Video Gamers Podcast - [Deep Dive] XDefiant - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Gaming Hosts Paul, Ryan and Josh are back with another incredible episode. We’ve been playing a lot of XDefiant and we’re bringing you the best (and worst) things about this new shooter. Is XDefiant a flash in the pan or does it stand on it’s own? Is it fun? What sets it apart? From gamers to gamers, we bring you the details, the moments and more. It’s another awesome deep dive from your favorite gaming podcast!  Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Disratory, Ole Jake and JigglePuff Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, fellow gamers! We are back with another episode of the Video Gamers Podcast. If you are new here, we are three lifelong gamer dads, and we release new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Today we are talking about the free-to-play first-person shooter X-Defiant. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, he is running around invisible trying to flank the enemy team. It's Josh. Guys, where are you? I had that team. I had the 1v6, guys. If you had backed me up, we'd have taken this point by now. We were that close. Yeah, there's objectives in the game, Josh. Come on, scrubs. The first kill would have been the domino

to knock down all the rest. Teenage. All right. And then joining Josh and me, his last match just ended and his closing screen award is for Tried. Yes! It's Ryan.

Yes! I got it. So Paul doesn't know what's going on, but Josh and I made a bet before we recorded that Paul would use this on his intros. And I just won 20 bucks, baby. Oh, man. I was like, we saw it one time.

Paul's not going to say it. And then Ryan's like, he's going to say it 100%. And he's like, 20 bucks. And I was like, you're on. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was so good.

Yeah, when I see a title screen and everyone's got a bunch of awards and then the one poor guy who just isn't good at shooters gets tried i had to pull it out for one of you oh man that's great i'm glad you gave it to ryan though that's more fitting so yeah i'll take it 20 bucks 20 bucks 20 bucks and josh loves his ghillie suits too much i know how much he loves running around invisible. Yeah. All right. Well, before we start our deep dive here, Josh, I think you're going to read a review.

Someone left us. I do have a couple of reviews. We're only going to read one because I know we're going to run long on this episode. But, you know, reviews are like the lifeblood of the show when somebody is looking around and saying, hey, let me check out a gaming podcast. You know, reviews are the first thing that they're going to look at. So if you are a listener of the show and you haven't left us a review yet, I am humbly asking that you take the 60 seconds to leave a review. If you listen on

Spotify, you can rate us five stars. If you're on Apple, that's where you can leave a written review. If you're not on either and, hey, you really love the show and you want to say, hey, you know what? These guys deserve a review. You can email us one. We'll take it. But this one comes in from Gray Wolves. It is a five-star review, and it's titled Simply Wonderful. And it says, I'm a relatively new listener, but I've never left a rating.

So I am definitely one of those guys who got called out recently by the boys for not leaving a review as a gamer dad myself. I can't get enough of this show. It's so friendly and I feel like I'm sitting around with high school friends. The show is funny, informative, and best of all, it's clean. I have a young boy and girl twins who are in the car with me a lot.

Needless to say, I'm list. My listening options are limited and I don't need my little ones hearing a show full of garbage. Thank you boys for always keeping it about the games and not devolving into world news and politics and other stuff the way so many other podcasts do. So, if

you want a gaming podcast that is what it says it is, you truly cannot go wrong with this one. Usually, I would have some form of constructive criticism, but not this time. That's how good the show is. Thanks again, Shane. Well, thanks to you, Shane. What a review, man. Shane knows how to write a review, boys. Yeah, for a first review, that's quality right there. Yeah.

Oh, man. Yeah, I was going to say, now let me talk to you about the upcoming election. Oh, no. Run. Words you'll never hear on this podcast. No, no, you never will. Oh, what a nice review. Thank you, Shane. We really appreciate it. For the rest of you out there, if you haven't left a review, like Josh said, just take a couple seconds. Doesn't take too much time. And then, Ryan, if people want to take the next step up and they like what we do and want to help support us, what can they do? Yeah. So, in addition to leaving a review really helps us out um patreon if you if we really uh you know we try to provide a good awesome like we said family-friendly content

that uh everybody can enjoy so if it's something that means a lot to you uh consider helping us out um you get a lot of awesome perks uh through patreon You can have bonus episodes, early access, Discord perks, bunch of cool stuff. You can do that over at MultiplayerSquad.com. Bunch of different tiers you can sign up for, but it'd mean a lot to us and really help us out. Absolutely. All right, so let's start talking about Xtifiant. We always start these deep dives by reading a description of the game. This one here is not available on steam it is only available through ubisoft connect and here's their description ubisoft's worlds collide in a free-to-play first-person arena shooter where you compete to be the best in fast-paced online matches all right now x defiant

has been on our radar for a long time. We've been covering the show for well over a year. Brian and I were able to hop into one of the betas. We had an absolute blast. This game has famously been delayed several times. There were some issues with being certified on console. And despite all of it, we are finally here. The game released a couple of weeks back on May 21st and ryan let me just throw this to you here first if there's anyone listening who maybe hasn't played x defiant hasn't been following along with the news what is x defiant if you want a fast-paced shooter like call of duty with abilities and ultimates like

Overwatch, mush them together and you got X-Defiant. So it's kind of a way to, if you haven't heard about it, if you haven't looked at it, first of all, shame on you, living under a rock. Listen to us and you would have known. Secondly, it's just

a good old classic arcade style shooter and it is a blast yeah 6v6 yeah lots of different modes how many maps i think there's 14 maps or 14 there's a good bit of maps we were playing the other day and i saw a map i'd never seen before yeah like you beat the odds played a couple hundred matches and somehow never saw yeah oh that's funny yeah i mean this is just a good it feels kind of like an old school arena shooter in a lot of ways and i think for better or worse that is why a lot of people hate it and that's why a lot of people love it so i think as we start to break down this game we'll kind of go over some

of the mechanics some of the forms of progression. We'll give a lot of our thoughts, and hopefully it'll help some of you guys figure out whether or not you want to test it out. I will say it's free to play. Yeah. So low stakes. Free 9 and 9. The best price.

Go check it out, I would say. All right. So I feel like the closest comp, like you said there, Ryan, Call of Duty, right? Yeah. It's got a little bit of that flourish of like an Overwatch or a hero shooter, but I would say a good 85 to 90% of its DNA is Call of Duty. So in what ways would you guys say X Defiant plays like COD? I mean, for me, as somebody that has not played a lot of Call of Duty, Call of Duty Cold War was the first Call of Duty game that I actually dove into, played through the campaign, did the multiplayer, played zombies. I know there's people going, what?

