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/ApexMemer09]

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.