It’s the last month of the year, and it looks like XDefiant won’t be out in 2023. In the latest development update for the upcoming free-to-play game, the devs shared what they’re working on, though they refrained from providing a release date or even release window.
Over on Twitter (X), Executive Producer Mark Rubin shared the following message:
Hello All!
I just wanted to share another update on the progress we’ve been making with XDefiant to get the game ready to go live. I know people were excited to play after the last test and so I know it’s tough having to wait. But we thank you all for hanging in there with us. We are just as eager to get the game in the hands of players as you are. We truly can’t wait to get the game live so we can shift focus to all of the really cool content we have coming in our upcoming Seasons!
The Quick Update – Ok, so the quick version of the update! We are progressing really well on the changes we’ve outlined in previous posts. We will be spending the rest of this year finishing up our work on the new Party System, the new netcode changes and switching all of our servers over to Linux. When we are back from the holidays, we will be testing for submission, fixing any last-minute bugs, and then getting everything ready to go live. So far, everything is going smoothly, and we don’t anticipate any issues. If you’d like to get more in the weeds of what we’re working on, continue to read below.
Party System – This has really been the main blocker for launch. We can’t go live if people can’t party up with their friends. The party system we were using worked fine throughout development in all of our testing, but when we tested it live, the crossplay aspect of it wouldn’t hold up and would basically stop functioning. That’s not something we were OK with prior to launch, hence the delay. To solve this problem, we’ve been implementing a new Party System that is being used in other Ubisoft games and has been proven to work in a crossplay environment.
Netcode-In our last test that was intended to be the final test before we launch, we found a critical bug in some of our 3rd party security software. It took us a little time to identify that as the culprit, but it has now been fixed. This bug was basically manifesting itself as random frame spikes that were causing all sorts of weird issues when the game was live with lots of players. Netcode is something we will always be looking at for to improve the experience for players.
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Linux Servers – As we mentioned in past posts, we are taking advantage of this time to move all of our servers over to Linux. At this moment that is all done, we just literally have one last bug to fix, and we should be good to go. This will improve some server stability as well as make servers scale up and down to handle load much, much faster.
As you can see, there’s still some work left to be done, which means we probably won’t be seeing the game released this year. That said, based on Rubin’s wording, it looks like that after they are back from the holidays (most likely sometime in early January 2024), they will be testing for submission and if it passes, we should then get a proper release date announcement then.
Source: Mark Rubin (Twitter)
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