Today, in a surprisingly in-depth blog post, Mark Rubin, XDefiant’s Executive Producer gave us a release window of late September/early October.
The blog post goes very in-depth on the nitty-gritty of game development, so you can read it on Ubisoft’s site if you want the full rundown. In summary, the game was submitted to major console companies like Sony and Xbox back at the end of July. This process is done to make sure everything works correctly on each console and takes a ton of time for the QA teams to get prepared for. Unfortunately, this process came back as a Not Pass in mid-August which meant the team has had to spend the past month or so correcting the issues that caused it not to pass.
That brings us to where the team is today. As of the blog post, they’re validating something called a “Candidate Master” or CM. This is the game’s final version that they believe is ready to ship, barring any fixes that would come as part of a Day 1 patch. They’ll submit this back to major console developers in the next week. If that goes well, we could look at a mid-late September release. There is a likely scenario that there will need to be some fixes in a Day 1 patch so that it passes cleanly. If so, the game will be slated for early-mid October.
As for why the team didn’t provide any details regarding a release date previously, Rubin said the team has “not chosen the typical route” with many aspects of the game’s development. The different betas they hosted previously were meant to take serious feedback from the community and spend the time making changes the players asked for. While it looks like things are taking a long time from the outside, this is all relatively normal for game development and was merely the result of extra transparency.
While this means we still have at least a month to wait before XDefiant is in our hands, I’m willing to wait. I’m already knee-deep in a handful of games myself, so I can keep busy, and I’d rather see the game release in a complete state with as few bugs as possible.
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