For almost as long as I’ve been playing XDefiant, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been an ominous question mark shaped cloud on the horizon. When Ubisoft‘s free-to-play FPS launched back in May, the buzz around it was that it was a lot like Call of Duty, but with locations and factions from Ubisoft staples like Watch Dogs, The Division, and Far Cry.
I had been trying to expand beyond my usual diet of single-player games and, since it was free, I decided to give it a try. I ended up having a pretty good time, and have sunk around 30 hours into it since launch.
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XDefiant’s Playerbase Was Always Waiting For Black Ops 6
But XDefiant’s days have always seemed numbered because it was a stopgap release between bigger shooters, not a shooter destined to be the Big Game in the long term. The YouTube music critic Todd in the Shadows talks about there being two different kinds of musical artists: the kind who will always be successful on some level because they have a dedicated fanbase, and the kind who will only be successful as long as they keep the hits coming. It’s the difference between Eminem and Flo Rida, Beyonce and Katy Perry. It’s a useful paradigm for other forms of art, too, and I think XDefiant always occupied that Flo Rida/Katy Perry space. It’s a game that people play as long as other people are playing it, but forget about as soon as it exits the zeitgeist.
The problem with aping Call of Duty is that a new Call of Duty is never far away. Games like Stardew Valley and Dusk were able to find huge success because no one was making SNES-style farming sims or ’90s-style shooters anymore in the mid 2010s, but if the game you’re modeled after reliably hits on an annualized release cycle, you don’t have much wiggle room. It’s break out, or get broken.
Black Ops 6 Is Just A Better Game
And judging by my experience playing XDefiant recently, it got broken. When I logged on a few Fridays ago, the game was a ghost town. Every match was either obviously populated by bots, or just empty. I would spend minutes most matches running around, looking for someone, anyone to kill or get killed by. That was the day that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launched, so I thought it could have been mostly due to that. Then I saw that Ubisoft recently stated that XDefiant was underperforming its expectations, despite the company having already lowered those expectations.
And, now that COD is here, it’s tough to see a reason I would ever go back to regularly playing XDefiant. Black Ops 6, just feels… better. It’s faster, crunchier, and more consistently action-packed. I’ve complained in the past about XDefiant’s maps being too large for its rapid time-to-kill, and Black Ops 6 is showing how it should be done. The maps are fun to play, and the time to find an engagement once you spawn into a map feels tight. You’re never waiting too long for anything. Add in that the Omnimovement system feels fresh, the new iteration of Zombies has fans excited, and the campaign has some great missions, and XDefiant is going to have trouble getting its flagging player base back.
Of course, this was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For months, I’ve seen users in the XDefiant subreddit anticipating the impact Call of Duty would have on the game. Whenever fans talked about the need for changes to the game, it was with the implicit (and sometimes explicit) threat that they would leave the game behind once Black Ops 6 launched.
My two cents? If XDefiant is going to have any hope of rebounding, it needs to go big. Until now, the series has only drawn on Ubisoft’s modern (or near future) realistic franchises, which has led to grounded maps, guns, and classes. But it’s time for a Hail Mary. Bring in maps inspired by Prince of Persia and Skull & Bones. Make the Pope from Assassin’s Creed 2 a playable character. Let me shoot arrows as Fenyx from Immortals. Let me earn extra points by hunting the Rabbids. XDefiant is getting whooped because a game came along that was similar, but better. If it can’t be better, it can at least stop being so similar.
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