Hey TheGforce, could you introduce yourself?
Hi all, I’m G and I’m a Mechanical Engineering student from the Netherlands. I’ve been playing The Crew since it launched in December 2014. Before The Crew my only experience with racing games was Burnout Paradise. Coming into the franchise I was truly amazed by the immense scale of the world, which kept me playing for several hundred hours. I just loved driving around in fast cars and watching the landscape go by in a blur. As I gained more experience with the handling, I became more interested in PvP and becoming more competitive on leaderboards.
The Crew community is quite large and spans across many different social media platforms, where are people most likely going to find you? What do you like the most about that community?
I spend a lot of time on Reddit and Discord. On these platforms I often voice my opinions and say what I think about the game. I’m always up for a civil discussion, and I enjoy helping other players out if they have questions or problems. I do look around the forums occasionally but I mostly lurk there.
Do you play on Console or PC?
I play exclusively on PC. I am a bit of a PC geek and i enjoy reading up on computer hardware. One perhaps weird thing about my setup is that I play The Crew 2 with keyboard. When I picked up The Crew in 2014, I did not even own a controller. I got used to the controls of the game on keyboard and when I finally did obtain a controller I had gotten used to the keyboard controls so much that I did not want to make the switch. So I stuck to keyboard for racing and that is what I still use to this day.
What was your first experience with The Crew?
I think it was a good friend of mine who showed me the e3 trailer for The Crew. When I saw that trailer i was immediately sold. I just had to buy the game. My first ingame experience was playing the first couple story missions together with this very same friend. We had a fantastic time together.
You’re quite the competitive player in TC2, can you tell us more about why you like this play style?
I have always had a competitive spirit, but it didn’t start out this way in The Crew. I played TC1 mostly for the environment. I was not very good at the game but as I mentioned with the amount of time is spent in game I got better, and eventually started to actively go for better times on my events. This went hand in hand with adding good players like Paragleiber and ISuckAtDriving to my friends list. They gave me a challenge and in a way their times on the leaderboard were goals for me to work towards. I love winning and beating leaderboard times is a very satisfying feeling to me. In tc2 this need to beat leaderboard times continued.
For players want to improve their time on the leaderboards or wanting to become PVP champions like yourself, do you have any advice for them?
Being fast comes down to a couple aspects in this game: making no mistakes, taking a fast line in order to optimise speed, and having a good vehicle and vehicle setup. In order to make few or no mistakes, you have to practice. The best way to learn is when every time you make a mistake, you have to think about what you did wrong, and how you can prevent the mistake from happening again. The second point is taking a fast line. In order to be the fastest you have to make sure you take every corner as fast as possible, and the fastest route through a corner is called the racing line. The basic idea of a racing line is to take a corner with the largest radius you can manage, because the tighter the radius the more you need to slow down. This usually means you enter from wide, hit the apex and exit the corner wide again. For the boats it is important to know that any time spent with your propeller out of the water is lost time, minimise jumps and landskips. The last point is having a good vehicle. Some cars in this game are just faster than others, a good indication of fast vehicles is checking the top of the leaderboards. The second part is of course parts, you will want to max out your car, and get affixes that will help you during races. Usually this means getting affixes with NOS based bonuses like “Pure” and “Extra Pump”. (important to note is that currently parts and affixes have no effect in PvP). The last part of having a good car setup is the tuning. Every car has unique handling characteristics, and almost every vehicle will improve at least slightly when you tune it correctly. Sometimes a tune can have a massive impact on how the car handles and thus greatly improve how well you can do with it.
You’ve played TC1 and TC2, do you have any memorable moments, or PVP battles you can share more about?
One of the most memorable PvP battles is when i first got invited by Paragleiber to an 8-person PvP with other great players, this was in the first year of TC1. I was absolutely humbled to have been invited, and I got destroyed on pretty much every race. That was the first time I got introduced to the absolute top of the playerbase, and being in those races taught me that even if you are good, there is nearly always someone better at the game.
Lastly, outside of The Crew do you consider yourself to be Gearhead?
Yes, I love cars and i love going fast. I have always been fascinated by the technology used to make cars go as fast as possible, and by the styling choices made for supercars. My favourite supercar is the Lamborghini Murciélago SV. I love the typical angular Lamborghini styling.
Thanks again for taking the time to answer our questions, TheGforce! We hope you enjoyed this latest spotlight, gearheads. Be sure to keep an eye on our official channels for the next one.
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