XDC: The Truth Behind XDefiant
In Clue’s first video for XDefiant Central, he breaks down Insider Gaming’s most recent article written by Tom Henderson discussing the troubled development of XDefiant.
Over the past couple of days a commotion has been brewing in the XDefiant community, stemming from a series of articles published on Insider gaming written by Tom Henderson, the articles alleged many issues going on behind the scenes at the San Francisco based studio that have contributed to a toxic workplace culture and caused the many delays the project has faced. While reading these articles initially I could not shake the feeling that critical context was left out or misrepresented to bolster claims that sources had brought forth, while other claims lacked supporting evidence of any kind. The presence of these inconsistencies led me down a rabbit hole and so today I’ll be filling in the gaps with my findings and seeing where that leaves us.
Tom’s article begins by stating
Following Insider Gaming’s exclusive report this weekend, it took all but 12 minutes for Executive Producer Mark Rubin — and another disingenuous tweet from Aches to shoot down the rumors that XDefiant’s delays aren’t related to chasing Call of Duty. Nevertheless, Rubin did confirm that the game has yet again been delayed, but its latest delay was because of “major technical issues” related to the game’s netcode, which is an issue that has been outlined since November 2023
Off to a strong start here Tom is already framing Mark and Aches’ response to this bogus narrative that they are “Chasing Call of Duty” as being “disingenuous” and too fast, as if there’s some socially agreed upon amount of time you have to let pass before it’s acceptable to shoot down false narratives.
As well Tom adds in a disingenuous jab of his own when he mentions how long its taken them to redo their net code from scratch implying 6 months with a major holiday where most of the studio were out of office smack in the middle of it is an unreasonable amount of time for this to take. A sentiment refuted by mark on twitter
Meanwhile if we take Halo Infinite for example, a game that released in Decemeber 2021, has just recently as of a couple months ago released their retooled netcode to mixed reception that they had been working on for several months behind the scenes in secret
Not to mention that the XDefiant devs have not only been working on the netcode but have also been hard at work remaking their social systems from scratch and retooling aspects of their anti cheating measures.
Continuing on with Tom’s article it reads,
As previously mentioned, XDefiant has missed dozens of internal milestones and deadlines these past couple of years and although Rubin’s latest comments on XDefiant missing its latest release date due to the netcode are accurate, it’s not a simple case of a one-and-done issue that has plagued the game for years. As Insider Gaming has reported, XDefiant’s shortcomings stem from several executives and directors on the project. They are internally referred to as ‘The Boys Club’ by a large majority of the team.
At first, ‘The Boys Club’ was the name given to a select few individuals who caused constant problems for the game’s development, and the term was collectively agreed upon by some members of the team to feel a sense of comradery. But a couple of years later, that group grew to a dozen or so both male and female individuals, and its term has evolved into something much more bitter in the studio. The group has been the cause of missed deadlines, crunch, a toxic work environment, and multiple people leaving the project, said sources.
While there isn’t an exact date on when the ‘club’ evolved into something more sinister, several sources stated that the change became the most apparent around the time when the ‘Tom Clancy’ brand was dropped (publically announced early 2022). Before the decision, the game was intended to be released in the holiday of 2021 without any significant issues that plague the game today. The change meant more freedom for the project, allowing The Boys Club to make unnecessary changes, which has had a domino effect on the progress of the game. Despite the warnings from the team, it’s currently added over two years to the game’s development. Eventually, things got so bad that XDefiant’s toxic work culture, crunch, and internal problems became so prevalent that knowledge of ‘The Boys Club’ even spread to other studios at Ubisoft.
Now this passage necessitates a quick history lesson on Ubisoft San Francisco, after Tom’s 2nd article came out Lisette Titre-Montgomery, who was an Art Manager at UbiSF during the development of South Park The Fractured But Whole, came out to claim that “The Boys Club” Tom had mentioned predates Mark joining the studio and she names Jason Schroeder specifically as a key member of the club and alleges under his leadership as Senior Producer & Game Director on the project, she was the victim of sexist and racist abuse and that she was unable to go to HR as Jason was in a relationship with the Head of HR at the time, these issues caused her to leave the studio in July 2017.
