Hey everyone, Bit here. The FPS to revitalize the FPS scene is no more.

XDefiant? What?

If you don’t know what XDefiant is, either you don’t like first-person shooters or the only FPS you care about is Call of Duty. XDefiant is basically the only game in recent times to try to come after Call of Duty’s position, offering the same 6v6 multiplayer that CoD has, while being designed to put the community first and be brutally honest. It’s published by Ubisoft and developed by their San Francisco team. The executive producer, Mark Rubin, was known for working on older Call of Duty games with Infinity Ward.

It’s community-first: Mark Rubin himself and the other developers have openly communicated with players. This is unheard of in AAA studios.
It’s brutally honest: No skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) and definitely no engagement-optimized matchmaking (EOMM). Being like this is meant to help players get better, instead of protecting them.

Activision is pushing predatory monetization and engagement optimization algorithms further, instead of trying to breed an experience that challenges new players and keeps veterans returning. Activision has taken the fun out of FPS with their protected brackets and lack of action against cheaters. XDefiant was the solution. But now it’s dead.

UPDATE: My petition is closed.

I suggest you sign NyteFalll’s petition instead. https://change.org/p/save-xdefiant

If you want to see what I originally wrote, open the dropdown.

See old content

I’m on Change.org

I have launched a compaign on Change.org for the goal in the title. If you want to support it, find it here.

Why Change.org? Isn’t it only for political petitioning?

Video game-related campaigns have happened on Change.org before. There was one launched by fortheusers.org about the web browser built into the Nintendo Switch, usually used for making social posts or connecting to WiFi networks with captive portals (usually public networks). See that campaign here.

I even tagged the campaign on Change.org with “Stop Killing Games” because I think that this campaign’s goal aligns with that initiative. (In fact, Stop Killing Games is related to The Crew, another Ubisoft title)

Why do I think that private servers are a good idea for XDefiant?

Because it worked for another game, even though the two are different because of their publishers. An indie studio called Velan Studios developed an odd mashup of dodgeball and third-person shooter called Knockout City. The game did well for the studio and they’re now releasing more projects. Velan decided to shut down KO City’s live servers in order to focus on other projects, but they didn’t leave the game’s community in the dust. They made it where you could play the game using community-run servers or over LAN. There’s even a community made launcher for the game to help manage servers. (If you want to try Knockout City, go to kocity.xyz to get the community launcher.)

A move like what I’m suggesting would be unprecedented for a game published by an AAA publisher like Ubisoft. However, Ubisoft has given the team behind XDefiant such a great degree of freedom that I don’t think the idea is impossible. It might be hard, but if Mark sees the campaign he may be able to work it out.

A video

If you wanted to see this video where I rambled for 15 minutes before deciding a blog post would be better, here it is.

In conclusion

It’s sad to see this one gem in the FPS space go. It was a good try. Mark Rubin, if you see this, I appreciate the effort. You could have turned the industry around. I hope more developers try to gun for Call of Duty’s position in the future.

Best regards, LittleBit