But, you know, like I said, just Battlefield or other shooters. So my basis of comparison in that regard is Call of Duty Cold War, you know, and in that way, it plays very similarly. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's a fast paced, you are, you know, there's quick movement, there's, uh, you know, quick respawn, you're trying to capture points. There's not really anything new as far as the game modes go. It's, you know, domination where it's like, Hey, whoever holds these three points, the longest accrues points or King of the Hill where it's a singular point on a pure shooter. It's one team versus the other team. You've got different objectives. Sometimes it's an escort, this little robot guy. Other times it's hold this one point. And there's a good variety of guns. You do get to level up guns. We'll get into that

in a little bit. But I mean, this is the definition of a pure shooter. The only wrinkle that X-Defiant throws in there is the characters or the classes and the abilities that you get to kind of separate it a little bit. Now, not being a Call of Duty guy, I know that you get things like killstreaks and things like that in Call of Duty, which I guess would be similar, but I don't think they're similar because in Call of Duty, which I guess would be similar, but I don't think they're similar because in Call of Duty, you had to earn a kill streak, whereas in X Defiant, they're just on timers. That's how you acquire these abilities that you use. Once you use it, you can't use it again for another 14 or 15 seconds. Yeah. So I would say the matches are also very quick which is also very call of duty-esque like some of these matches especially if it's a little bit more one-sided they might be over in

like six to seven minutes so even the longer matches seem to be like maybe 15 so i feel like this is kind of a really good game if you only have a short period of time where you can only hop in for half an hour. You can knock out two, maybe even three matches of X-Defiant. You can get in and out. Not terribly long. Yeah, the abilities are clearly where they diverge the most. I would also mention Time to Kill is much slower in X-Defiant. And for better or worse, it does take a little bit longer to kill an enemy. So I feel like whenever I play Call of Duty, there's a lot of instances where someone has that corridor on lockdown. You round the corner, you get popped in the head. Before you recognize anything, you're dead. And in X Defiant, that can still happen with snipers. But sometimes you have

that extra half second to readjust and jump behind that wall, take a second and heal. So that I think is also a little bit divisive. Some people are going to like it. Some people are going to hate it, but that's another area where it diverges a little bit. How do you guys feel about the time to kill? I have to disagree a little bit on this, Paul, because for me, the time to kill when i am shooting somebody is very long when somebody is shooting me is yeah infinitely smaller yeah like i don't know the difference man there's 15 bullets going into this body he turns around he shoots me once and i'm toast and that's what i'm just like what the heck man it's that blimp on your shoulders man yeah something yeah no i i go ahead ryan i was just gonna say i i love

the time to kill because like paul you made an example of the the corridor on lockdown worst case if you if you can't get past it and this guy's nicked you a couple times you know you always have your abilities too so you could throw like if you're the cleaner you could throw this fire drone at him and this drone flies at them and goes out and explodes when it hits them so it either does a lot of damage or kills them or even at uh worst case get off a grenade or something so having that ability to at least respond because i mean face it like we said we're just a bunch of dads that love to game we're not professionals we're not sitting in those areas doing practice stuff and hitting targets and getting all our our you know ads set up down and it's just it's just that quick fun shooter game good quality time to kill quick matches

and and it just makes it for great gameplay yeah i am i am a fan of the time to kill, to be honest. I've always said I prefer a slightly longer time to kill in games because I am not a young pro e-sports guy that can just snapshot headshots and stuff like that anymore. So for me, I do enjoy the time to kill in this. I do think it's just about perfect. I agree because you can definitely have it where it's too long. Like the cycle is a game that no longer exists. All the servers are down, but Josh remembers there were times when like someone would be chasing you and you could use certain movement abilities and duck behind corners. People sometimes would chase you for two to three minutes before they could get you down.

And that was where it's like, okay, maybe the time to kill is a little bananas. I don't know that you should be able to go on a wild goose chase that long. But at the same time, I always felt like Call of Duty was a little too short. I do feel like this is almost perfectly dialed in. There are times, and believe it or not, guys, some people cheat. I don't know if you know this. What? But, you know, X-Defiant is no exception. I've been in some matches where I'm like,

I'm 99% sure that guy's using something. But yeah, I do feel like Time to Kill is pretty good. All right, let's start breaking down some of the specifics of X-Defiant. And let's start by talking about the factions, because I think this is actually kind of fun. This is a little bit of a wrinkle that Ubisoft put on it. They basically have five different factions that are based off other Ubisoft properties. So this is almost like, if you will, the Ubisoft extended universe, right? You've got the Phantoms who are from Ghost Recon. They rely on fancy tech. You've got the Echelon from Splinter Cell, which is all about stealth. You've got Cleaners from the Division, which use fire.

The Libertad from Far Cry, which specialize in healing yourself and your teammates. And DedSec from Watchdogs, who are cyber attackers. All right, so we're going to break down all five because they give you different abilities, different ultimates, different passive abilities as well. But I was kind of curious like did you guys generally jive with one faction or another or do you just kind of hop around and play all of them like how do you feel about it i play two factions almost exclusively and that is and forgive me because see this is like they're hard to keep track of there are

thank you because i was just about to be like am i gonna sound like an idiot here where it's like yeah they all kind of look the same other than the fire dudes which are wearing fireman outfits you know it's like i like the the the the stealth ones you know you got a radar ping that lets you wall hack basically and then you can go stealth uh it's the echelon echelon there you go see i was like it's not the dead, and it's not the other one. But the other one has a shield barrier that you can plop down, which I like a lot, because that allows you to

kind of outplay some people occasionally. I don't remember the name of that. Phantoms. Phantoms. See, there you go. Phantoms and Echelon. Wouldn't the Phantom be the people that can cloak? Doesn't that make more sense? You would think, but the problem is that a lot of these Tom Clancy games, they have a lot of overlap.

