XDefiant
Well, Ubisoft, good start, and we are looking forward to Ukrainian in future Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games.
Ubisoft seems to be slowly approaching the release of XDefiant, the long-suffering free-to-play arcade shooter with 6v6 combat. Yesterday, the developers announced a technical stress test to check the servers’ readiness for the full release. At the same time, the game was launched for pre-loading on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, and the main news was revealed — the game will have an official (text) Ukrainian localization right out of the box. And this is the first such Ubisoft game that we can recall, has two large offices in Ukraine (Kyiv and Odesa).
The test will take place from April 19 to 21 — everyone can sign up for the test at this link. During the stress test, you can get several rewards for completing tasks — exclusive weapon skins and XP boosters that increase the experience you gain to unlock various weapon upgrades. In particular, there are three rewards: MP5 Shamrock skin (just for starting the game), M9 Ember skin (team game) and XP booster (x3) for weapons (for reaching level 18). All items will be available on the day of the shooter’s release.
As for XDefiant, it is a dynamic arcade shooter featuring characters from Ubisoft franchises — a total of five factionswhich will include, among others, hackers from Watch Dogs and former special forces from Ghost Recon. Factions can be changed during the match, as well as the set of weapons. At the release of the game will have 14 different cards, and then with the development of the project New locations, factions, weapons, and modes will be added.
XDefiant still doesn’t have a release date — Ubisoft has set an internal timeframe several times, but it’s been pushed back each time, most recently to the end of February 2024. In late March, Tom Henderson released an investigation into the terrible working atmosphere inside Ubisoft — employees anonymously spoke about the toxic atmosphere, the privileged ‘The Boys Club’ («The Boys Club»), which included both men and women, the depressingly sad situation with the network code, and the desire of top management to copy Call of Duty. After that, Ubisoft, according to Henderson, organized a wave of strikes against bloggers who covered the situation on YouTube. At the same time, XDefiant executive producer Mark Rubin responded to the investigation saidthat no one was going to copy Call of Duty, and the shooter was postponed for one reason — serious technical problems in the network code and social systems.
Ubisoft is still in a deep creative crisis — Tom Henderson previously in another in-depth investigation said about the serious internal problems of the sixth largest game development company in the world by number of employees. If you’re interested, the crisis started earlier and hasn’t gotten any better since — Here is the story.
Nevertheless, Ukrainians should definitely pay attention to XDefiant, as it directly affects the prospects of Ukrainian localization in future Ubisoft games.