After development on South Park The Fractured But Whole concluded in January 2018 work began that same month on what at the time was a spin-off title set in the universe of “The Division” codenamed “Battlecat”, under the leadership of Jason Schroeder as Creative Director, Development on the project had been going for a little over a year when Ubisoft made the decision to bring in Mark Rubin to salvage what he could from the axed project, and thus Tom Clancy’s XDefiant was born.
Work on the project progressed slowly but surely until the game was eventually revealed to the public in July of 2021 to mixed reception with some heavily criticising the use of the Tom Clancy IP. With a Private Test of the game held in August 2021 under NDA, this was when i first got my hands on XDefiant, I quite enjoyed my time with the game as a lifelong fan of Objective FPS and class based shooters such as TF2, Dirty Bomb, Overwatch and Paladins. I found the melding of elements from that genre along with gunplay inspired by Call of Duty to be a compelling offering, although the game was not without its faults and as the test progressed issues became more readily apparent and I was left with the impression that this was a very early prototype.
After this private test the decision was made internally to drop the Tom Clancy name from the project and reshuffle the team involved with the development and so Jason Schroeder would leave his role as Creative Director to join the Rocksmith+ team as Executive Producer and inbound to the XDefiant team were 2 figures from the Call of Duty competitive scene in Patrick “Aches” Price and Jonathan “PacmanJT” Tucker. And publicly all seemed well as Mark and other members of the team came out to sing their praises as their hiring was described as “a great win” and that gameplay designers on the project “greatly enjoyed working with [them]”
Curiously in this passage Tom mentions allegations of excessive crunch and multiple people leaving the project so lets address these 2 claims quickly. Let’s begin with the more egregious allegation of the two being the excessive crunch at the studio which is quite interesting given Mark Rubin’s history of being very publicly outspoken against crunch as a concept
“One thing I made as a pillar for my team when I joined was that I didn’t want anyone crunching. I want people to have a great work-life balance with a focus on life, friends and family.” – Mark Rubin (Discord August 2022)
“I’ve stated this a few times before, but this test is something that no one else is really doing. (although some games are starting to copy it) We are not at alpha. We are not about to ship (if we were then yes we would keep the servers up longer) We are in full development. There are entire features that haven’t even been started yet. This test is a way to allow players to get in and play and give feedback that actually can affect the development of the game. Do we plan on having longer tests? Yes, but not right now. We are running/managing these servers ourselves from the office. Normally servers are run form an Ops center that has 24/7 support. So NO, I do not want my team crunching their lives away so we can have longer tests. I want my team to have a life outside of work. I care about my team! So you’re welcome that you get to play this early in development. If the game isn’t for you or you can’t handle playing a game that isn’t done then I totally understand but please keep the toxicity out of this community. I care about them as well. ❤️” – Mark Rubin (Discord August 2022)
And with all these public examples why then would he turn around and in private proceed to crunch his team excessively anyways? Knowing that if it was ever exposed all credibility to anything he’s ever said would disappear instantly? Seems quite the risk for little benefit when crunch is the industry norm and he would be better off just not commenting on it at all. With that reasoning in mind I’m much more likely to take Mark at his word over Tom’s claims here.
And the next claim put forth by Tom in his article is that multiple people left the project during development but this isn’t the smoking gun Tom thinks it is as it would be more surprising for this not to be the case over the course of 6 years of development, we saw previously people like RJ Palmer, a Concept Artist, departed the project over creative differences.
Meanwhile others like Warren Price, Lead Map Designer, left on good terms to pursue an opportunity at High Moon Studios and work on Warzone.
It’s unclear on the specifics as to why Mark Vernon, Senior Game Designer, left the project whether voluntary or otherwise
And Caehlin “Morning” Kelly, Community Manager, left to pursue a career as a Social Media Manager at Corsair in 2022.
While this is a non-exhaustive list of people who have moved on from the project it’s more so meant to illustrate that not every departure from the project has been over bad blood, it’s quite normal for people to leave for new opportunities or due to creative differences in an industry like game development.
Lastly before we move on to the next section of the article lets just quickly touch on the idea that word of XDefiant’s troubles have spread to other Ubisoft studios, this claim is also true, as over the years Ubisoft have tapped multiple support studios and brought them onboard to the XDefiant project to assist San Francisco and spread the development workload around, namely being Osaka, Sydney and Kyiv.