The Venn diagrams are kind of over one another with Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell. Yeah, but for me, those two factions I have played almost exclusively. I have tried the cleaners. I just find them to be bulky, if that makes sense like are they bulkier like they look a little bit bigger yeah i think that they are yeah and so i don't know i just in a game where it's all about you know you know run around shooting people it's like i want the little skinny people that can go invisible or you know have the radar ping to tell me where my enemies are ahead of time versus

like the chunky dude with like fire extinguishers and like a full fire outfit on. Right. Exactly. So, but I do like that there is a variety and it's funny cause I think it was Ryan and I were playing the other night and he, I,

you were somebody asked, like, do you guys ever play the Libertad people, which is the, from far cry but they're the healers basically and i was like no man like who you healing in this game like the time to kill is quick enough that like heels aren't really going to make a difference but then i was like but i sure do like it when one of those is on our team yep yep or they plop down

that little canister that constantly heals you're always glad to have them around yeah exactly for what about you ryan do you feel the same or do you like any of the other factions yeah i played those two a lot um the other one i would play uh would be the cleaner i liked it you could uh there was a couple i i it was really cool how i think each faction has a part to play in certain objectives and you can tell between us and then josh on who focuses on objectives the non-flankers the non-blankers um so like with the phantoms you can you can use your shield on a on the escort mission and you can go out there and you can really move that guy with your shield um as you're walking like you're holding shield and and then uh coinciding with

that the cleaners have like this kind of just suicide explosion flame thing that the guy can do so you can just run into the middle and blow yourself up there and then it kills them so there's counterbalances to the different abilities which i think is really really neat and then again you know with um with echelon where you can go invisible or you can ping i would typically use it to ping because when you do it your your intel suit shoots out a radar and then it spikes everything on the map and then you can see them throughout like behind walls so you can see characters and your enemies if they're about to pop out you can get a beat on them right before they pop out um and it helps a ton in tight packed maps so i

thought it was really really cool how all the different abilities and factions kind of played off each other especially with the objectives there's a little bit of rock paper scissors involved like not not in a hardcore way but there are times when if our team is getting destroyed by multiple snipers, then maybe you can switch to the ghillie suit, put on a loadout with an SMG run all the way around. It's going to take you a minute, but then you flank them, take out all of their snipers at once. And all of a sudden now you're moving a payload.

Yeah. Or like similarly, Ryan, what you were mentioning, especially since sex defiant is still a little bit new. I did play one of the rounds using the Blitz Shield. So like, I don't know if we're going to break down literally every single ability, but with the Phantoms, what happens is every faction gives you an ult, they give you a

passive, and you have the choice between two abilities. So for the Phantoms who rely on shields, one is a shield that you shoot out. And then the other one is a blitz shield that you can hold. And I played one round where everybody was playing the same on the other team. They were all trying to go mid range ARs. And I just brought out the shield, stood on the payload. No one seemed to be able to aim at my feet enough to kill me. and i just marched that that payload through the entire game it ended and i had three kills and four deaths and yet that was enough to just push the payload all anyone had to do is just one guy needed to switch to the fire bomber once which you mentioned ryan it's just the aoe fire it goes past the shield and it would have knocked me out that would have been the end of it

i would have switched off. So there is an element of switching on the fly, which I love because that's very reminiscent of Overwatch. Call of Duty, if you want to do your burst fire M16, you're never going to switch off it. But because of the abilities of X to find, it's a little bit more teamwork, a little bit thinking and strategizing along the way,

which I love. Yeah, for sure. I love that you get the choice of the two abilities per faction. I guess the only question would be, let's just say that you had one skin, but you could pick from 10 different abilities. It's the same game ultimately, right? I mean, it's really just the skins, the cosmetic nature of the different groups that you get to pick. I'm not saying it's the same game ultimately right i mean it's really just the skins like the cosmetic nature of the the different groups that you get to pick i'm not saying it's bad i just like the the abilities that you get to use are like the the you know nuts and bolts of the game i guess as far as that goes other than obviously the shooting part of it but i really

do enjoy that option like i you, you know, I go with the echelon. See, I remembered the people now, the echelons. And a lot of times I do, I want to take my SMG. I want to, I have, I want to have my, you know, invisible cloak, a ghillie suit, and I want to sneak around and take out the snipers. Sometimes I want to go in AR and kind of hold down a corner and having that radar pulse that highlights enemies through walls makes a lot of sense. This also comes to play on the different maps because some maps are very narrow maps with not real long sight lines and things like that. And knowing that a guy is crouched behind a wall guarding it allows me to just jump in and start shooting right away and get the jump on them so i really do like that option of saying okay i want a shield that i can throw out there so that we can move this payload a little bit further i have actually never tried the riot shield which is

funny so i need to kind of dig into that because i like trolling people you know which is kind of fun so maybe i need to to you know expand my horizons a little bit with the classes but you you rush them and you can hit them yeah you can just body check them and then they're dead the best thing i have done is literally a guy was coming after me and i i absolutely i know to shoot the feet and you can actually shoot the head it's like a three pixel wide area but you can shoot him in the head i just turned around like literally 180 and just ran away from him he couldn't catch me and i was like all right well that worked too so one last thing too i want to say about the the factions which i thought was neat is that some games you'll notice when you

pick different characters and stuff you they limit you to certain weapons this one you can be the echelon to snipe with and because you're invisible and stuff and you're like okay this isn't working uh this this area we're in is real tight i need to see where these people are and use an ak or a submachine gun or something and you can switch and still keep your character but switch your weapons so i thought that was really cool that you didn't they didn't limit you in that way and you can switch your loadout after any death too which is really cool so there really is the opportunity to say hey the way i'm playing is not working let me switch this up let me try a

different weapon but then also hey let me try a different class as well yeah to to throw a little bit of love at the uh the the libertad since they are the healers there is one game mode that we'll talk about later called Hotshot, and it does require a little bit more teamwork. I was in a match where all six of us chose the healer, and we all just clumped up together and kind of just like tried to space out our healing. And I got to say, it was pretty awesome. We were really hard to take out because you can only heal, I like every 30 seconds maybe it's a little bit less but all of a sudden when you've got six of them

you're talking once every five seconds someone can heal so it made it very hard for anyone to come through and clear us all out all right let's go ahead and take a short break and then i want to talk a little bit about the ultimate abilities all All right, so now that we are back, it should be mentioned that, and we probably should have made this a little clearer earlier, there are multiple characters within each of the factions, but it's just purely cosmetic. So when you look at the screen, it kind of looks like you have 15 different characters to pick from. There's three for each of the five factions. In reality, they have the exact same abilities. It does not matter who you pick. They look a little bit different. You can unlock new characters. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter.

But as you are playing, you do have access to an ultimate. So just to kind of run down the list here in case people are curious to know, if you are playing as the Phantoms with the shields, your ult is an Aegis shield, which is a giant sphere that surrounds you. Your teammates can run inside it. And then you've got this point blank scatter gun for close combat. So it doesn't let you shoot at distance, but it's very good for moving a payload or holding a zone.

For the Echelon, you get sonar goggles, which lets you see where every enemy is on the entire map, and you get to run around with a silenced Sam Fisher 5.7 pistol. If you are the cleaners, I think it's the lamest ultimate, personally. You get a massive flamethrower before you immediately die. The Libertad get to deploy a backpack that heals everyone within a certain area. And then DedSec, which are the Watch Dogs people, they get an ult to prevent enemies from using any abilities within a certain area. I will say this is not like Overwatch, where one ultimate can swing the whole battle. I think that your ultimates help.

