Ubisoft's new free—to-play competitive shooter, XDefiant, is out today, and it has surprisingly hit some matchmaking issues."

The developers have acknowledged the problem and as of 1:30 p.m., things seem to be getting better - I just got into a couple matches now. It was a great experience. When I can play, it works brilliantly with my slightly aged RTX2070Super (which is what you want from a competitive FPS that is not intended to look fancy)

I also enjoyed XDefiant in beta, and I was skeptical, that it comes with a "MLG pro360no-scope" type. I've called "sweat" as a shorthand because it's characterized as a throwback to the kind of nervous call of duty shooting—and these days I'm really not interested in competing with people who intend to make YouTube highlight reels all the time they set up in a dark sandstorm and killed me. It is not.  

One way to manifest Xdefiant's competitive focus is that, outside of one introductory playlist, its casual playlists do not use skill-based matchmaking. The advantage of SBMM is that it is believed that you will always play against a player close to your skill level, so each match is a challenge rather than a stomping it is controversial, or does not work well because some people think it homogenizes the experience, and it will lead to longer. The matchmaking queue that you may encounter.

If Xdefiant's matchmaking speed remains intact, it can't be said that things have sped up because omitting SBMM is so slow. But I have not found myself smeared on the pavement by a 16-year-old esports genius. Things may change as people with casual interests drop out over time, but so far I'm happy to accept that not all games need to try to match me algorithmically with similar K/D ratio-havers.

One thing I'm not really interested in right now is giving you special abilities such as cloaking suits, healing devices, or deployable shields. Mar and Ultimate is free of charge in a game that focuses on getting rid of the excess of modern CoD and Hero shooter for more sophisticated and competitive shooting. Maybe they will grow on me.

For this "pre-season" launch, there are several casual playlists available and Season One comes with a "preview" of Rank mode. There's also a Premium Battle Pass just outside the gate, but it's just cosmetics and XP boosters.

XDefiant needs to be retrieved from the Ubisoft store on the pc, which is annoying, but c'est la vie.