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/company/careers/search?cities=Osaka
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/company/careers/search?cities=Sydney
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/company/careers/locations/kyiv
Moving on with the rest of the article it reads
The issue with ‘The Boys Club’ isn’t that its managers or directors telling developers what to do—after all, that’s their job—but it’s the lack of work ethic, unpleasant behavior, and the egos from these individuals that have created a really unhealthy place to work, said sources. “One member has no design experience or people experience and has been given directorial powers because of personal friendships”, said one source. It means that developers are left with responsibilities beyond their original job descriptions, told to work tedious hours of overtime to complete tasks, and are often shrugged aside when suggestions don’t align with the views of the higher-ups. “There have been many instances where people have cried, had mental breakdowns, or stopped caring about their wellbeing because of the toxic environment fostered by the club”, it was said
Initially reading this passage about someone with no experience being given a directorial role many speculated on twitter that this was referring to Aches, but as I understand it this is actually referring to PacmanJT
Now while i’m not qualified to speak on his professional qualifications as a game dev the idea that someone who spent a decade travelling the country and interacting with fans as both a Competitive player and his 1 year stint as an Analyst with the Call of Duty World League in 2019, someone lacking proper socials skills does not magically get hired as on-air broadcast talent.
Following on with the article we come to the end of the opening section and it reads
The Boys Club is a closed group of protected individuals who think they are better than everyone else and do as they please without any repercussions”, said one developer working on the project.
One member has a history of treating people extremely badly with more HR reports than I’ve ever seen”, said another
I frequently was told the following [by management]: What do you know? You have never shipped a game before. If you want to make it to where I’m at, then you need to do (XYZ thing)”, said a former developer who has since left Ubisoft altogether because of how they were treated
I’ve heard that it’s pretty bad over there, but it’s bad everywhere [at Ubisoft], to be honest”, said another developer working at another studio
This bit about the HR reports strikes me as odd, with no given number of HR reports the frame of reference is left to interpretation, even a number as low as 5 could be the most this particular source has ever seen. A proper number here wouldve really bolstered the claim and illustrated how bad the problem actually is but instead it’s left to be pretty nebulous which is unfortunate.
As well this bit about it being “bad everywhere at Ubisoft” feels shoehorned in as misconduct at Studios unrelated to the XDefiant project would have no bearing on what goes on at the San Francisco based Studio
In the next part of the article Tom goes on to write about the issues the team have faced with the netcode specifically writing
As of late 2023, the XDefiant team has been facing a huge hurdle with the game’s netcode. As Mark Rubin had already outlined, the game had significant issues and needed fixing. Ironically, though, this has been a known issue for years, said people working on the project, and could have been avoided if leadership had listened to the rest of the team. But as the suggestions didn’t come from within their bubble—or should we say, the club—the advice was always ignored.
There have been countless occasions where different teams would advise The Boys Club (for good reason) about making certain choices and decisions with months/years notice in order to avoid issues down the road”, said one developer when asked about the games netcode issues.
This claim that Mark’s change of heart on the netcode issues is a recent affair is completely inaccurate, as early as April of 2023 Mark spoke of netcode changes that had been in the works for over a year in a thread regarding details on the at the time upcoming Closed beta, this new and improved netcode would only see the light of day in the Open Session that ran in late June
With these improvements to the netcode falling short of player expectations the call was made after the open sessions to begin a complete overhaul of the network protocol for the game as well finally migrating the servers over to Linux from Windows, something they had actively been hiring for since at least May of that year, and likely sooner, when i noticed active job postings for a Linux Systems Engineer.
Furthermore the article goes on to state
Insider Gaming understands that the game’s netcode is still a significant issue for the project and that the team has recently been struggling to reach the internal goal of 100 players per server partician—a goal desired to support the expected hundreds of thousands of players that will play the game on launch. It’s one of the major reasons for this past weekend’s closed playtests, which saw the testing of the netcode, social features, battle pass, and store (the store and battle pass weren’t tested due to coins not being allocated to players).
During the weekend tests, players who played the game and spoke to Insider Gaming said that the netcode still wasn’t great. Hit registration was described as being “terrible” or “off” by some sources, with bullets not registering, going around corners, etc. However, from the five playtesters we spoke to, the good news is that there weren’t any major game crashes.
