After years of marketing, delays, betas, and name changes, XDefiant from Ubisoft is finally here and…things aren’t going very well. Players are currently unable to find matches as the game’s servers can’t seem to cope with the large influx of people.
XDefiant—out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC—is Ubisoft’s big-budget free-to-play Call of Duty-like first-person online shooter. The FPS has had a long road to release. It was first announced back in July 2021 as Tom Clancy’s XDefiant, but in March 2022 the game dropped the “Tom Clancy” bit and expanded to include characters and locations from various Ubisoft-owned franchises, like Far Cry and Watch Dogs. In 2023, it got its first big open-beta playtest and I enjoyed its fast-paced, Black Ops II-like gameplay. Later that year, it was delayed twice. But now, after all that, XDefiant is out. Good luck playing it, though.
Poking around online, XDefiant isn’t completely broken. I’ve found streams online of people playing it. However, in my testing on Xbox, I was unable to join a match and was stuck in a lobby waiting for something to happen. And even players who do get into matches have reported long waits to get into another.
At 1:30 pm EST, the official XDefiant Twitter account posted that it was aware that “some players are unable to join a game” and asked folks to wait as the devs looked into the situation.
At 2:55 pm EST, the account offered an update, saying that things were improving but that it was continuing to work on making sure everyone could get in and play the FPS.
Then at 3:50 pm EST, in response to players complaining about the lack of updates and continued matchmaking issues, Ubisoft posted on Twitter:
Update: We are all focused on the matchmaking issue and are continuously investigating. We will continue to provide updates as possible.
As of about an hour later, that’s the last update from the main XDefiant account on Twitter. Players are frustrated, as you might expect. But, really, in the year of our lord 2024, I’m not sure how anyone could be surprised that a large-scale online multiplatform video game is having issues at launch. Still, hopefully, Ubisoft is able to get the game up and running without resorting to making developers and engineers stay late into the night.
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