XDefiant’s second season is a great time to come back to Ubisoft’s free multiplayer FPS

I rather enjoyed XDefiant – Ubisoft’s series-hopping, free multiplayer FPS – in the weeks after launch. Featuring characters from Splinter Cell, The Division, Far Cry, Watch Dogs, Ghost Recon, and Rainbow Six, it’s proved to be an enjoyable alternative to Call of Duty with a strikingly strong map pool at its disposal. With so many games launching over the past few months, however, XDefiant has fallen a little out of my mind. Aiming to change that right now is the XDefiant Season 2 reveal, and I’m certainly tempted to dip back in.

Ubisoft has already laid out its remaining year-one XDefiant roadmap, with plans currently in place through season four. The focus for season two is the arrival of the new Highwaymen faction, the neon-drenched, post-apocalyptic gang from Far Cry New Dawn, and the introduction of Bomb mode. The new game type appears to be equivalent to the likes of CoD’s popular Search and Destroy mode, or to other single-life FPS games such as Valorant and Counter-Strike 2.

There are three new XDefiant weapons to look forward to, as well as an additional device, and three more XDefiant maps on which to make use of them. Elsewhere, you can expect more limited-time modes and the introduction of private matches in a beta format. Player progression has been updated with a new battle pass and a fresh set of ranked rewards. You’ll be able to earn weapon XP by completing objectives, tackle event challenges, and even unlock a new weapon mastery skin.

Along with the new features comes a range of quality-of-life updates. These include improvements to player collision and mantling, better footstep audio, ranked loadouts and map voting, and a leaderboard to show the top 500 players. Additionally, executive producer Mark Rubin says the team is hard at work on continually improving the game’s netcode and hit registration, which he describes as “one of the most important topics” for Ubisoft. “We’ve been making some improvements since launch, but we still have a way to go and we’ve added some more specialist engineers to help with this work.”

“With that out of the way, I just want to quickly address the status of the game,” Rubin adds. Is the game dying? No, the game is absolutely not dying. We know there are things we need to improve like netcode/hitreg and adding more content to progression, but the game is doing well. We just want it to do better. And we do that by addressing the concerns of our community, which has always been the plan. Ubisoft is very much behind us and has allocated more resources to the team in order for us to do that.”

The long-term future of XDefiant may still be in the balance, then, but it sounds as though the team at Ubisoft is at least committed to regular updates for now. Given the studio’s track record of sticking with projects such as The Division 2 and Rainbow Six Siege for many years after launch, I’m certainly willing and curious to see what the coming months bring to XDefiant.

XDefiant Season 2 begins on Tuesday September 24. You can play now for free via the Ubisoft Store.

If you’re gearing up for season two, make sure you’re using the best XDefiant loadouts to lock in the win, or jump into another of the best multiplayer games on PC right now.

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