XDefiant: Five Hidden Features You May Not Know – Opinion

After months of anticipation, XDefiant finally released earlier this week bringing a breath of fresh air to the gaming world and here are five hidden features you may not know. 

Spending years as a Call Of Duty fan, I cannot begin to describe how refreshing it is to see and play a new first-person shooter that feels both entertaining and traditional all at the same time. I have thoroughly enjoyed playing XDefiant this week even despite the server issues that occurred during the launch of the game on Tuesday.

XDefiant is full of brand-new maps, new weapons and plenty of new game modes including some of the popular cut modes from previous Call Of Duty titles. For example, in Black Ops 3, there was a game mode known as ‘safeguard’ which relied on one team guiding a robot to the other side of the map whilst the opposition tried to prevent you. In XDefiant, this mode has returned but it is instead known as ‘escort’.

Here are five hidden features you may not have known about in XDefiant…

‘Going prone’ does not exist

In Call Of Duty, players can ‘go prone’ which involves your characters lying flat on the ground. This is an ability that is typically used by ‘campers’ when defending or attacking an objective in modes such as ‘search and destroy’ or ‘domination’.

However, in XDefiant, the ability to ‘go prone’ does not exist and I personally love this inclusion. This is because it vastly reduces the amount of campers in the game, making it feel more open and entertaining.

Limited climbing to improve realism

One thing that a lot of shooter/open-world games have adapted is the ability for our characters to due unrealistic things such as jumping too high and climbing over unclimbable things amongst others. However, Ubisoft have limited the number of objects that players can climb over.

This makes it more difficult to ‘camp’ or ‘snipe’ which again improves the entertainment within the game in my opinion. The fact that our characters have an element of realism to them makes the game flow and feel more genuine.

Emoji reactions

Admittedly, I am not a massive gamer but one thing that I have noticed that feels unique to XDefiant is the introduction of reaction emojis. These occur in game whenever you have been killed by an opposition player.

Instead of showing a kill-cam, players are forced to wait up to five seconds to be able to respawn and when this occurs, you can react to your death by using one of several emojis. I can’t say I have ever seen these in a video game before and it makes Ubisoft’s attention to detail even more impressive.

Unique Dialogue

In games such as XDefiant and Call Of Duty, players will often hear a narrator/commander who will commentate on the game itself, but one thing that Ubisoft has included is unique dialogue that’s dedicated to your character/team depending on how they are doing.

For example, if you are killed by the same opponent twice, the narrator will give you a short but motivational message telling you not to “give up”. Similarly, towards the end of a game players will also hear a unique dialogue based on how well or badly their team did. If you are losing, you are likely to hear negative/sarcastic comments.

MVP

Similar to Call Of Duty Mobile, one thing that XDefiant has also added is an ‘MVP’ at the end of each game. The player on the winning team with the highest overall score will be the MVP for that particular game, but there is also a less-known MVP.

Just before you return to a lobby, you can vote/praise another member of your team who did particularly well. This is shown on the screen with a green thumbs-up emoji above the name of the player you have voted for.

XDefiant fans, what other hidden features have you noticed in the game? Let us know on Twitter @TheGamingDeckUK.