They are fun. You generally are only going to get... How many do you get in a match? just one like i mean sometimes zero maybe i'm bad but i get one i generally get one as well and and and how often would you say you die within five seconds of activating that ability 97 of the time wait you guys it feels like maybe so yeah they're not quite game changers, but they are fun. I would say the massive shield is probably the most useful. That is, I think, the most useful, because that shield is pretty strong.

It should be said, we talk about the phantoms that can deploy shields. The riot shield is indestructible, but you have to hold it. The deployable shield dies pretty quick i mean if the enemy team knows what they're doing they can break through that shield in probably two seconds like it's less than one clip of any guy it's really not like a super strong barrier the ultimates are weird because they're super slow to charge and then anytime i pop one i die within three seconds because you're super slow to charge. And then anytime I pop one, I die within three seconds because you're still super vulnerable while using it. I will say two of the greatest moments that

I've had in this game were because of ultimates, the cleaners, we were on an escort mission or the payload, and it was right near the end of the map, but they had that area locked down. It was just, there was one ramp way that led up and their whole team was just firing down this rampway. And I popped the flamethrower, which will shoot kind of around corners. And I managed to just kill like one guy around and it opened up and I just sprayed that flamethrower and literally took out their entire team

because it's like, it's an insta kill basically. It's not like most flamethrower games where it's like the guy sits there and burns and can try to do a lot. And we wound up we wound up winning and i was like oh that was so clutch the only other time i've had an old actually work really well oddly enough was the um echelon one where you get the goggles so you basically have like a part like a wall hack that lasts like i don't know 15 20 seconds something like that you this pistol. But I was alone on a point holding the point. But popping that let me see where the guys were coming from.

And it was not their whole team. So it was just they were kind of streaming in. And the pistol is a two shot if you hit in the body. So I would just wait and then I'd pop out and then that guy would die. And then here comes his buddy and I'd pop out and then I turned to the right right and there's another guy that's trying to flank me and then i pop him and i like i wiped their whole team while holding this point like by myself so i think there's definitely like best use cases of these ultimates but paul you hit the nail on the head these are not game-changing huge swing ultimates like you would see in Overwatch, where if one dude popped their ult,

that was going to really swing the tide of this battle. I mean, nine out of ten times you pop your ult and somebody headshots you and you're dead just a second or two later. Yeah, well, and that's the cool part, again, with all the other features, too, is where there's a time and a place and a way to use these things.

It's not just blanket. Like I'm just going to kill everybody because I have this ultimate, you know, the first time I, I saw a couple of cleaners use their alts and I'm like, Oh yeah, here we go. When I got mine first time I got it. I'm like,

Oh yeah, I'm about to melt everybody. And I turned the corner and I popped it, you know, way too soon. Cause you're, it's not like you have some crazy defense. Once you pop it,

I turned the corner. I started to walk like with a smile on my face, dead, like within a second. I'm like, Oh, come on. What the heck? And I learned real quick, like you're not invincible. You know, you can die pretty fast. You just got to time it right and use it in the right situation. And they can definitely come in clutch. Similar to your story, Josh, the greatest use I've had was with the Aegis Shield. We were on defense for an escort, and we had already pushed the escort all the way on offense. We're on defense.

I had been holding my ultimate for like the final minute of the match. They got to 99.6% when I was able to pop my shield and stand on it, and it was just enough time for the rest of my team to come in. I got one kill with the scatter gun. My team cleared out all the rest and we won the match. And that was like me being the only guy on my team that was alive for that like five seconds. But it was just enough to keep me alive with that shield. And we won the match.

So they can matter. But you're only going to get it once and it only gives you a very slight advantage for a short period of time yeah all right let's talk about josh's favorite aspect of any game progression right josh needs good progression if he's going to care about a game uh other other than battle pass progression because i don't think any of us care about that, there are two main paths here. One is leveling up your weapons to... Well, really, there is challenges, which when you complete, they can unlock new weapons. And then also as you use weapons, your weapons level up and you unlock attachments, there's also challenges to unlock new characters as well. So let's talk about challenges first, because I think they're a little bit more

unique and are a little bit harder to maybe understand, but it's fun to talk about. So for example, if you want to unlock a certain gun, you can look under the menu, under challenges, and you can see how do I unlock all of these different weapons. Some of them kind of make a lot of sense. You start out with the M4 as an AR. They tell you after you deal 4,000 damage, you're going to unlock the AK-47. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Some of them are a little bit goofier. If you want to unlock the P90 SMG, which is very popular, one of the most popular guns used, you have to run around and get 10 SMG hip fire kills, which is very strange because you're not normally hip firing in a game like Call of Duty or X Defiant.

Also, hip fire in this game is atrocious, by the way. It is the worst hip fire I think I've ever seen in a shooter. Utterly useless. Yeah. Unless you have a shotgun, that's your only case for hipfire. So it's a little bit of an interesting system. You could argue that it provides a little bit extra fun. It forces you to play a little different.

I probably would have never tried hipfiring in SMG, if I'm being honest, except for the fact I was trying to unlock the P90. Other people might argue now you're detracting from the game because people are running around forcing a certain play style just for the purpose of progression. I've been there. I played a game where I was seriously in the negative because I'm trying to get my 10 hipfire kills. So I feel a little conflicted on challenges. I think where I ultimately landed is that I love the system because you're going to unlock everything pretty darn quickly in this game. It's not like you're 180 hours in and you're still working on a challenge. But for a minute there, I did kind of question whether or not I liked it. But

how do you guys feel? I mean, I do like the progression. I mean, you're correct there. I need that carrot to chase in a game. And I had no idea what honestly, like, I think I played three or four matches before I even realized that there's challenges that you can do to try to unlock more weapons. You know, obviously, you're leveling up the weapon that you're do to try to unlock more weapons. You know, obviously you're leveling up the weapon that you're using. So you get to unlock like, you know, a red dot site and then, you know, a grip or, you know, a stock for it or something like that.

But acquiring new weapons is part of the fun of the game. But to do that, like you said, sometimes the challenges are a little weird. Like one of them, I can't, I think it was the ACR where you had to get long range kills with an ar but these are like 50 meters and longer which is that's a long way on these maps because these maps are not like you know you don't have a ton of sniping long range shots or or like lanes that you can shoot down. So I'm just standing back with an AR,

like at long range, hoping to just pick somebody off kind of thing. Like they are a little goofy, but I will say that it definitely gives you something to play for in the match other than just your KD, right? Like that's, I mean,

at least for me and I get, you know, I want to just Merck people. And so when I'm playing, I'm just caring about like, am I, is my KD good? Am I killing more people than I'm dying? Right merc people. And so when I'm playing, I'm just caring about like, is my KD good? Am I killing more people than I'm dying, right? Because that tells me that I'm doing good.

