Tom Clancy’s XDefiant, Ubisoft San Francisco’s first game as lead studio since South Park: The Fractured but Whole, launched this May, around three years after the original announcement.
The free-to-play competitive first-person shooter game immediately registered strong player counts, becoming Ubisoft’s fastest game to reach one million players. Last week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot officially revealed that XDefiant had hosted 11 million players over its first five weeks.
Despite the large fan base, the game has some issues, especially bugs. When a fellow player tweeted to XDefiant Executive Producer Mark Rubin that the game might have been rushed, the developer replied with a lengthy explanation that the engine (Ubisoft Massive’s Snowdrop) wasn’t envisioned for that genre and, therefore, still needs a lot of improvement.
Rushed out? No. What we have is an engine that has only ever been an MMO. And so all of the infrastructure for an FPS has had to be built up from the ground floor. Even Call of Duty started on ID tech, which was a shooter engine. Apex Legends started on a shooter engine. But for us, we are working on developing all new tech in an engine that was designed for something else. That being said, the engine is really great, but it does require a lot of work, and with that work comes a lot of bugs that other engines have already worked out. We’re not a shooter that’s been out for 20 years. If you like what we are trying to do, stick around, and you’ll see things improve and new features get added. But if the game isn’t for you, that’s ok; you can move on.
It’s not that it’s outdated. It’s more just that it wasn’t made to do first-person shooters, so there is a lot to do and to improve.
Indeed, Snowdrop was devised for Tom Clancy’s The Division. Later, its incredible potential convinced Ubisoft to use it in many other games, such as Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and its sequel, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, and The Settlers: New Allies, among others. XDefiant is not the first game powered by Snowdrop to launch, as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launched in December 2023. However, that game was a single player title with optional co-op, whereas a competitive multiplayer shooter has far different needs.
How long will Ubisoft San Francisco need to iron out Snowdrop’s kinks remains to be seen. Meanwhile, XDefiant launched Season 1 earlier this week, launching the GS Kommando faction from Rainbow Six, three new maps (Clubhouse, Daytona, Rockefeller), three new weapons available through the free Battle Pass tier, two new modes (Capture the Flag and Bomb, the latter of which is coming later in the season), and Ranked Play.
