Ubisoft has done it again.
I grew up loving Ubisoft titles. As it stands, Ubisoft hasn't made a decent title since Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. While my faith in XDefiant was already minimal, I felt compelled to touch it as it pays some form of homage to Watch Dogs 2, Ghost Recon: Phantoms, and Splinter Cell, which I all enjoyed when they were relevant.
As it stands, XDefiant is the safest, uninspired, and most unimaginative piece of shit Ubisoft has ever pushed out to date. It runs like ass, looks like ass, and feels identical to Ghost Recon: Phantoms, a game that was fine on its own until Ubisoft decided to take it out back and shoot it to seemingly replace it with this slop.
The faction system is just a hero system. The three characters per faction introduce no gameplay differences outside of appearance and voice lines, seemingly to just pull more money out of your wallet should you be dumb enough. The abilities given to each faction are bland enough that Ubisoft should have been able to come up with character specific abilities. They can all be defined with a noun, and that alone should make it easy enough to create unique abilities. Fire, healing, stealth, hacking, and shields sum up each faction, and what Ubisoft does with these nouns is impressively unimaginative. For instance, the Fire Clan gets to summon fire at their feet or 3 feet in front of them. Nothing more is done with this and likely nothing more will be in the future.
Everything about this game feels identical to COD and Battlefield. The progression system is equally ass, the weapons control the same, the movement is almost the same, there is nothing in this game that would make anyone else who plays modern FPS to come to XDefiant. There is no other way to describe it because nothing about this game is original in the slightest. If you've played Warzone you've played XDefiant. They are fundamentally the same. Everything else is unbelievably bland. This game lacks its own visual style outside of "ESPORTS" and has its own shitty UI to top it off.
What Ubisoft wants is a dumping grounds to put each of their misused IP's to work, just to say they're doing something. Clearly Siege players got fed up with being fed repurposed slop from old titles, or Ubi couldn't create a kosher solution to adding DedSec or Abstergo to R6. XDefiant's sole existence is very clearly to do this. To siphon money from fans who have been patiently waiting for a new Splinter Cell title. Those who have been waiting for a new Ghost Recon. Everything about this game screams live service slop.
What Ubisoft needed to do was to do something bold. While siphoning tons of resources into rereleasing a worse version of a game you shut down a while ago is certainly bold, every move XDefiant makes is just safe. It's the same shit the rest of the industry is doing. If Ubisoft wants to get back into the market, to make something worth playing, XDefiant needed to do something new and creative, to push the limit of this genre. But they don't. All this game strives to do is cost Ubisoft more money they cannot make.
Within a year this game is going offline. There is nothing special that this game offers to survive the current live service climate, especially not with a Treyarch Call of Duty around the corner.
I grew up loving Ubisoft titles. As it stands, Ubisoft hasn't made a decent title since Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. While my faith in XDefiant was already minimal, I felt compelled to touch it as it pays some form of homage to Watch Dogs 2, Ghost Recon: Phantoms, and Splinter Cell, which I all enjoyed when they were relevant.
As it stands, XDefiant is the safest, uninspired, and most unimaginative piece of shit Ubisoft has ever pushed out to date. It runs like ass, looks like ass, and feels identical to Ghost Recon: Phantoms, a game that was fine on its own until Ubisoft decided to take it out back and shoot it to seemingly replace it with this slop.
The faction system is just a hero system. The three characters per faction introduce no gameplay differences outside of appearance and voice lines, seemingly to just pull more money out of your wallet should you be dumb enough. The abilities given to each faction are bland enough that Ubisoft should have been able to come up with character specific abilities. They can all be defined with a noun, and that alone should make it easy enough to create unique abilities. Fire, healing, stealth, hacking, and shields sum up each faction, and what Ubisoft does with these nouns is impressively unimaginative. For instance, the Fire Clan gets to summon fire at their feet or 3 feet in front of them. Nothing more is done with this and likely nothing more will be in the future.
Everything about this game feels identical to COD and Battlefield. The progression system is equally ass, the weapons control the same, the movement is almost the same, there is nothing in this game that would make anyone else who plays modern FPS to come to XDefiant. There is no other way to describe it because nothing about this game is original in the slightest. If you've played Warzone you've played XDefiant. They are fundamentally the same. Everything else is unbelievably bland. This game lacks its own visual style outside of "ESPORTS" and has its own shitty UI to top it off.
What Ubisoft wants is a dumping grounds to put each of their misused IP's to work, just to say they're doing something. Clearly Siege players got fed up with being fed repurposed slop from old titles, or Ubi couldn't create a kosher solution to adding DedSec or Abstergo to R6. XDefiant's sole existence is very clearly to do this. To siphon money from fans who have been patiently waiting for a new Splinter Cell title. Those who have been waiting for a new Ghost Recon. Everything about this game screams live service slop.
What Ubisoft needed to do was to do something bold. While siphoning tons of resources into rereleasing a worse version of a game you shut down a while ago is certainly bold, every move XDefiant makes is just safe. It's the same shit the rest of the industry is doing. If Ubisoft wants to get back into the market, to make something worth playing, XDefiant needed to do something new and creative, to push the limit of this genre. But they don't. All this game strives to do is cost Ubisoft more money they cannot make.
Within a year this game is going offline. There is nothing special that this game offers to survive the current live service climate, especially not with a Treyarch Call of Duty around the corner.
3 Comments
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@Q___ Was Syndicate before WD2? I can’t remember exactly, but to me it was the last Ubisoft game I played I liked. It’s not that they haven’t had a few decent titles, I’ve heard Mirage is fine and I personally just didn’t like Origins, but most of their catalogue since around that time to me has been pretty bad. The point is that Ubisoft is nowhere near outputting at the quality they used to.
I don't disagree at all with that main point and obviously every opinion is different with the specific games. I just feel like with with developers/publishers we currently don't like or are in a slump, gamers are getting more and more revisionist history with their past libraries where people are saying like for example oh Bethesda hasn't made a good game since like Oblivion when everyone loved Fallout 3 and Skyrim at the time. Again every personal opinion will differ I just feel like I see that as a growing trend.
Q___
28 days ago