Tom Clancys XDefiant
Yesterday evening Ubisoft announced the arena shooter Tom Clancy's XDefiant for PC and consoles. The focus here is on matches between two teams with six participants each. After the first trailer including a few bits of information, there are now some more details about the action game.As can be read on the official website, Tom Clancy's XDefiant will have a variety of multiplayer modes to offer. In addition to the classic team death match, variants such as escort, arena and domination are also firmly planned - possibly even more. Furthermore, Ubisoft has revealed that in addition to your primary weapon, secondary guns and various gadgets are available to you with which you can go into battle. You can even customize the primary weapon to a certain extent and thus adapt it to your personal taste. In addition, Tom Clancy's XDefiant will offer a cross-play function at launch, with the help of which it will be possible to play games with players from different platforms. However, it is not yet clear whether there will also be a cross-save feature.
Ubisoft did not want to comment on the number of maps available at the launch of Tom Clancy's XDefiant. However, the publisher speaks of a "large pool of uniquely created maps in a rotation". Accordingly, there should be no lack of variety in this regard. Ubisoft did not mention a specific release date, the first test phases should already start in August - more are already firmly planned.
Source: Ubisoft
Who Is Tom Clancy’s XDefiant For, Exactly?
XDefiant
UbisoftYesterday, Ubisoft announced the arrival of Tom Clancy’s XDefiant, a free-to-play competitive shooter loosely set in the Tom Clancy universe, led by former Call of Duty developer Mark Rubin. And it very much looks like Call of Duty from the early preview footage.
Other than the origin of its confusingly bizarre name, the main question I came away with after this presentation and the post-reveal interviews was…who is this game for, exactly?
The Ubisoft answer would be “people who just want to chill and have fun with their friends!” but I’m talking more in terms of the actual audience for a game like this, at this point in the existence of the genre. I’m not saying there isn’t one, but digging through the potentials here, it’s a little hard to parse what Ubisoft is targeting here.
First of all, the game has been mocked for its Tom Clancy branding, given that what was once associated with militaristic realism is now “edgy” in this format, skewing closer to the punk aesthetic of the last few Watch Dogs games. But past the vibe, the games this game has drawn on for factions have little to do with this new format. Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell and The Division are mostly, if not often exclusively, third person shooters where PvP, if it exists at all, is a minimal component. So it stands to reason that just because you’re a fan of those games, converting the names and factions from those into a Call of Duty FPS may not necessarily be your thing. And The Division already has a separate spin-off f2p game coming with Heartlands, its own take on battle royale.
XDefiant
UbisoftIf anything, this seems like it could cannibalize a bit from Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft’s much-vaunted tactical multiplayer shooter, although with 6v6 fast firing/respawn format, the two games are kind of miles apart in terms of how they’ll play.
Rather, I think the main goal for this game is to beat Call of Duty to the punch in one specific aspect, that this will be a free to play offering for modes like Team Deathmatch or Domination, something Call of Duty has not pulled the trigger on yet. Warzone, its battle royale is free, and yet to play Call of Duty multiplayer you do in fact have to buy the game every year. It has not gone free to play as a whole, which makes sense considering the massive sales it continues to generate every year.
There are also aspects of XDefiant that are clearly competing with Overwatch, given its role system and some linear maps, and that game too is not free to play yet, albeit it’s cheaper than most others. As a new IP, Ubisoft has less to lose by debuting XDefiant as f2p, and if can have Mark Rubin create a game that feels enough like Call of Duty to be a welcome free alternative to it, well, there you go.
But while I understand this positioning, it still seems…risky to me. Call of Duty loyalists are just that, loyalists, and it’s hard to see them switching over to this, or really, it even being on their radar, despite the similarities. And Ubisoft’s existing Tom Clancy universe players are being expected to play a type of shooter that is dramatically different than the mostly third person, mostly PvE games they’ve had in the past. For me personally, I may have actually jumped at say, a new PvE open world Division game that played like Call of Duty, but a competitive shooter? Not so much, that’s not what I’m into, and why I played that series. You can carryover two factions from The Division but it’s the gameplay and concept that’s either going to interest me or not, not the IP alone. Guessing you can say the same for Ghost Recon or Splinter Cells fans.
We’ll see how it goes. Ubisoft seems to be treating this as a long term experiment, though we all remember HyperScape. Or rather, many of us may have forgotten about it, Ubisoft’s brief foray into an original battle royale IP that vanished shortly after release. They seem more committed to XDefiant, and we’ll know more when the early test hits in August.
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