It's been a long road for Ubisoft's XDefiant development team, but it looks like they can finally see the light at the end of their very long tunnel. Today, the publisher announced that the free-to-play shooter will finally get its public, non-beta, launch on May 21 for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC platforms.
The game was first announced in July 2021 as Tom Clancy's XDefiant, with the theme of mashing up characters and settings from Ubisoft's various Tom Clancy games in a hero shooter. In 2022, the company removed the Tom Clancy name from the game, as it decided to expand the scope of XDefiant. to include content from other Ubisoft franchises,
In the summer of 2023, the game was set to be officially launched, but Ubisoft then revealed XDefiant had failed to pass the certification tests for Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation platforms. In October 2023, the development team put the release of the game on hold indefinitely due to issues discovered in a public playtest session.
Now it looks like all of those problems have been solved, and XDefiant will launch its first six-week "preseason" event on May 21. The blog post about the release date reveal stated:
The action kicks off by offering five different game modes across 14 maps, 24 weapons with 44 attachments, and five playable factions inspired by Ubisoft franchises, each of which brings unique gameplay buffs and abilities to the fighting arena
The game's official website also has info on the first-year roadmap for the game, which will be divided into four seasons. Each season will include a new faction, three new weapons, and three new maps. Additional features that will be added to XDefiant will include new gameplay modes, a ranked mode, support for private matches, and features to introduce the game to new players like practice modes and more.
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