Ubisoft's upcoming shooter "XDefiant" was at one point scheduled to be released in the summer of 2023. That date was pushed back to October, and then public testing resulted in the release date being pushed back to an undetermined date. However, the game is listed in Ubisoft's Q3 2024 financial report, which indicates that the publisher expects the game to be released on or before March 31, 2024.

Now, with a week to go, that's looking less and less likely, and a report from Insider Gaming tells us why: according to the Insider Gaming report, the game has missed "dozens" of internal milestones, "chasing COD and pointless The endless hunt to add stuff is constantly breaking current builds," the report quotes an inside source as saying.

Delays aside, XDefiant's reception to the testing period has been generally positive, which may raise eyebrows given the focus on being in line with Call of Duty's older gaming style. xDefiant executive producer and is no stranger to COD, having previously held the same role at Infinity Ward.

"FYI, our delays are not due to any new features," Rubin said, referring to one of the report's core claims. 'In fact, from a gameplay standpoint, not much has changed. The delays are due to the technical issues we talked about.

And as for "those who said they were going after COD" in the first report, Rubin said it was a "big eye opener," adding a grinning face emoji.

Rubin further elaborated on the reasons behind the delay. 'One of the reasons,' Rubin said, 'was scale. 'On a small scale, some things worked fine, but as we increased the scale, compounding problems occurred, and we had major problems with those systems.' Also, some of the problems with netcode were due to the increase in anti-cheat, which sadly, always degraded performance.

Rubin also directly addressed the idea of going after COD. 'We've said in the past that we're going for a different era in FPS history, namely the old CODs,' he said. To a certain extent, yes, but we don't want to be like the new COD." [One has to admire his patience, such as when he explains that building a netcode system in six months is no trivial task.

As for the big question, when will the game be released, Rubin and Ubisoft have, perhaps wisely, refused to give a firm date.

"We're staying silent because, honestly, we don't have much to say. '' Rubin said. We can't wait for the shipment. Then we won't have to talk about shipping dates anymore and we can talk about more important things like gameplay balancing and new content/modes/maps."

Rubin said this is not about sitting down to "fix every last little bug. No one releases a perfect game without bugs. We do our best, but it's not realistic to think that way. There were major technical problems that we found right before launch that we had to fix."

Despite this "massive infrastructure and total overhaul of the system," Rubin says." The game is the same as what we have already played and we have tried to make it as enjoyable as possible.

Well, they don't want to be the new Skull & Bones. And the constant chatter about delays risks distracting from the fact that when people get this, they are achieving what they set out to do (whether you call it the old COD style or not). But I think a delay of a few months per start to ape the COD functionality a bit more would be overly polite to roll Rubin's eyes.