* All other events though are much more boring to grind, to the point I just have lost interest to play the game more now.

* Hyper-cars is a complete disaster with such long races and that awful rubberbanding of AI. I did 1 hypercar race, ended outside of the top 3 so that was a total of 30 minutes just completely wasting my time for nothing... no thanks!

* Air race is another catastrophe, I did 2 race in it and controls / indications of where to go are downright horrible. No interest in continuing that more.

* Jet sprint I don’t like, way too twitchy.
* Powerboat is decent.
* Touring cars is fun for a few races but too boring to grind, and grind is the next thing to do if I want to progress there.
* Monster trucks is boring.
* Air acrobatics was fun until you get missions like flying under a bridge with no bridge in sight...

What else am I missing? The fact that I don’t even remember probably says something as well.

Deep down I absolutely love the game but the progression in the game downright sucks. And I think that is mostly to blame on a big lack of events. In a game like Forza Horizon I can play all events without having to think about grinding and the progress of doing this is pure fun. In The Crew 2 I can play 6 fun events for a family and the next thing to do is to grind the most time/parts-efficient one of those races over and over again. That is.... not fun!

The Crew 2 to me feels like a title that should not have been launched yet. A ton (and I really mean a TON) more racing events should be added first so there is less of a grind and more fun of completing events.
 
Hypercar races are actually my favorite. I didn't have huge ai problems. I hope they will add more of them.

I hate monster trucks... especially this idiotic race through city... This thing drives like a brick on stick...

Jet Sprint - I am very suprised that it is very decent on... Steering wheel, i have great precision and great feel of speed. Same with power boat. I will definitely grind those.

Is the game too grindy? Yes and no. If you want to get through campaing it isn't. You can easily buy good vehicles and beat all bosses and live events.
It is becoming grindy after beating all events. You start to replay them and farm those followers to get to LaFerrari (i would actually prefer to just buy it :/ ) I hope it will change after adding more events etc.
 
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