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XDefiant’s Maps Are Too Big For Its TTK To Be This Short

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Andrew King

Published Jun 10, 2024

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Ubisoft’s popular new free-to-play shooter XDefiant is a whole lot like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty with a very light coat of Ubisoft paint. At launch, the game only features factions and maps from modern, realistic, and shooty Ubisoft series like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Division and Far Cry, which largely makes it look like any other shooter. I am fundamentally in agreement with who argued that the game should draw on more cartoony Ubi franchises like Rayman if it wants to stand out. Imagine a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mario + Rabbids level with blocky cover and primary colors. Alas, there’s nothing but camo and AK-47s as far♚ as the eye can 🌺see.

XDefiant Embraces Call Of Duty For Better And For Worse

As it stands, the Call of Duty core is what jumps out, and that influence is both good and bad for the game. XDefiant feels just like COD. The weapons are punchy, the run and slide feel like Treyarch could have cooked🐼 them up, and the special abilities would feel right at home in a COD game. All of that stuff is good. COD ha🐽s ruled the shooter roost for a decade-and-a-half for a reason.

But also just like COD, the time to kill in XDefiant is extremely quick. If you notice that an enemy is shooting at you, it’s usually too late to do anything about it. That works okay for Call of Duty, a series where the maps tend to be fairly compact and organized neatly into three lanes that funnel you toward confrontation. But XDefiant’s maps are larger and more sprawling. There are entire areas that aren’t used during certain match types, and, if you find yourself in one of those empty spaces, it's like stumbling into the Backrooms.

XDefiant is a little like a biathlon, the winter sport where competitors ski for multiple kilometers then pause to shoot at targets, before skiing away. You spawn on your team’s side of the map, sprint for a long time, then briefly shoot someone if you’re lucky, or instantly get killed if you’re not. Then, like you’re strapping your skis back on after pausing for a bit of marksmanship, you’re back to running again. Again, this structure doesn’t mean the game isn't fun. I’m having a good time with it. But it can make it a frustratingly choppy experience.

It also prevents XDefiant from being the kind of story-making machine that great competitive games often are. The last multiplayer shooter I got really into was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Halo: Infinite, and Halo’s big maps pair well with its lengthy TTK. Because one shot usually isn’t enough to take down an enemy, you’re often pursuing or being pursued, firing off rounds in a prolonged chase. It feels exciting, even cinematic. And, if you manage to give your opponent the slip, hop on a Warthog, then run them over, it's exhilarating. You were on the ropes, then you came back and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. A longer time to kill allows for that kind of arc.

While playing XDefiant, I don’t find that my character really has much of an arc at all. Sure, you could assemble a narrative over the course of the full match, but that feels more like looking at data points and plotting them on a graph than like actually experiencing a story. The game is most fun on its smaller maps, like Pueblito, and for this TTK to really sing, Ubisoft should introduce more maps like that. Get me into the action quickly and I'm less likely to mind getting taken out of it just as fast.