While the dust settled on a hectic (and messy) launch, I got a chance to talk to the FPS XChallenging‘s executive producer Mark Rubin and creative director Safy Saada on the free-to-play Duty-like the first few weeks, how the Ubisoft team is balancing the game, the all-important bunny hopping, making good maps, and the future for the live service game.
The one from Ubisoft XChallenging launched last month to mostly positive reviews and large player numbers. Since then, the game has received a handful of updates as it begins its live service journey XChallenging evolving and changing in the coming months and years.
“The launch was great,” Rubin said. “We are very happy with our player numbers. It has gone much further than we expected.”
Rubin explained Kotaku that Ubisoft had tried to keep the game ‘pretty calm’ and ‘grassroots’. The idea was to build a game and a dedicated player community at the same time. However, the huge influx of new players and eyeballs since launch isn’t a bad thing.
“This tells us that gamers are genuinely interested in what we do and enjoy the fun gameplay we’ve created,” Rubin explains.
How Ubisoft plans to solve and balance the problem XChallenging
Although many people have jumped into Ubisoft’s new F2P shooter, there have been some complaints from players about hit registration issues and desynchronization issues. In short, players share fragments of death behind a wall because they haven’t yet reached safety on the other player’s screen. Or they share videos of players getting shot but not taking damage as you would expect.
“We’ve had a great launch so far, but there have been some issues. That is our property and we are not trying to hide from it,” Rubin said.
“This is the first FPS powered by the Snowdrop engine. So that involves a lot of work to reconfigure the engine. And we are constantly discovering new things. There are growing pains, but in a good way for this team.”
Rubin further added that as a “live game” the real work is just beginning and that they will “absolutely” continue to fix, tune and improve “every part” of the game. XChallenging.
As millions of players scream online about issues, balance and changes, I wondered what Ubisoft’s philosophy was for updating XChallenging and possibly change the meta with a patch. Creative director Safy Saada explains that the team waits long enough to get enough data and then combines that with player feedback.
“Like XChallenging evolves, we will continue to refine the game,” said Saada. ‘We know we always will [an] evolving meta and that is a key element for these types of games.”
Saada says that every time the team adds something new, like a faction or weapon, they will “probably have to rebalance the existing content.” The creative director has confirmed this Kotaku that Ubisoft plans to use “private test servers” in the future to “ensure the first iteration” of a change is as balanced as possible.
Bunny jumps in XChallenging isn’t going anywhere
A popular topic among the player base right now is bunny hopping XChallenging. This is the act of players jumping up and down in different directions during firefights. At launch, players complained that it was too easy to bunny hop and get kills, so in a recent patch (which went live after this interview) Ubisoft has added some aim accuracy penalties to b-hopping. But many players are still not happy with the current jumping meta.
“The purpose of our movement has always been clear to us. We want there to be a skills shortage,” Rubin said. “We also want players to say, ‘I’m learning, I’m getting better at this game, I’m learning how to use the tools the game provides.'”
Rubin confirmed this Kotaku that it won’t be a ‘nerf’ bunny that ‘jumps into the ground’. But as we saw with the recent accuracy penalty update, the team is still tweaking the moves and hops.
“We had a purpose. And when we looked at that intent, we realized there were some things that needed to be adjusted,” Rubin said. “We’re tweaking the features of things like jumping and other parts of the game to better fit the intended design we wanted. It was our intention to always do that XChallenging be an experienced FPS with a good sense of movement that is not overly complex, but fun to master.”
To make XChallenging’s fan favorite cards
The different cards of the game form one area XChallenging which has received near-universal praise from fans and critics alike. Although a few of them aren’t as great as the rest – if you look at Times Square – the majority of them are XChallengingThe game’s 14 maps are fantastic and rival those from many other popular shooters.
Saada says he and the team are “super happy” with the way things are going XChallenging‘s cards have been so well received by the community. According to the creative director, the cards have arrived XChallenging are one of the ‘main pillars’ of the game. I asked Ubisoft what goes into making a good arena shooter map, and Saada told me that the team always tries to “start simple” and that the developers “really wanted to go back” to the original three-lane maps that can be found in older games. Duty games and similar shooters from that era.
“The interesting thing then is that we show what’s nice about the Ubisoft IPs that we use,” says Saada.
Clubhouse will start in the next season of the game, which starts on July 2 Rainbow Six Siege will be added XChallenging. And although Ubisoft’s tactical shooter is known for its destructible environments, XChallenging I can’t beat this kind of gameplay. However, Ubisoft has still found a way to ‘celebrate’ the game and its destruction.
“[Clubhouse in XDefiant looks] like a R6 The competition just happened, with a lot of holes in the walls and floors as part of the way we designed our lanes,” Saada explained. “So it’s really about mixing iconic flavors and elements from our titles with solid, proven designs.”
The challenges of creating something like XDefiant
A lot of work goes into developing, launching, and maintaining an online video game. I asked if Saada thinks players don’t realize how complicated it is to develop these games, and he said players know more today than they did 20 years ago.
Saada also said that even the team of experienced developers didn’t fully realize how much work goes into a game like XChallenging until they actually started doing it. He also said that while creating a game like this takes a lot of time and energy, it is also a “very fascinating” process.
“To start with just an idea and take it all the way to the point where it gets into the hands of the players and then let that idea evolve as you experience it with the players, it’s a fascinating process,” said Saada.
XChallenging is available now for Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC. The new season starts on July 1.
We also spoke with Ubisoft about how it chooses which factions to add to XDefiant and whether the panda dancer from Just Dance will ever appear in the FPS.
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