I reviewed XDefiant shortly after launch, and I quite liked it. No, it wasn’t a groundbreaking new experience or anything like that; it was just a decent F2P FPS. Once upon a time, that was enough for games like Paladins to build a regular audience that still sees more than 3,000 players a day on Steam alone — a tenth of the genre-leading Overwatch 2, but enough to sustain a game made for a smaller scope on a smaller budget.
But the video game marketplace is completely different now than six years ago. Developers have had more than enough time to pump cash into blockbuster hero shooters and put them to market, but it hasn’t gone well. Hyenas didn’t even manage to release before getting permanently shelved, and while Concord made it to market, it probably shouldn’t have at a premium price.
Which brings us back to XDefiant, the latest F2P shooter to meet an early grave. Since I already played at launch I was able to redownload the game for a final jaunt through the Ubisoft-themed shooter, and after a slightly longer matchmaking time than I’m used to, I was dropped into The Division’s New York. For a moment, I was pretty excited about diving into this semi-familiar setting. And then the problems started.
The countdown to the game elapsed, and I immediately hit sprint — and nothing happened. Nothing, that is, aside from a pop-up covering the top quarter of the screen: “You must use your selected Gameplay Input while in a match.”
Here I am, playing on PS5, having never plugged a mouse or keyboard into my console since owning it, and it’s telling me that my controller isn’t my selected Gameplay Input. I scrub through the settings, finding no option to change it, back out of the game, scrub the settings again, re-enter the game in progress (which is a nice feature, honestly), and I still can’t move. Even when waiting to rejoin the game, I can see a controller icon next to my name in the lobby. Everything points to the game being wrong.
I restart the game entirely, and just to err on the side of caution, I remove a pair of USB C-to-A converters I have sticking out of my PS5 Pro. Upon loading into a new game in a chosen mode playlist, I was finally able to move and play. I’m not sure what the root cause of the issue was, but the fact remains: this game is six months out from launch, and shouldn’t have such simple issues preventing players from getting into a match.
Once finally in a game, I was in a distinctly more familiar/uninteresting map that I remembered from launch, and my team initially struggled to escort the package, but we got the job done in the end. When on the defense, we managed to shut down the enemy squad before their package reached the first checkpoint. It felt good and reminded me why I was mostly positive on the game when I first played it. But then the match ended, and I was ready to stop.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? When playing a match in Call of Duty, sure, I’m aiming to win, but I also usually go in trying to achieve some specific goal, whether that’s unlocking a new weapon attachment or achieving a secret easter egg in the Zombies mode. When the XDefiant match finished, it rolled off a bunch of weapon levels I’d earned, and I just had no interest in any of it. There are no weapons I want to earn, no gear pieces I want to own, and no cosmetics that make me excited. Yes, the base gameplay was fun, but not fun enough to stand on its own with such a limited sense of progression.
A F2P shooter like XDefiant can’t merely be good anymore. Apex Legends is a F2P shooter, and at its peak, it was one of – if not the – best shooters you can play on any platform, and you can still jump in right now. Call of Duty is a premium experience, but Call of Duty: Warzone is free to play, and has much sharper gameplay than XDefiant could muster.
The F2P market is no longer smaller experiences like Paladins, it’s also Overwatch 2, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, and so many more that I’m forgetting. XDefiant was good, I genuinely believe that, but in 2024 that’s not enough.
