"Tom Clancy All-Star Brawl" is about to justifiably introduce more characters.
Not many people dare to put their names in the title of the game, and there are only a few people who can make the name in the title remembered by the player. Sid Meier, the game designer who single-handedly created the Civilization series, should probably be the first in line; tom Clancy, the American military fiction writer, can probably get the second place.
In 1996, Clancy co-founded Red Storm Game Studios. Ubisoft has since acquired Red Storm, the right to use Clancy's name and work without taxation, and prefixed all military-themed games based on Clancy's work: "Tom Clancy's."
Starting with the first Rainbow Six in 1998, Clancy's title has appeared in more than 40 Ubisoft games over the past 20 years, such as Ghost Recon, Cell Splinter, Eagle Strike, The Division, and other game IPs, all of which have stained his light.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Xenomorphs
When Clancy died in 2013, more and more Ubisoft games were being released under Clancy's name. Ubisoft has always been working on original plots, but in recent years the game has increasingly deviated from Tom Clancy's worldview blueprint, not so much as "adaptation" as completely original. In order to introduce popular elements such as open world or multiplayer battles, Ubisoft inevitably has to sacrifice the depth and narrative of the game, and "Tom Clancy's Game" is no longer synonymous with hardcore military-oriented games.
In July 2021, Ubisoft unveiled the free-to-play competitive FPS game Tom Clancy's XDefiant for the first time. As can be seen from the "XD" in the title, this game has no serious content, and the only thing that has anything to do with Clancy's work is the player's choice of characters.
Ubisoft introduced four factions from its Tom Clancy Universe: echelon, the secret service force echelon in the Cell Splinter series, the main villain in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, the Wolf, and the two opposing factions in the The Division series, the Purifier and the Exile.
In XDefiant, factions are similar to the class system, with players selecting different factions to get different passive bonuses and active skills, such as healing aura, turrets, shields, stealth, and perspective, much like Overwatch and Valorant.
The four major factions are currently announced
"Escorting The Carrying Target"
At the same time, according to the trailer and development log, XDefiant focuses on 6v6 small-scale map confrontations, and the pace is relatively fast; the weapons are basically based on reality, and the time required for most guns to kill a single enemy (TTK) is also controlled within 0.5 seconds, and the actual experience is more like "Call of Duty".
Fast-paced FPS is of course indispensable to the sliding shovel, the GIF source IGN real machine demonstration screen
Players seem to be surprised by such a seemingly uninvited "stitching monster" game, and do not give particularly positive advice. And the dissatisfaction with Ubisoft's long-term appropriation of The Tom Clancy's name as a marketing gimmick also exploded when "XDefiant" was announced, figuratively transforming into the yin and yang in the trailer's comments section.
Even after some controversy, XDefiant gathered many players at the time and successfully completed a closed test. In September 2021, a month after the end of the test, Ubisoft's development team wrote a development log pointing out some of the issues that players focused on in the closed test, including Tom Clancy's naming problem.
Since then, "XDefiant" has been without news and has been silent for nearly half a year. It wasn't until March 16, 2022, that the development team released another log that mentioned a project called Insider Sessions. From March 15, Ubisoft will gradually open up the eligibility of a subset of registered players to enter the "Insider Meeting" test game, allowing players to "fight alongside" Ubisoft's development team to provide more feedback.
Currently, testing qualifications are not available in Asia or on platforms other than PCs. However, the logs point out that the number of participants will be expanded as this program continues, and players who need to test must go to the game's official website to register in order to obtain qualifications in time.
The number of test qualifications is limited, the players participating in the test also have to sign a confidentiality agreement, and there is no real machine screen leak, so the test of XDefiant has not aroused much repercussions. More players focused on the announcement itself, and they found that the long prefix of XDefiant had disappeared, and that all the promotional materials since the launch of the Insider Conference had never seen Tom Clancy's name again.
The new logo of the game
This does not mean that Ubisoft has completely abandoned the "Tom Clancy" brand. The official journal and Twitter explained it this way: they wanted to add something "outside the Tom Clancy Universe" to XDefiant, and introduced the major factions of other games as alternate characters for the player, so they had to change the name.
But this decision can at least be used as proof that Ubisoft listened to the opinions of players, and its willingness to make changes to the game was enough to applaud players who still remember the game.
Tom Henderson, a well-known game whistleblower abroad, also praised Ubisoft's decision, although he believes that XDefiant may not necessarily become a mainstream shooter, he is happy to see the changes that Ubisoft may make in these months.
Although the "Tom Clancy Universe", commonly used in Ubisoft's official caliber, covers a breadth of content that is quite suitable for making a "Smash Bros." game, but "XDefiant", which is free from the shackles of Clancy, can free up its hands and feet and introduce more content, creating unexpected possibilities for players.
How much determination the development team is willing to pay to "de-Crancize" roughly determines whether XDefiant, which lost in the early stage of marketing, can turn around when it is officially launched.