Given the team have only had 6 or so months with a major holiday in the middle to rewrite major portions of the netcode from scratch, the fact it runs well at all is a miracle. Even Valve with CS2 have had issues implementing a sub-tick netcode, the same type of netcode that XDefiant employs,
Valve have, through a number of updates over the past couple months, been able to slowly address inconsistencies and issues with netcode of CS2 and there is nothing to suggest Ubisoft couldn’t achieve similar results given they were able to get to this point in the span of 6 months.
The article continues to state
It’s understood that the netcode issue originated from the significant changes brought on by The Boys Club after the Tom Clancy name was dropped. The simple case of just dropping the name based on fan feedback resulted in a frenzy to add new factions, maps, and other features that needed to be built from scratch. Internal feedback was ignored, and corners were cut by reusing assets, resulting in huge technical issues that could have been avoided.
Mark Rubin has said he will update the game’s status in the coming weeks, but Insider Gaming understands that the game is currently undergoing as many internal playtests as possible.
As stated previously the XDefiant project itself spawned out of a cancelled spin-off title in the universe of “The Division” with assets being reused and repurposed where they could. You would think that with allegations of crunch being levied that the reusing of assets to cut down on time spent creating new ones would be framed as something positive. Despite any issues that may spawn from the reuse of assets the overall workload from this decision would still be far less, which is why this technique was heavily employed by Sledgehammer Games in the development of MW3 with many elements being reused from their previous title Vanguard and a set of map layouts lifted from Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
This next section of the article grasps at straws in an attempt to make the accusation that XDefiant is “Chasing Call of Duty” stick reading
In our previous report, we reported that XDefiant’s delays have stemmed from the never-ending pursuit of chasing Call of Duty, which has resulted in developers becoming increasingly frustrated with the project’s lack of progress. This isn’t an issue that caused the recent delay, but an issue that has plagued the game for years and a subject that ‘The Boys Club’ finds sensitive when brought up internally – and after our past report – seemingly publically too
While there’s no question that a new first-person shooter should take inspiration from other popular titles on the market, sources who spoke to Insider Gaming said that it became evident really quickly that Call of Duty was the only title that leadership was interested in. Sources said that almost every very creative decision for the best part of two years quickly ended with the same rhetorical question – What would Call of Duty do?
What Tom fails to point out here is that the XDefiant Insider Sessions program, a weekly private playtest for developers to gather feedback from players and iterate on gameplay design took place during 2022 into the early part of 2023, and the Call of Duty titles during that time period were Vanguard and MWII, which lacked many features XDefiant had and would refine during this period of time some examples of which being, a high time to kill, fluid movement system, faction abilities, red dots on the minimap, non disbanding lobbies, ping based matchmaking, objective based linear gamemodes, etc. and it warrants reminding everyone that Mark cut his teeth in game development as the Executive Producer at Infinity Ward for over a decade, working on Call of Duty 4, MW2, MW3 and Ghosts and leading the teams that created most of the staple features from the golden age of Call of Duty, so these allegations that he’s copying something he played a key part in creating are silly to say the least.
The article continues saying
As Mark Rubin said in his responses to our original report, “the game remains the same that you played already, which we have strived to make as fun as possible, and we feel confident about this.” Insider Gaming understands that this is true; there haven’t been any significant changes to the game since its last public playtest, and almost all of the additional features have been delayed in order to be implemented into the game’s seasons because of constant project pushbacks. This includes any form of true progression or challenges, including prestiging and weapon challenges, and other features that have been discussed, such as kill cams, killstreaks, theatre mode, a competitive mode, private matches, and more.
These claims are true as ever since the decision to delay the game to fix the key infrastructure the current build of the game has been in a code freeze with all future features pushed into their respective seasonal updates. A topic that Mark has been very forthright about on twitter.
Continuing on with the article it reads
Speaking on ‘The Boys Club’ and its pursuit of CoD, one source said:
They will nitpick the feature to their liking [similar to COD] and tell the design/production teams to come back later once they make the appropriate changes. Even once the team makes those changes, The Boys Club will come up with something else and the process will repeat again for months. All resulting in either the feature finally being implemented into the game or being cut entirely.
