Ubisoft’s XDefiant has been a highly anticipated first-person shooter over the last year with many players expecting to get their hands fully on the game soon. During the recent Ubisoft Forward presentation hosted in June, it was revealed that XDefiant was going to be released in Summer 2023.
Today, Executive Producer at Ubisoft San Francisco, Mark Rubin shared an update as to why we haven’t seen news regarding the free-to-play shooter’s release date. Just like every game it had to be put through submission which is part of development where they give the game to 1st parties like Sony and Microsoft to check that the game works correctly in their environments. Rubin then talks about the other parts of the process like their own QA/Compliance teams testing before it even gets to that point.
First parties take about a week to their final report on the submission and that is when Ubisoft would find out if they got a Pass or Not Pass along with a list of fixes for the next stage. After they would get a Pass from all 1st parties they are then ready to ship and would need 1-2 weeks before release depending on when they received the Pass.
XDefiant did not pass the submission process and the process began in late July and they received the first results back by mid-August. Mark Rubin talks about how they would’ve released the game by the end of August if it did Pass. The last month has been about fixing those issues at Ubisoft San Francisco and preparing for another submission.
Ubisoft is hoping to have the game released by mid-to-end September, but there is a likely scenario they get a conditional Pass meaning they’d have to do a Day 1 patch.
Mark Rubin talked about how they want to be more transparent with the XDefiant Community:
“To conclude, we set out since the concept of this game to be more transparent with our community and to listen to our players and act on their feedback. We’ve even shown that we will add features in the middle of development based on player requests. Map Voting which is in now and an S&D-like mode that is coming later are two examples of this. We want this to be your game!”
XDefiant will come to Xbox Series XlS, PC, and PlayStation 5.
Are you excited for XDefiant?
Source: Ubisoft