But when you have that challenge you're working on, it gives you that little something extra to just say, even if my KD sucks, at least I'm getting these hipfire kills with this SMG. So I know I'm making progress, right? So I think I am a fan of it even though not all of them are fun challenges to have to get through either yeah for sure it's it's yeah i'm kind of on both sides of the fence with this one because i i do i did like the system i thought it was it was good enough it wasn't anything groundbreaking or crazy but it wasn't punishingly

difficult you know to where i mean it's only 10 kills you can get that in a couple matches probably i mean even with as bad as the hipfire kind of uh play is you know it's it's something that can be done and it's not egregious it's i hate it when they have the challenges that's like know, get 10 360 no scopes and get 15, you know, sliding, uh, shoddy kills from 25 meters, you know, just stupid stuff like that. That's, that's way too difficult, but it is, you know, it does detract from the gameplay where you got these guys obviously trying to beat these challenges and you're like, you've already beat it. So you don't care. And you're trying, I want to win this match, dude, What are you doing? Come on. So there's kind of some give and take.

But, you know, they're nothing crazy. And as long as people kind of try to do the challenges well, they're playing, you know, the objective, then it should all work out. But overall, I thought it was a pretty fair system that, you know, didn't punish you too bad. I like it. Yeah, I think it's pretty clever. And I like the fact that they reward you by using ars you're gonna unlock ars and by using shotguns you're gonna unlock shotguns like that to me makes sense so so josh mentioned a little bit there about upgrading weapons this i think is the more relevant progression that you do far more in the game the challenges you do them

once you unlock that character or weapon and you're done game. The challenge is you do them once, you unlock that character or weapon, and you're done. There's only so many. You knock them all out. That's finished. However, in order to level up your guns, you have to use them. You have to deal damage. You have to get kills. And even during matches, they'll tell you, like when it upgrades, it'll say like, boom, you've just unlocked level two on your AK-47. And so then you can go into your custom loadout. And depending on the weapon, they have different number of attachments. But for example, for ARs, you actually have a grand total of seven things that you can upgrade. You have the muzzle, barrel, front rail, optics, magazine, rear grip, and stock. But the catch is that you can only use five of them at once

so there's a little bit of progression and a little bit of strategy here you have to use the weapons enough to unlock the attachments and then you have to decide which attachments you're going to use and this is where you get to fit your weapons to your play style like am i going to put and i know most people aren't doing this in x defiant but am I going to put, and I know most people aren't doing this in X-Defiant, but am I going to put that four times scope on my ACR so it's better at long range? Or am I just going to use a red dot there? You know, am I going to use an extended mag or am I not so worried about that? And I'd rather focus on recoil and use a different grip or something like that. There's also a lot of stats that these things affect

and i don't even know what they all mean i still to this day i've not looked it up but there are things like flinch control versus recoil versus like restabilizing recovery like we all know what recovery is but then like recoil recovery is a stat on something and yeah like they really do branch out on the stats a lot i mean you know i i maybe i'm different but all i want is my gun to fire like a laser beam i'm a fire in my laser lots of recoil control like so i always go for like the recoil control stuff but um i like the i like the stat leveling or the ability to level up your guns it's just the worst when you get a new gun and then you have to start all over again with iron sights you don't even have a red dot yeah yeah it's very tough the the stats also affect movement speed and time to aim down sites.

So there's like a lot here because now all of a sudden maybe you're focusing on recoil control, but now you've made your character 15% slower and 20% slower aim down sites. Well, now you're kind of like closing that buffer where now I have to land all my shots, even though I thought my recoil is going to help me here. Maybe it's actually hurting me. So there's a lot to tinker with and try to figure out. And again, you can change all this stuff. Every time you die, you can immediately swap out your loadout and mess around with this stuff. You know, Ryan, do you like the system? Do you like having to level up weapons, but then ultimately you get reset to zero when you unlock that new gun i i don't

mind it because it's it does you you get so used to the you know everybody obviously everybody uses a red dot or something along those lines and you're used to that visual kind of cues on how that looks and so when you start that new weapon it's kind of like a reset to your brain and it's exciting to me at least the way i view it is like, okay, cool. Now I got to level this bad boy up, you know. And when it's just by using it, I like that. I don't have to do anything crazy to get some new attachment. I just can use that gun.

All right, sweet. It's level eight now. I can use this grip or this attachment. And especially if I like the weapon and it's more my play style, I can use it more in and unlock it and then follow that tier to the other kind of similar style guns I'm like an a I'm more ar guy and so then I can just try other ones see if that works for me but yeah I I like the leveling system on the guns I like that little kind of reset when you have to use the iron sights it sucks for a

match or two but it didn't take long I mean usually level two i think or three you can unlock the red dot so you get the red dot at level two thankfully they were doing yeah so it's not it's yeah you got one but you still get that okay here we go we're starting fresh you know and then you can get it you know within a match or two um and unlock it so yeah i i didn't mind it at all i thought it was it's it played well for like my play style and you know i enjoyed it and josh you're a huge call of duty war zone fan oh yeah i mean this is exactly the same system absolutely yeah i mean this is not a new system by any means i will say the biggest downside to this system is like the other night i i unlocked or i said you know what i've leveled up my smgs i've leveled up my ars like i've got a sniper that i just don't really snipe that much in this game

so i was like let me try the dmrs you know and the base dmr that you get i'm like okay let me try this out but i've got an iron sight on a dmr dude i went like 3 and 17 while I was trying to use that stupid DMR because I couldn't aim. So a normal match, huh? Right? Yeah. And then it was just like all I wanted to do was unlock the red dot for this thing, but the match was going so poorly.