Tom’s source here has described what happens in any job, you won’t nail your deliverables 100% on the first try consistently, and even after a round of changes there could still be issues that need fixing. Unsurprisingly this cycle can continue for a while oftentimes ending in losses being cut and features getting scrapped.
Tom goes on to say
Another source said, “the constant changing of approved features, or adding new features that don’t really affect the game has pushed us back significantly, probably a year or so at this point”.
To be clear, chasing COD isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s one of the biggest first-person shooters of all time, so it makes sense, but when features are pushed back constantly or canceled entirely because they are not ‘COD enough’, it has a detrimental effect on those working on the project and the project itself.
As Tom helpfully points out here, studying your contemporaries in the market and seeing where you can improve on their offering is just what I’d call sound business, but of course much like the rest of this article, this point too must be twisted into something more sinister than it actually is in practice. As well this bit pertaining to “new features that don’t really affect the game” is curious to me as I can find no example of such a feature existing as someone who’s played every iteration of XDefiant so the fact no examples are offered here is strange to say the least.
And finishing off this section of the article Tom says
Some developers have even expressed immense frustration over XDefiant’s seemingly positive ‘open transparency’ conversations. It was said that these ‘updates’ don’t often align with what is actually going on, including upcoming features that haven’t yet been internally discussed or problems that don’t exist.
“But hey, at least mentioning no SBMM gets cheap brownie points, right?” said one developer.
Now SBMM, being such a hot button topic in online discussions of competitive pvp shooters, is bound to attract eyeballs at it’s mention, and as long as people respond positively to its exclusion in XDefiant, Mark is going to keep bringing it up, after all having eyeballs on the game is an important part of making sure the game stays culturally relevant and attracts a player base that can sustain the title for many years to come.
In this last section of the article Tom details where XDefiant is at currently and where they will be in the near future, reading
As outlined in our previous report, XDefiant is not currently canceled. Following the insanely popular open test, Ubisoft has some expectations that the game could be the free-to-play hit that they’ve been looking for for a number of years. That’s why the internal goal right now is to get the game out the door, but it’s unclear how long it will take to fix the game’s current issues—we’ll have to wait on Mark Rubin’s update for that one.
Internally, some developers believe that seasonal content targets will almost certainly be missed due to ongoing issues, lack of resources (unless the game is a stellar hit), and just staff wanting the “XD Sega” to be over so they can move on to other projects.
At the time of writing, there’s no release date set for XDefiant, and Insider Gaming understands that the past-generation console versions for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have been canceled.
Now firstly on the topic of the game lacking resources currently this is true and while this does sound quite alarming, it’s important to remember the financial state of Ubisoft as a company isnt great at the moment and the fact that XDefiant is a new IP that isn’t yet generating any revenue for the company.
Getting bigger budgets to expand the development team is tricky for now but this problem is likely to solve itself as soon as the free to play money tap is turned on and with 3 support studios already attached to the project and multiple job postings relating to XDefiant already listed for a variety of positions. they’re well positioned to expand if new budgets get approved. Secondly on the topic of last gen console i also understand this to be true, as far as what ive heard from my conversations with developers, the last gen console port has not seen active development for awhile now as its all hands on deck with the current gen build, it’s unlikely development on the Last Gen build will resume at any point in the future.
Tom ends the article with this passage saying
Unfortunately, XDefiant’s story is a common one within the industry, but it should be talked about, reported on, and taken seriously.
It’s clear that the video game industry is not in a good place right now, but something has to be done. Whether it’s the unionization of workers or anything else, something has to be done for contractors and workers in the video game industry. For the longest time, I was told, “That’s just how the industry is,” but I refuse to believe that meaningful change can’t happen one day. Hopefully, that day will come sooner rather than later.” – A former developer of XDefiant
And there we have it, apologies this was a bit long winded but i felt it important to add a lot of this context to the discussion around these allegations, thanks to everyone who watched so far to this point and if you could take a moment to drop a like and let me know your thoughts on this whole situation down in the comments, what do you make of it? I look forward to reading your opinions and hopefully ill see you in the next video, till then pce out and have a good one.
A huge thank you to XDC for having this posted on XDI, be sure to follow them on YouTube and X
