Ubisoft’s much talked about online shooter XDefiant dropped its first ever 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 issues and network codes.
Fanfare surrounding XDefiant Season 1’s new faction the GSK (sourced from Ubisoft’s wildly popular Rainbow Six franchise), as well as its new maps and revamped ranked mode has been severely dampened by a host of performance and balance issues. Chief among them are harsh frame rates that players on the PS5 experience after updating the game.
The game’s subreddit is ablaze with complaints about suddenly low frame rates on the PS5 post-patch, as well as ever-present successful recording and network encoding issues, all of which combine to make the game feel like it’s running on PS1 rather than. Sony’s latest hardware. not good
The constant network code issues and then poor logging are particularly disappointing to read about, as I just covered how much worse both got after the previous XDefiant 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 games post-season 1 update, I have yet to experience any network coding issues as dire as those that populate the game’s very active subnet. The same goes for frame rates, even 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 the game, so there’s still something fishy going on here.
My gut feeling is that Season 1 was released too soon. You can’t exactly ride the high of new factions, maps, modes, and weapons when the fundamental core of your gameplay is still unplayable for so many players.
And I’m not even getting into the questionable choice to make the new GSK faction of the game immune to one-shot kill headshots, as well as the commotion surrounding changes to the spider bot. There is a good game under all this Yank; here’s to hoping that Ubisoft can move past its growing pains and get XDefiant to the level it deserves to be at.
Want to know if the XDefiant servers are down or not? Then I suggest you check Is XDefiant down? How to check server status in Pro Game Guides.
