XDefiant showed plenty of promise during its various betas last year, but the wait for Ubisoft’s free-to-play FPS to release has been excruciating. Rumors about the game’s state have been growing over the last few months, with Ubisoft reportedly missing multiple XDefiant release date goals. Now, executive producer Mark Rubin sets the record straight after a report from Insider Gaming, while debunking rumors that Ubisoft is trying to replicate Call of Duty‘s success.
The report purports that the FPS game is falling behind due to Ubisoft’s goal to chase trends – specifically keeping up with the Call of Duty franchise. Sources close to Insider Gaming reportedly say that XDefiant‘s “neverending hunt to chase COD and add pointless stuff always breaks the current build.” Furthermore, Insider Gaming’s report suggests that the transparent nature of Ubisoft’s developers like executive producer Mark Rubin isn’t as honest as it seems.
Responding to rumors about the forthcoming multiplayer game, Rubin says the development team “had major technical issues that we found right before we launched that had to be fixed […] they are not just minor bug fixes but major infrastructure and full system overhauls.” Work on the game’s technical aspects has been a point of contention for months, acting as the game’s major stumbling block to release.
Despite these obstacles, Rubin expresses that XDefiant “remains the same [game] that you played already, which we have strived to make as fun as possible which we feel confident about.”
Regarding its comparisons to shooters like Modern Warfare 3, he adds that Ubisoft is “aiming at a different time in FPS history, i.e. older CODs. So are we ‘chasing’ older CoDs ? To some degree, but we don’t want to be like what the newer CODs are like.”
It isn’t the first time Call of Duty games have been linked to XDefiant. We spoke to Rubin last year about these comparisons, and how the FPS isn’t aiming to be a ‘Call of Duty killer’. Yet, the matter of the XDefiant release date remains unresolved. However, it sounds like players will hopefully get an answer in the coming weeks, as Rubin teases another update on the new PS5 game and new Xbox game.
“We have an update coming soon (probably this coming week) […] I know people just want to see the game ship and so do we.”