And it was all my fault. My teammates were doing fine, but this was a 5v6 because I'm sitting here just whiffing shots on this DMR with no scope or optic on it at all. And then finally, I was just like, dude, this is terrible. I swapped to an SMG and literally within four minutes, I was back to almost, I think I finished 23 and 26 or something but it was just like the you kind of feel this in like overwatch right where it's like hey let me try a new character but now you go from feeling like you're fairly decent to just absolute garbage you know to that flanking genji who immediately dies yes exactly and so that's the one problem i have with the like it's cool to unlock a new weapon but it's not so cool to feel like i'm sliding back like really far you know in that regard so at the same time i'm a sucker for unlocking stuff though so even though it's like you know if i mean i've kind of maxed out my p90 right like so it's kind

of again that's that carrot on a stick for me to be like well maybe i can make this dmr work for me if i just unlock a few things on it yeah and i hate the dmrs in this game just for the record well i was gonna say too real quick um with that though it's kind of in line with everything else to where like arena i would have guns that i want to upgrade and i'd have them sitting in an old custom slot on the bottom and when i get to arena that's the level that's the level that i tried to upgrade the guns because it's just a killing fest it's so tight and compact there's guys everywhere so you can usually use that time to get you know the kill and then on the other levels where it's a lot more spaced out i won't do that so it is cool that again certain things lend themselves to uh you know uses in a certain Yeah. And if you're the kind of person that only wants

to play one game, this game throws a lot of weapons to level, a ton of attachments, a ton of characters to unlock, all the challenges. There's a lot you can do in X-Defiant. All right, let's go ahead and take our second break here, and then we'll come right back. All right, guys, we've mentioned some of the game modes some of them are pretty obvious escort i think everyone's used to payload maps there are three of the zone control that josh quickly flew by earlier i still don't know which is which they are zone control domination and occupy every time i have to look on the map and figure out oh okay this is the one where we gotta progressively get get the five points. I never remember which is which. And then you have Hotshot. Now, Hotshot, I still think to this day, 97% of people do not understand how Hotshot works.

All right. This is a mode that I think is kind of clever that a lot of people seem to not totally understand. Now, Josh and I have played quite a few hotshots together just the other day. The whole idea behind it is that when you kill a player, they drop a token, you can pick it up. The first person to get three tokens without dying is now the hotshot. Now that is good and bad. It marks you on the map so the enemy can see you at all times, but you have faster speed and faster reload. And then if you pick up a token as the hotshot, you get three more points, as opposed to if anyone else grabs a token, it's worth one point.

And there are so many matches where I'm the hotshot and we just clear out a room. I see four tokens on the ground and I'll see one of my teammates run in and start grabbing tokens for one point each when I could have grabbed them for three. It can be a little bit frustrating. I will say in X defiant, no one uses comms to this day. I have heard, I think two people try to communicate. Sometimes some people will type to text, but it is hard,

I think, for some people, because if they're not looking this stuff up, the game doesn't necessarily teach you the ins and outs. But Hotshot, I felt like it is a little bit unique and it's kind of fun. It's not quite collecting skulls like you see in other games. It's got a little bit of that twist and forces you to kind of stick around as a team which i appreciate yeah are there any modes you guys like more than the others on the on the point of hot shot it's basically like kill confirmed for you know people that have played like i guess that's call of duty where you just if you kill a person you don't get credit unless you actually pick up like their dog tag kind of thing um so hot shot's not my favorite i'm still a fan of just domination dude domination

is my favorite game mode it's the default one um escort i'm not a huge fan of because it just steamrolls like it's i feel like escort is the map where it's going to just really get out of hand the enemy team's just gonna walk walk that thing, the entire map, without any sort of resistance whatsoever. I will say I think Escort can be one of the most fun when it's an evenly matched round, but it just gets way out of hand. But there's nothing new here. That's the one caveat to X-Defiant is they are not doing anything new in regards to game modes. I mean, this is all stuff that we've seen a thousand times before. So if you've ever played Call of Duty, if you've ever played anything like this, it's everything you're used to.

I really would have liked to have seen some different game modes or at least attempt it or give it like a kind of like Rocket League did where it's like an experimental list where it's like hey we're not really putting these in the game but if you want a little bit of a different flavor you can go and play some of these modes but yeah i mean for me domination and occupy are always my two favorite nice yeah domination is definitely the one for sure but i i personally i love the escort mission. I love knowing that when I'm on defense, those guys are going to funnel and they're going to be right by that spot. So if I want to snipe or sneak around and try to flank them,

I know where I can get those guys, especially if I'm using the intel suit and I can pin them all and just pick them off from there. But yeah, domination is just, man, it's fun to just go out and just merc people. There, Domination, it's just, man, it's fun to just go out and just merc people. There's a reason why it's in every game.

Yeah, exactly. Just having your, yeah, just your zones to go grab and control. All right, so there is Ranked Mode. It is technically in trial right now. You can play it. It's 4v4. It's technically coming later, so we can't really

give a final evaluation for that quite yet. Let's talk a little bit about the scoreboard and the endgame awards. This is the kind of flourish that I love in shooters. Some games just take themselves a little too seriously. You can hit tab, you get to see kills, deaths, assists, and damage, and's like in most games about all you get i like that they add a little bit more to this so at any point you can pull up that scoreboard in addition to those basic stats you also get points for objective time and also for support so i think that qualifies as like damage that you block or damage that you heal those things feed into support and they add all of it together into an overall score. And that's how everyone is sorted on your

list. At the end of a match, whoever had the highest points is awarded the player of the game. They get a little bit of a splash screen that you unlock. And then you get to see everyone on your team and everyone has an award. And sometimes it might be like match highest kill streak of seven, or it might be your team's high of objective time with 500 seconds. Or if someone was really bad, that's where you might see moral support, tried hard, showed up. So they do throw a little bit of the sarcasm in there with the awards. And then you can click on someone to give them a thumbs up and you get some bonus XP.

I love the fact that they incorporate this stuff. You've got to have a good scoreboard. What game was it that took scoreboards away? Do you know what I'm talking about, Josh? Battlefield. Battlefield. Yeah, it's 2042. How do you eliminate a scoreboard in a

shooter that's a crime they make people feel bad paul and we can't have people feel bad about their performance in a video game get good scrub yeah get good yeah it's funny because i joke about the like taking a scoreboard away because you don't want people to feel bad but at the same time i gotta give x defiant credit because everybody gets something man like like that's like they really are pointing out like your best contribution to the match yeah and it's not always good it's not always good but i mean but most of the time it is good like that's kind of the thing is it'll say hey you had the most multi-kills on your team. Like, dude, I did nothing this match. I mean, I went 3-17 trying to level up this DMR,

but one time I killed like two people back-to-back, you know, and it's like, hey, you had the most multi-kills on your team. And it's like, oh, cool, man. Like, yeah, I did something, you know. So I will say, like, I do think it's neat that they will pick out like all of these different things that they're tracking. And they do try to say, hey, this is, you know, you had the highest score on your team. You had the highest kill-death ratio.

