XDefiant, Ubisoft's upcoming multiplayer shooter that some have hailed as the return of a more old-school, more 2010s-style, perhaps more try-hard Call of Duty-esque experience, has been delayed for an indeterminate amount of time. Why? Because it somehow offended the console gods: failing to pass the certification process for at least one of either PlayStation or Xbox, which means we all have to wait to get our hands on it until Ubisoft can rectify the problems that cropped up and try to get XDefiant certified again.
If you're used to the sunlit uplands of PC gaming, where the only barrier between a developer and a videogame release is whether they can be bothered to upload a build to a cloud storage platform, «certification» might be a bit of a mystery to you. In short, it's the process by which platform owners like Sony and Microsoft scrutinise games that release on PlayStation and Xbox to make sure they meet those platforms' requirements before coming out.
According to a post on the Ubisoft blog, the game didn't meet those requirements for at least one of the consoles (though which one isn't stated), so the game's being pushed back.
«At the end of July, we started this process, and we got our first results back by mid-August which was a Not Pass,» wrote XDefiant executive producer Mark Rubin, «We realized then that we had more work related to compliance than we had anticipated.» If XDefiant had passed its first attempt at certification, the game would probably have released at the end of August, but alas, it wasn't to be. Instead, Ubisoft has spent the last month or so working on rectifying the issues that cropped up during certification in order to submit it again.
Rubin says Ubisoft will «hopefully be submitting
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