It doesn’t matter what FPS you boot up, there’s always a pesky sniper player waiting to beam you, and XDefiant has plenty of those right now. Ubisoft’s free-to-play shooter is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with, thanks to snappy movement and punchy weapons dominating the battlefield. The latest XDefiant update tackles the latter, though, as it stops sniper players dead in their tracks with a major tweak to flinching.
We’ve been sinking plenty of hours into XDefiant recently, especially after that gnarly Season 1 trailer debuted at Ubisoft Forward, which included our first look at the GSK faction from Rainbow Six Siege. But before that XDefiant class debuts, Ubisoft’s latest patch notes for the FPS game reveal that the studio has “revamped how snipers flinch when they’re tagged by enemy fire.” Now, when you’re deep in the heat of battle with your best XDefiant loadouts, you’ll experience “flinch” that will persist through “multiple hits” from enemy players.
This should put a stop to sniper users absolutely deleting you from the arena, as their accuracy won’t be pitch-perfect during incoming hails of gunfire. Furthermore, Ubisoft is adding extra precautions to combat sniper users, especially while moving across any of the XDefiant maps. The developer clarifies across multiplayer game modes that it is implementing “various fine-tuning for long-distance shooting, including slightly reduced walking speed when holding your breath while wielding scoped weapons.” Ubisoft is aiming to add a touch of realism, with the latter design choice, as it adds that it “makes sense when you think about it.”
It might be disheartening to hear if you’re a sniper connoisseur in XDefiant, but we have no doubt that you’ll come back into the arena stronger than ever after our assessment of the current XDefiant meta. However, we will warn you that Ubisoft is also penalizing players who like to abuse high-octane movement exploits. “[We’ve] added aiming penalties for players who go to town on the jump/crouch buttons, aka the nuanced tactic of jump spamming, aka the maddening exploit of jump spamming,” Ubisoft says in the latest XDefiant patch notes.
Sorry, but you’ll just have to settle your beef with other PS5 and Xbox players the old-fashioned way. Elsewhere in the game’s new update, Ubisoft is also adding the following tweaks:
- Fixed an Xbox-specific issue where the Xbox button broke on the in-game Social menu after inviting a player from said console
- Tweaked the way ping is calculated in matchmaking so you’ll have access to a wider group of players who share your ping characteristics
- Players were unable to join a nearly full game in progress despite being invited by someone already in the game, but good news: Now they can
- Fixed an issue where players could join a game in progress that didn’t fit their meticulously customized controller and matchmaking settings
- Libertad’s medical skills were so potent, they were soaking up bandwidth. That’s been fixed (the bandwidth issue, not the healing potency, which remains untouched)
- Added additional fixes so that Echelon players turn invisible only when using the Digital Ghillie Suit rather than for their entire lives
- Corrected how feats of Libertad battlefield medicine are highlighted at the end of each round for well-deserved peer-group recognition
- The camera used to shake when nearby explosives exploded whether the explosion caused player damage or not, but now the camera shakes only when the exploding explosive causes damage
- Fixed an issue preventing players from deploying abilities and devices after changing control input
- The Buzzkill Achievement wasn’t unlocking but now it unlocks according to plan
- Cosmetic items were displayed as available in some places but not in the place where you could actually get them. That’s fixed now
In other gaming news, Black Ops 6 will be the first Call of Duty game on consoles to require a persistent internet connection, and Xbox allegedly had way more new Xbox games to show at the recent Xbox Games Showcase.