Ubisoft San Francisco has taken the lead on development for the first time since South Park: The Fractured But Whole, but is still critical of XDefiant’s engine.

The game is a bit buggy, and people are talking about it on Twitter. One user contacted Mark Rubin, the executive producer of XDefiant, and asked if the studio had rushed the release, but was given a detailed answer by the producer, who said it was the technology, the Snowdrop engine borrowed from Massive Entertainment, that was the reason the free-to-play FPS was not 100%:

“Is the game being rushed? No. We have an engine that has only ever been an MMO, so the whole infrastructure for an FPS had to be built from scratch. Even Call of Duty started on ID Tech, which was a shooter engine. Apex Legends started with a shooter engine. But for us, we are working to develop all new technology in an engine that was designed for something else. That said, the engine is really great, but it takes a lot of work, and with that work comes a lot of bugs that other engines have already worked out. We’re not a shooter that’s been around for 20 years. If you like what we’re trying to do, stick around and you’ll see things improve and new features added. But if it’s not for you, that’s fine, you can move on. It’s not that it’s outdated. It’s just that it wasn’t made for first-person shooters, so there’s a lot to do and a lot to improve,” Rubin wrote.

Indeed, it has been used by Ubisoft in MMOs before, as we saw in two episodes of Tom Clancy’s The Division, but it later showed up in Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and its sequel, The Settlers: New Allies, or Starlike: Battle for Atlas, or possibly Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Avatar, on the other hand, was a single-player title (though it had co-op features), while XDefiant was designed to be multiplayer by default.

We’ll see where that goes over time.

Source: WCCFTech