You had the most support and healing. You know, you had the most, like, objective time or something like that. And every match they do that. And it's different a lot of times. So whatever all these stats are that they're tracking and reporting on, it at least mostly makes you feel good at the end. And what is kind of neat is it will say match best. So it's like if you had the most multi kills out of everybody,

then you get the little badge on the thing that'll say match best, which means like, oh, I was the best out of everybody in this regard if it's just on your team you don't get the match best but you still get it so i kind of like that they're making you feel good about something even if you really weren't doing very much dude the worst other than the sarcastic awards sometimes it'll just say kills six and it's like oh that's not that's not the card i wanted no i i do i i love this trend that we've started to see in this like we saw with hell divers too where it's just it it's a fun game and i'm sure they took it very seriously creating it and and doing this stuff but it doesn't take itself so seriously where you know we because we've had this progression

and and thankfully you know where games are becoming more mainstream, we have all the eSports stuff. My daughter, when I was taking her through her walkthroughs to start high school, they had a class for eSports, you know, which was so cool to see. But when you take it so seriously, like we're all just big doofuses that just want to laugh and have fun and play games. That's why we play so to see these funny parts within the game but still get all your stats and your data if you want to see you know the accurate kind of details on how you did it's just i love it i hope the trend continues and um yeah this this one had this did it very well it's such a simple concept for a scoreboard, but they do a good job with it. So I want to give them credit.

So we have to mention skill-based matchmaking, because I think for a lot of people, that's what's going to make or break this game. So kind of famously, Ubisoft said, we're not going to have skill-based matchmaking, which most shooters have. That's where you basically have like a skill rating. They will only grab other players within a certain range of your skill. So that way everyone's relatively even. And Ubisoft said that has led these shooters where every match feels the same. Every match is very close. You're going to have a 50-50 win-loss rate. Over time, it's going to get repetitive so instead what they did is they said we're going to populate a lobby by grabbing whoever has a similar latency and region as you and we're going to populate that game with the 12 players

and then we're going to look at skill rating and do our best to even the teams. So you're never going to have six shrouds against six Paul from the Video Gamers podcast. Right? So sometimes it feels that way. So they at least do their best to try. So it's not just complete Wild West free-for-all, but that will lead to games where you've got the one guy going 50-4

who carries the whole match. You'll have a certain game where everyone's better than you and you're going to go three and 17, even if you're not unlocking a new weapon. So with the lack of, and you do have skill-based matchmaking in the beginner lobby up to level 25, I was very worried once I hit level 25, I was going to get left in the dust and end up hating X defiant. That has not been the case. I have still found the game to be incredibly fun. I am bad at shooters. I always hover around one kill to death ratio. The lack of skill-based matchmaking had me very concerned. Ultimately,

in the end, I'm fine with it. Where did you guys land? Do you think it's a pro or a con? This one's tough for me, man. There are pros and cons to both sides of it. One of the pros is that, especially in a game like this, you don't have long matchmaking times. Because when you have skill-based matchmaking, it has to take longer to find enough people that are your level and skill level to say, okay, well, now we've got a match. Overwatch is a good example of this, where it can take four or five minutes sometimes to find enough people for it to say, hey, okay, all these people are evenly rated and let's put you all together and away you go. So there is a pro in the sense that when you go to play a game,

it fills that lobby quick. I mean, there's no wait time hardly at all in that regard. The downside to it is that matches can be very frustrating. I do not like losing. And so the nature of not having skill-based matchmaking is that I'm going to come up against people that I got no business being in a lobby with. We fought one the other day where there was some dude, I don't know, it's like rental on Twitch TV or something. And I was like, this dude's hacking, dude.

There ain't no way this guy should be like a pro e-sports player if he's this good. And he obliterated us, man. I mean, every freaking time I rounded a corner or he had a sight line, I was just dead within an instant. And I was just in that match sucked, man. I mean, every freaking time I rounded a corner or he had a sight line, I was just dead within an instant. And that match sucked, dude. It sucked so bad because I was like, why am I playing this game if I can't do anything because there's some freaking wizard pro dude in my lobby that is absolutely wrecking everybody? To his credit, I went onto his Twitch. That dude's just really good. He's not hacking.

So then it's like, what am I doing playing against this guy? We had a buddy, shout out Beef Supreme, who literally went against Shroud. They have the footage of it. And it's like, I watched it, and Shroud is wrecking them, man. And it's just like, but what are you doing going up against Shroud? And so it's like, you got a good story. yeah i mean you can get a good story out of it you know but it's just it's one of those things where the frustration level when a match just snowballs out of control is really hard for somebody like me because i'm super competitive, you know? And so it's like, like, this just isn't fun at this point, you know?

So that's the trade off. And the bummer is when you have a game like that, that's going to be your last game of the night because now you're frustrated. You say, screw this game. I'm getting off. And so a lot of times you end on a sour note, but then of course, like Josh, you even, I, I'm pretty sure you were joking when you did it, but the other day you literally said,

I hate this game so much. All right. I'll see you guys later tonight when we play it again. But that's like how the game plays. You do have higher highs, but you also have lower lows. You're going to bring in more frustration and all those things. That's why it feels like a throwback game because they used to not have skill-based matchmaking so if you played a lot

of like quake 3 arena well guess what it does kind of feel like that you will get steamrolled you will steamroll others it just is i mean it feels really good when you're on the steamroll side like exactly and then if you're you're playing that guy you're playing trout or you're playing somebody the match is like five minutes eight minutes you know it's not like it's some long hour long thing that you have to just withstand the whole time and and then for me at least like i'm uh i'm competitive but i also know where i'm at and i'm just playing a video game so i don't get too bent out of shape with it but then i try to make my mission okay this dude's really good i'm gonna try to get as many kills on him as i can and try to make my mission okay this dude's really good i'm gonna

try to get as many kills on him as i can and i make that my mission and then it totally flips that match from something that could be so like devastating and frustrating to where then i know i'm gonna get killed probably a lot but if i can get two kills on him like i got you bro i got you you know so so that's where i that's the way I look at it. Because, I mean, like, Josh, if I'm like, hey, you got to go play in this match against Michael Jordan, basketball, you're going to get destroyed. But would you not still do it? It's like you're playing with somebody so much better you can see it. So, I mean, that's the way at least I look at it.

I like that there's no matchmaking. There's super fun matches that you just destroy people. There's good balanced ones where they're just fun because they're balanced and then when you get devastated and just straight dusted it's only like five minutes so i i love it the way it's set up i i will say i think it works you know yeah i mean i there again there's pros and cons to it i do think it works and i like that we have games that say hey we're not going to spend five minutes finding the perfect match for you you know and it is really fun when you do steamroll somebody i mean again i you know i joke about my 3 and 17 match or going up against this guy that you know was obliterating everybody but then it's like but i had a match where i went like 53 and like 30

and then i was just like yeah i'm the best man best, man. Look at me. I'm so good. Dude, we had one where we escorted the package. I don't think it stopped once. Like we just literally just walked it all the way through to the end. And I'm like, that was quick, but that was kind of cool. And it hasn't happened again for sure. But yeah, I like it. You have to savor those good wins.

