Call of Duty-like shooter XDefiant faces the typical matchmaking woes on launch
Gun with the wind.
XDefiant, Ubisoft's free-to-play Call of Duty-like arena shooter, launched yesterday. However, the game has already faced its share of issues, with matchmaking being shot (pun not intended) leaving many unable to access it at all.
As users reported being met with an "Unable to Find Match" alert, Ubisoft acknowledged players were struggling to join a game, stating: "Please bear with us while we look into servers and matchmaking!"
Things got so bad, developer Mark Rubin - who previously worked on the Call of Duty series prior to his role as XDefiant's executive producer - shared a post on social media last night, showing a hamster clinging on desperately to an out of control wheel. "Matchmaking servers go boom!" he wrote.
Rubin additionally assured his followers that the team was "working on it", and the most recent update over on the XDefiant account is that Ubisoft is "seeing progress on the matchmaking servers".
"We will continue to monitor the situation and keep you updated," it said.
XDefiant has walked quite an uneven path to launch. The game was initially revealed as Tom Clancy's XDefiant back in 2021, but Ubisoft later announced it was dropping the prefix following criticism from Tom Clancy fans. Essentially, the Tom Clancy fanbase felt the XDefiant announcement strayed too far from the franchise's serious military themes and formula.
With the Tom Clancy name dropped, XDefiant went on to have a number of tests, but not always very successfully. In fact, one beta was described as having a "horrible" server experience by Rubin himself.
XDefiant then missed a planned launch last year due to console certification issues. It subsequently received another delay in October, this time because of "inconsistencies in the game experience".