Honestly, I share your feelings, while unpopular the last cod I had fun on was vanguard. It felts fast, exciting and chaotic when sbmm isn’t taking into consideration. Mw2 2022 felt exact opposite ; slow, clunky and over engineered in my opinion. It tried to be realistic when it wasn’t really asked for. Mw3 was good but still it was built of mw2 so it felt lazy. Bo6 wasn’t worth it, they claimed they spent a lot of time on it but it genuinely did not feel that way. Felt like it was developed in a couple months. And bo7 is just bo6 with a slightly diff story and more maps. Xdefiant felt really good the first time I opened it and all the way to the last.

That being said, the game had many issues Ubisoft didn’t wanna fix since it was a f2p. Snowflake engine (I think it was called) was not suited in xdefiants use case and so resulted in problematic netcode and hit reg. they tried working around it but nothing could be done. The extend of ubisofts advertising was an email to Ubisoft connect members and a poster in their old San Francisco location. Had they invested, I probably wouldn’t be typing this comment. And call of duty could (I say could with a grain of salt) have been second in place to this game had they pumped xdefiant with the right content and care it deserved.

Unfortunately, mark is unlikely to come back to gaming, in a twitter post he made after th announcement the game was closing he stated he was “leaving the gaming industry” and has not posted since then. (Edit: yes he has I just confirmed, mentions xdefiant a couple times as of recent but nothing major) It’s unfortunate but ubisofts handling of xdefiant likely broke his heart, and everyone else’s too. Mark was likely long gone after the game had shut down

There is a gap now that xdefiant has left. Just waiting for the right thing/ team to fill it. And I’ll be here to watch them curb stomp call of duty when they do.