XDefiant continues to develop since being released by Ubisoft on May 21. Today, the 1.4 patch rolls out, with the notes recognising that it’s mostly targeting a few bug fixes and tweaking out some glitches. Ubisoft is also adding some new cosmetics bundles and implementing a minor range of quality-of-life improvements, so it’s not all that key an update.
As these patches are deployed, it’s no big secret that with each passing one, the XDefiant player count is dwindling. On social and streaming platforms, the sentiment around the first-person shooter is growing stale and people are simply losing interest in the game.
What’s In XDefiant’s 1.4 Patch?
It’s a simple assortment of things in the latest patch to hit the XDefiant platform.
Ubisoft has addressed a series of bugs impacting challenge progress, in-game stats, and a certain glitch in Zone Control that would almost automatically award the attacking team the win in a few seconds. In the patch notes, the team addressed this particular bug as ‘weird’.
The bulkiest part of the patch notes is around weapons, with Ubisoft having tweaked the M44, the TAC-50, and the L115, increasing their overall spread and making the game’s assortment of sniper rifles less overpowered. To put it simply, it now means that players will need to be ‘fully scoped in’ to reliably land kills with a sniper rifle.
The team also addressed issues with ‘magnet’ sticky grenades and tweaked some issues with the in-game reporting system.
That’s all well and good, but with the player count dropping with each passing day, fewer people are around to soak up the benefits of these changes. When it was released, XDefiant soared, but the buzz quickly dropped off, and within a matter of weeks, the free-to-play first-person shooter had all but passed out of relevance.
If we use the numbers from Twitch as a representative example, we can see that the all-time high peak viewer count of 203,000 has dwindled this month to just 8,000 – and it continues to decrease.
It’s part and parcel of a new release and we can expect that, but this game will only survive with a healthy player base, and that presents a huge concern.
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