XDefiant Year 1 Roadmap Update Revealed, Netcode/Hitreg Improvements Detailed

With Season 2 of XDefiant kicking off soon, the devs at Ubisoft San Francisco has stuck to their word, revealed the XDefiant Year 1 roadmap update, which highlights the stuff incoming in Season 2 up to Season 4.

Read on for the list to see what’s coming this month and beyond for the free-to-play shooter.

XDefiant Year 1 Roadmap Update:

Season 2:

Featured Content:

• New Faction – Highwaymen
• 3 New Weapons
• 3 New Maps
• New Device
• Bomb Mode
• Beta Private Matches
• Limited-Time Modes

Player Progression:

• Event Challenges
• Objectives Progress Weapon XP
• Improved Battle Pass Progression Speed
• New Weapons Mastery Skin
• New Ranked Rewards
• New Battle Pass

Quality of Life:

• Mantle Improvements
• Player Collision  Improvements
• Footstep Audio Improvements
• Top 500 Leaderboard
• Ranked Loadouts
• Ranked Map Voting

Season 3:

Featured Content:

• New Faction
• 3 New Weapons
• New Mode + New Map Type
• Bots Mode
• Limited-Time Modes

Player Progression:

• Daily Rewards
• Prestige
• Faction Mastery
• Badges
• New Ranked Rewards
• New Battle Pass

Quality of Life:

• Replay (Death Replay Cam)
• Improved First-Time User Experience
• Ranked Rejoin
• Ranked Sanctions

Season 4:

Featured Content:

• New Faction
• 3 New Weapons
• New Device
• Major Event Takeover
• Limited-Time Modes

Player Progression:

• Weapons Mastery 2.0
• Weapon Skin Challenge
• New Ranked Rewards
• New Battle Pass

More Info Coming Soon!

Quality of Life:

• Ranked Vote to Surrender

More Info Coming Soon!

Also, the devs note that there will be ongoing netcode, matchmaking and anti-cheat improvements all throughout the game’s seasons as well.

Speaking of netcode, the dev team has hired “specialist engineers” to help with this and hitreg (hit registration). There are two key areas they are working on:

1. Focus on increasing the amount of proactive resend of packets to mitigate issues experienced by players suffering from packet loss.
   • Bandwidth reduction efforts ongoing to allow for this as we need to reduce bandwidth usage to accommodate the bandwidth increases associated with proactive resend.
2. Migrating more gameplay systems to lightweight networking protocols to improve their responsiveness.

So basically, we want to automatically resend every packet 4 times. That is the basic industry standard because packet loss is more common than people realize but usually losing a few packets here and there isn’t a big deal. In a twitch shooter however, it is. Right now, we are only resending twice because our packets are basically too big (simplifying the issue) and if we resend 4 times the traffic will slow down and will create worse Netcode/Hitreg issues. So, we need to reduce the size of our packets (again simplifying) and then we should be able to do 4 frames of automatic resends and that should make a huge difference in people’s Netcode/Hitreg experience.

This is a big task, but everyone is working as hard as possible to get this work in as soon as possible. It’s hard to give you a solid estimate as to when it will be ready because there is a lot of iteration and testing time. But we’re hoping to see something towards the end of Season 2 if not sooner.

The dev team also clarified that the game is “absolutely” NOT dying, and that the game is doing well, but they want it to do even better. The Season 2 reveal is happening tomorrow, September 18, and once more info on that is known, we’ll be sure to let our readers know.

[Source: Ubisoft]

Stay connected to MP1st and the latest news by following us on Bluesky, X, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Google News.