Ubisoft's much-talked-about online shooter XDefiant dropped its first-ever battle pass season on July 2nd, 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 net code issues.
Fanfare around 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 due to a wealth of performance and balance issues. Chief among them are severe frame rate drops players on the PS5 are experiencing after updating the game.
The game's subreddit is on fire with complaints about precipitously low frame rates on the PS5 post-patch, as well as ever-present hit registration and net code issues, all of which combine to make the game feel like it's running on a PS1 rather than Sony's latest hardware. No good.
The persistent net code issues and subsequently poor hit registration are especially disappointing to read about given that I just recently covered how much worse both got after 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 continued issues are preventing them from properly competing in the mode.
In my several games post-Season 1 update, I'm still not experiencing any net code issues as terrible as the ones populating the game's highly active subreddit. The same goes for frame rate 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 the game, so there's still something fishy going on here.
My gut feeling is that Season 1 was rushed out too soon. You can't exactly ride on 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 going into the questionable choice of making the game's new GSK faction resistant to one-shot-kill headshots, as well as the uproar surrounding changes to the spider bot. There is a good game underneath all of this jank; here's to hoping Ubisoft can get 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 out Is XDefiant down? How to check server status on Pro Game Guides.
