Despite recent rumors of an imminent launch shared by credible leakers, Ubisoft announced yet another last-minute delay for XDefiant, its free to play arcade first-person shooter game. The news came from Executive Producer Mark Rubin, who shared a lengthy explanation with the community via Twitter (X).
We just had a quick test of our PTS (Public Test Session) server infrastructure. Thank you so much to everyone who filled out the survey and provided feedback on our various social media platforms. From this feedback, we saw that the majority of people had a great time and saw an improvement over previous tests, BUT…that wasn’t the case for everyone. So, we’ve spent the last week digging through the data that we collected and have identified some things that brought us to the decision to take some extra time to fix or improve the experience for everyone.
I also want to point out that all feedback is not only extremely welcome but crucial to our goal of making a great game. A great example of feedback from the PTS test was around movement feeling off. In particular, that slide felt nerfed or clunkier. Nothing had changed in that part of the game but because people brought it up to us we were able to dig deeper and find that the slide was being interrupted by frame spikes.
I know it’s a bummer that we are moving the date, especially since we seemed so close, and that for many the game is great and they can’t wait to play, but I’d rather ship a game that is better for everyone. Our intent for XDefiant is to be something that players can return to for many years and to do that we have to build this game WITH the community.
There is no new release date for XDefiant yet. It sounds like the fixes shouldn’t take long, but then again, we thought the same the last couple of times. Still, we’ll let you know as soon as Ubisoft San Francisco finally settles on a launch date.
