xDefiant is a free-to-play multiplayer-focused first-person shooter which takes heavy inspiration from the likes of Call of Duty. Having garnered quite a bit of interest over the course of its development, many have been excitedly waiting for the Ubisoft-published title to get a concrete release date. The team have now posted an update to their blog – but unfortunately it is not good news.

Taking to their blog to update fans, xDefiant’s executive producer ‘Mark Rubin’ (who previously worked on Call of Duty) said: “Hello XDefiant Fans! I’ve got an update for you and it’s a big one! We want to explain further why we haven’t given a specific date yet for our launch. And sometimes full transparency is like drinking from a firehose so hope you all are thirsty! :D”

After explaining how the submission process goes for in-development titles, Rubin revealed that xDefiant was unfortunately rejected by both Microsoft and Sony following the game’s most recent submission, saying:

“At the end of July, we started this process, and we got our first results back by mid-August which was a Not Pass. We realized then that we had more work related to compliance than we had anticipated. If it HAD passed, then we would have been able to ship at the end of Aug. But it didn’t and so we have spent the last 3-4 weeks fixing those issues and getting ready to do another submission.”

Of course, the team will continue to try to get xDefiant out as soon as possible, with Rubin stating: “We are currently in the CM [Candidate Master] prep part of that process and will hopefully be submitting to 1st parties in a little less than 2 weeks. If that Passes cleanly, then we could be looking at a mid-to-end of September release. There is however a likely scenario where we get a conditional Pass meaning we have to do a Day 1 patch with some final fixes to ensure compliance. If we do need to do a Day 1 patch, then that pushes our date out to early/mid-October.”

xDefiant has hosted a number of betas over the past year and has seen a great deal of positive feedback from fans of the genre. Hopefully Ubisoft are able to pass certification sooner rather than later.

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KitGuru says: Have you tried out xDefiant? What did you think? Could it be a Call of Duty killer? Let us know your thoughts down below.

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