Ubisoft’s much-hyped online shooter XDefiant launched its first Battle Pass season on July 2, 2024. It brings with it a new faction, new maps, new modes, new weapons, new skins, a new ranked mode, and the same old performance and netcode issues.
The hype surrounding XDefiant’s new Season 1 faction, GSK (from Ubisoft’s popular Rainbow Six franchise), as well as its new maps and revamped Ranked mode, has been severely affected by a number of performance and balance issues. Chief among them are the severe frame rate drops PS5 players are experiencing after updating the game.
The game’s subreddit is filled with complaints about extremely low frame rates on the PS5 after the patch, as well as ever-present hit-registration and netcode issues, all of which combine to make the game feel like it’s running on a PS1 rather than Sony’s latest hardware. Not good.
The persistent issues with netcode and subsequent poor hit registration are especially disappointing, given that I recently commented on how much worse both got following XDefiant’s previous patch. And now that a proper ranked mode has been introduced to the game with Season 1, players are naturally furious that these ongoing issues are preventing them from properly competing in the mode.
In my several playthroughs following the Season 1 update, I’m still not experiencing netcode issues as dire as those populating the game’s highly active subreddit. Same goes for framerate drops, though I’m playing on PC. But there were definitely one or two instances where I shouldn’t have been killed when I was already hiding behind a wall in-game, so there’s still something fishy here.
My gut feeling is that Season 1 was released too soon. You can’t enjoy the excitement of new factions, maps, modes, and weapons when the fundamental core of your game remains unplayable for so many players.
And I’m not even going to get into the questionable part. choosing to make the game’s new GSK faction Resistant to headshots that kill in one shot, as well as the surrounding chaos changes The spiderbot. There’s a good game underneath all this rubbish; let’s hope Ubisoft can overcome its growing pains and take XDefiant to the level it deserves.
Do you want to know if XDefiant servers are down or not? I suggest you check out Is XDefiant Down? How to Check Server Status on MyFullGames.