Year 1 Update

Hey everyone!

We're super excited to be launching Season 2 and I had a lot I wanted to talk about, hence this blog post instead of a simple tweet.

So, to start one of the most important topics for me is Netcode/Hitreg. We've been making some improvements since launch that has made Netcode/Hitreg better, but we still have a ways to go and we've added some more specialist engineers to help with this work. There are two big things that we are working on to improve Netcode/Hitreg. They are:

1. Focus on increasing the amount of proactive resend of packets to mitigate issues experienced by players suffering from packet loss.
   • Bandwidth reduction efforts ongoing to allow for this as we need to reduce bandwidth usage to accommodate the bandwidth increases associated with proactive resend.
2. Migrating more gameplay systems to lightweight networking protocols to improve their responsiveness.

So basically, we want to automatically resend every packet 4 times. That is the basic industry standard because packet loss is more common than people realize but usually losing a few packets here and there isn't a big deal. In a twitch shooter however, it is. Right now, we are only resending twice because our packets are basically too big (simplifying the issue) and if we resend 4 times the traffic will slow down and will create worse Netcode/Hitreg issues. So, we need to reduce the size of our packets (again simplifying) and then we should be able to do 4 frames of automatic resends and that should make a huge difference in people's Netcode/Hitreg experience.

This is a big task, but everyone is working as hard as possible to get this work in as soon as possible. It's hard to give you a solid estimate as to when it will be ready because there is a lot of iteration and testing time. But we're hoping to see something towards the end of Season 2 if not sooner.

Alright, with that out of the way I just want to quickly address the status of the game. i.e. is the game dying? No, the game is absolutely not dying. We know there are things we need to improve like Netcode/Hitreg and adding more content to progression, but the game is doing well. We just want it to do better. And we do that by addressing the concerns of our community which has always been the plan. Ubisoft is very much behind us and has allocated more resources to the team in order for us to do that.

And that leads us to our Year 1 Roadmap. As you can see, we have a lot of new content and features coming in Year 1 ending in our biggest ever event in Season 4. As a reminder, all of the items you see on the roadmap could shift around and some stuff will land at a season launch and some stuff will land in patches mid-season. So, we'll keep sharing regular updates to this Year 1 Roadmap.

And lastly don't forget to tune in to the Season 2 Reveal on 9/18.

Thank you everyone for all of the support that you have given us!!! We're looking forward to an amazing rest of the year for XDefiant!