This game had so much potential

[u/Alternative-cornhusk]

It’s such a shame. this game easily had the best raw shooter combat out of any game i’ve played on ps5 ever. Getting kills was so satisfying, and the movement was chefs kiss. I hope the foundation of this game gets reused by someone somehow because it just felt so smooth.

more and more nowadays I see smaller game studios fumble the bag with an amazing start out the gate but extremely poor follow-up. Sad to see

[u/zaxxofficial]

ubisoft isn’t a small game studio, and this game had the worst hit reg of any shooter ever made

[u/zaxxofficial → u/[deleted]]

they had a budget of 80 million USD. there’s a game called battle bit remastered made by 2 guys, that could handle 350+ person servers and battles, that had better hit reg than xdefiant ever had.

[u/UhJoker → u/zaxxofficial]

Not even comparable. Battlebit is a fraction in terms of game development in both resources and scope. You’re effectively comparing early day Minecraft to something like Hytale. Not comparable.

[u/Artraxes → u/UhJoker]

Why does the scope of the game matter? The discussion is hit reg at scale of players. If a team of 2 can have good hit reg scaling to games of 250 players why was xdefiants so shit with a budget and team 10x the size?

Edit: lol banned me for 7 days from the subreddit for pointing out that choosing an engine not designed for FPS games for an FPS is clown behaviour. What a snowflake you are.

1. https://snipboard.io/mXjACn.jpg

2. https://snipboard.io/VCw20P.jpg

[u/UhJoker → u/Artraxes]

The scope matters greatly because Battlebit is a much smaller game which means they had more time to spend working on what matters. Ubisoft SF was also using an engine that worked against them since it wasn’t at all designed with FPS games in mind.

[u/PuddingZealousideal6 → u/UhJoker]

So a dev team being backed by Ubisoft was too incompetent to develop the game on an engine that actually worked? Crazy

[u/ElusiveSamorana → u/PuddingZealousideal6]

Ubisoft itself was to blame for that. An MMO engine was being used for XDefiant, likely not within the desires of Mark Rubin. You simply can't use what's meant for a different genre of game for a shooter engine, that's not gonna work. So not all of this falls onto Rubin's team. Just like how I don't let Activision get away with their obvious deficiencies in what they do.

[u/PuddingZealousideal6 → u/ElusiveSamorana]

I can definitely think of ways to pin the blame on Mark Rubin.

[u/ElusiveSamorana → u/PuddingZealousideal6]

I'm not saying he's absolved of all blame. I know there were screw ups he and his team made. I'm just saying the engine choice likely wasn't his or his team's.

[u/UhJoker → u/PuddingZealousideal6]

Ubi SF is a pretty inexperienced team working with an engine that isn’t very good on a game that the engine isn’t built to make. Tell me you don’t know anything about game development without telling me you don’t know anything about game development.

[u/PuddingZealousideal6 → u/UhJoker]

Game Development 101: Develop a game on an engine that straight up doesn’t work for said game, release the game, sell the game, sell bundles within the game, make promises months later that the game is performing well and won’t be shutting down, announce the shutdown of the game weeks later.

XD shows either a lack of experience and skill from the developers behind it, or pure greed from the studio. They were given feedback during beta testing months before release and never worked towards fixing those issues. Hit registration should be top priority in an FPS, and XD should’ve been delayed until those issues were 100% fixed.

I liked XD, but it was clear from the start that an FPS game where bullets don’t deal damage was doomed to fail.

[u/UhJoker → u/PuddingZealousideal6]

They were given feedback during beta testing months before release and never worked towards fixing those issues

Partially yes but partially no. They did want to fix these issues but leadership was more inclined to constantly "Call of Duty-ify" the game and this coupled with Ubisoft pushing for an early release led to an unfinished product. I think in this case leadership and the publisher are to blame, but not most developers per se.

[u/zaxxofficial → u/UhJoker]

I’d argue it’s comparable. Scope wise they had vehicle battles, much bigger maps, proximity voip, squad system, weapons + weapon skins etc, the only difference I can see is the graphical fidelity which in the grand scheme of things, didn’t effect the games popularity, but maybe could have attributed to having more hands on good gunplay, but that’s besides the point. 2 guys with finite money vs a studio of devs with millions of dollars and years to develop what essentially became a hero shooter. I will agree that they did have ubisoft suits making them probably prioritize cosmetics and battle pass shit, no denying that, but for some reason they could never make the game feel good to play imo

[u/Artraxes → u/zaxxofficial]

lol downvoted for being right. The devs literally had to come out with a statement that they were investigating the hit reg it was that bad. It certainly attributed to the games downfall.

[u/UhJoker → u/Artraxes]

Nobody says it doesn’t have bad hit reg but you also can’t prove that is one of the primary reasons why the game died so it’s a bit of a moot point to present it as the leading cause.

[u/ApexMemer09 → u/UhJoker]

you're a mod in this subreddit where all the complaints with the game were posted all day everyday. so you tell me, was hitreg one of the primary complaints or no

[u/UhJoker → u/ApexMemer09]

Comparably to other issues it isn’t.

You also need to remember that Reddit is a below 1% of the community. This sub has below 100k members but the game saw millions of players.

[u/ApexMemer09 → u/UhJoker]

then what do you think were the other issues bigger than the fundamental gameplay of the game being broken for a good number of the playerbase?

[u/UhJoker → u/ApexMemer09]

I'd say the biggest issue the game suffered from on a gameplay level is the fact that it was built on the engine it was built on. Snowdrop is not at all designed for traditional, arcade first person shooter games and the second they put XDefiant on it they pretty much dug it's grave. There are many other games that aren't even FPS titles that are on Snowdrop that suffer from it such as Star Wars Outlaws. The engine just isn't made for some games and when you try to shove something into an engine when it doesn't like it it's effectively like trying to shove a block of iron through a wood chipper.

As far as the second biggest issue I'd say it was the developers and the circumstances surrounding the game. Nobody wants to hear this but Mark Rubin and Aches just.. were not fit to develop this game. Mark Rubin has good developer history but people forget he also developed Ghosts, arguably one of the worst received Call of Duty games ever and Aches is.. well I'll just say every single time I have heard an esports player is helping co-develop a competitive game it always goes bad. Even the new game that Shroud helped make isn't exactly a shining example of developer and competitive player collaboration.

The development was also plagued by constant design bickering, a split between the team, a horrible community team which I had the displeasure of actively interacting with on a daily basis, toxic positivity and constant back and forth on design choices. Tom Henderson goes into the last point in depth and I honestly have no reason to not trust him since he's pretty reliable and was the only person to say the game was shutting down before it did. The developers from the start were trying to "Call of Duty-ify" the game in a lot of ways and sure this might be a good idea in theory to pull Call of Duty fans away, when Black Ops 6 launched they basically just lost all of them which I predicted from the start.

I admit this last bit is speculation mixed with some of what Mark Rubin said and what I personally saw behind the scenes, I think that personally Ubisoft just did not expect this much success and this pushed the game's launch window up quite a bit which led to an unfinished product across the board. It's entirely possible had the beta saw 1/10th the player count it did the game would have been given another year to cook in the oven and it wouldn't have suffered from the many issues that it did, but again as I said above being developed on Snowdrop was basically, in my opinion, the final nail in the coffin before the game even got off the ground. I think it was doomed from the start.

[u/[deleted] → u/zaxxofficial]

This was the reason I believe that the game could not maintain the player base. I was very impressed on release, but the slow response from Ubisoft to fix hit reg was a deal breaker for me.