Despite having a name that sounds like my 13-year-old neighbour's gamertag, XDefiant doesn’t look all that bad. In an era where 90 percent of military FPS look damn near identical to one another, seeing this colourful take on an urban arena was admittedly a little surprising.
Paired with mobility that looks like what you’d expect from a Respawn game, XDefiant could be really good – this isn’t just some arbitrarily mean-spirited piece judging a game based on a two-minute trailer we saw. What I’m wondering is this: who on Earth does Ubi think is currently in the market for yet another free-to-play live-service hero shooter? You do know that other types of games exist, right? Have you forgotten about Hyper Scape already? I know everybody else has, but surely Ubisoft remembers, right?
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I’m predominantly an RPG and shooter guy, so I’m pretty well acquainted with Ubisoft titles. I love Assassin’s Creed – I actually think Assassin’s Creed Infinity could be the perfect evolution of Valhalla – and I really miss Splinter Cell, which has once again been doomed to a boring cosmetic crossover as opposed to earning the right to a new game. I wonder what it is that makes Ubisoft think there aren’t millions of people unanimously bellowing about how we need another Sam Fisher game. ‘You like Sam Fisher? Well we put Sam Fisher in Ghost Recon so you have Sam Fisher but not in the game you like him in.’ I know that meme format is messed up, I don’t have time to fix it.
I’ve got hundreds of hours in Overwatch, if not over 1,000. I played a decent bit of Valorant before falling off it. I’ve flocked to CS:GO for short stints, as well as Apex Legends, various Call of Duty games, some Battlefield, Star Wars: Battlefront, Titanfall… you get the gist. I’ve been around the block multiple times and am 100 percent part of the target demographic for both single-player and online FPS. I just can’t see what’s different about this one – what’s new, or innovative, or designed as a specific and enticing USP. It mostly looks like a couple of other successful games mashed into one, which absolutely isn’t a model that should be adopted with either commercial success or critical acclaim in mind. And again, it’s called XDefiant. Imagine Tom Clancy actually saying those words, with extra emphasis on the spray-painted ‘xD.’ Eugh *shivers*.
I’d really like for XDefiant to be good. Last year I wrote about how Titanfall 2 changed how FPS approach mobility forever, so anything that allows me to slide and slug at the same time is pretty exciting. And again, at least this game is investing in colour and a cityscape as opposed to fifty shades of lurid beige. Beige should never be lurid. That is the colour of a person’s insides when they become outside after a bout of particularly unpleasant indigestion. Eugh *shivers again*.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the people making the big bucks at a multi-billion dollar corporation know more about money than me, actually, and I’m just making an arse of myself like an uneducated twat. But really, in my eyes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate one shootybang game from another shootybang game. I could pick out a screenshot from Doom Eternal, Metro 2033, Titanfall 2, or Halo: Combat Evolved in a heartbeat. All of those games have spectacularly distinct art styles and a commitment to uniqueness that stands in stark contrast to homogeneity.
But the other ones, where you play as super army soldiers who all look vaguely similar to one another and run around uncanny little playgrounds kitted out with monochrome walls… I’m just not sure. A lot of talent is required to make these games. The people working on them are geniuses, technical whizzes, inspired artists, imaginative writers, brilliant programmers, and high-quality quality assurers. But what if they didn’t work on something that looks a lot like a lot of what we’ve been getting over the last ten years?
Again, I don’t really know. I’m not an exec tasked with deciding the kind of model a team of devs should adhere to. It just makes me wonder, is all. When I look at Arkane, a studio traditionally associated with immersive sims like Dishonored and Prey, and see that it’s switching things up by making a co-op multiplayer FPS with Redfall, I don’t think, ‘Oooh, that’s Microsoft pigeonholing one of my favourite developers into what it thinks will make the most money.’ It’s different, but it still looks like an Arkane game and nothing else besides. I’m not arguing against multiplayer experiences or devaluing the big-budget FPS – hell, Doom Eternal was in my top three games of 2020. All I’m saying is that the announcement of XDefiant shocked me because I can’t see how it can fit into an incredibly saturated market without, like, subverting it, or exploiting a gap, or at the very least establishing a point of clear difference that separates it from the rest of the competition. I really hope it’s good – I’m just not convinced it can be.
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