Yeah, exactly. You got to have those to counterbalance the sourness of the others. All right. So before we go to our leaderboard, one last thing I wanted to bring up. So we did our most anticipated games draft for 2024. For those who don't know, it's just a little funny game that we played. The three of us had a fictional $200 budget. We would nominate games, bid against one another and buy games trying to find good value. We each drafted eight games, so a total of 24 got taken. For example, for some context, Josh drafted Dragon's Dogma 2 at $68. We ultimately agreed that's probably a tad high.

I drafted Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater, which got punted to next year. So that ended up being a completely way a complete waste of 20 dollars x defiant was actually the first game that ryan drafted and i gotta say it was a pretty lean 22 dollars i think that's good value i would say this probably deserves i would say like in the 30 to 35 dollar range i was kind of curious where you guys would appraise this after the fact. I think 22 is good value for that. I mean, I don't see X defiant winning game of the year or anything like that,

but like, if we're talking about, you know, was Ryan's bid of $22 value compared to like my $68 I spent on freaking dragon dogma too, then yes, absolutely. Um,

there's really not much wrong with with this game you know as far as that goes it's either your type of game or it's not like there's that's the thing is it's not really branching out it's not being super experimental or anything like that so it's like you know what you're getting and if it's something that you like then this is gonna jive with you well and so 22 bid on this game which is exactly what i think it's intended to be is really good value dude i hated my team when we first did this and it's looking pretty good right now i don't like my team dragon age four or dragon age the veil guard as it's now been renamed if that comes out this year you might you might end up winning ryan i think if we did

the auction again right now, I think Josh would be the first to say, I'm out. And Ryan, I think you and I would probably go up to like 35. I think that's around where I would bow out. Are you kind of like in the same range? Yeah, 30, 35, I think is a really fair auction price for this, for sure. Yeah. The longer the show goes on and the more drafts we do, I feel like that's a good way to evaluate value in games. And I hope our listeners will appreciate that and pick up on it. All right. Well, let's go to our leaderboards. So for people who don't know, videogamerspod.com, that's our website. You can go there. Anytime we do a deep dive, we put this game up against every other game that we've done a deep dive of. And we are now currently sitting at 114 games for Josh, 111 for me. We've got 41 for Ryan.

So to put a little bit of context here, looking at Josh's leaderboard, all the way at the top, we got stuff like God of War 2018, Red Dead 2, Rocket League, Elden Ring, stuff like that. Down in the 50s, he's got stuff like Weird West, Broforce, Ark, Fortnite. And then down in the 80s, stuff like Deathloop, Star Wars Squadrons. Of course, all the way at the bottom, we know how much Josh hates Fors forspoken elite dangerous battlefield 2042 josh let's do you first where are you gonna rank x defiant so i i will i'm gonna just say i did not like x defiant when i first started playing it i i made it you definitely did i kind of made it clear to you guys i said dude i don, I don't get it. This isn't fun. Like this has all been done before. Like what's the attraction to this? Yada, yada, yada.

And then I started kind of getting into the flow of the game and the pacing and the unlock the weapons and then finding the weapons that I liked and finding the classes that I liked, having those really great matches where, you know, I felt like I was just king of the world. And then I'd have the matches where I was absolute garbage and then i was like i hate this game um this game has definitely grown on me like to where i i can legitimately say i enjoy x defiant a lot um i you know we we actually have not had our schedules line up to where the three of us have been able to play together very much so it's been pairs right yeah we've kind of been pairing off and then there's been a lot of just solo play as well. So this game is definitely better with friends, just like kind of any multiplayer game. The natural comparison for me is, you know,

call of duty. And we did do a deep dive on call of duty cold war. Um, so that is the one that stands out to me and says, okay, well, you know, it's close to this in the type of game that it is. Do you like it more or less? And I go, well, I like X defiant more because I like the classes and the abilities that you get there. So then it's kind of like, all right, well, we jump up and, you know, that's kind of the midpoint. And then I look at a game like Splitgate, which is an arena shooter. You know, it's very basic except for the portals and stuff like that. I like Splitgate more.

Like, I think Splitgate offers more than the next defiant does i like the it's got tight shooting and i like the portal aspect of it so it's going to be somewhere in that 41 range that i have splitgate at to 48 i'm gonna put it at 46 the reason for that is i really like vermin tide too i love the co-op kind of melee nature of Vermintide 2. So I can't put it above that. So I'm going to put it at 46 instead. All right. So yeah, you've got it below Destiny 2, Pillars of Eternity 2, Vermintide 2,

but above Rainbow Six Siege, Endless Dungeon, and Black Ops Cold War. Yeah, and people might say like 46, that's low. Dude, you got to remember, this is like 100 and how many games on my leaderboard 114 yeah so most of which are pretty good right exactly and that's the thing so 46 is saying like this is legitimately a good video game man i am very close to where you're at josh i am looking at my list i've got splitgate at 31 no way is X Defiant going above that. I've got Call of Duty Warzone at 41, and I feel pretty similarly about both. I mean, I played a lot of Warzone. I don't play it anymore. I feel like when it's all said and done, I very easily could have equal playtime of both. I'm going to put it... I don't want to give in to recency bias. So for now, I'm going to put it below war zone.

I'm going to put it at 42, which is going to put it below far cry five dead Island two and war zone, but above bro force rocket league and halo infinite. I do like this just a tad more than halo infinite halo infinite. I don't like the time to kill. I don't like the weapons. I like the more grounded realism of x defiant and so that's why i'm gonna put it there what about you ryan how are you feeling um so i i really liked this game

i i liked uh the gameplay i like the time to kill i liked the match length um how short it was to find a match like you said said earlier, how you can, you know, my wife the other day was like, oh yeah, we got to do this and I'll be ready in 20 minutes. I'm like, sweet. I went and hopped on and I got two matches in real quick before we left. So that leans heavily into my decision here. So I tried to look at something comparable as well. I am much higher on Warzone than probably you guys are i loved me some warzone and played quite a bit so something comparable more for me was a fortnight which i've honestly grown to really really enjoy and love i play a ton with my son we still play a lot uh throughout the week but i i do like fortnight better um and then i couldn't i couldn't justify putting in a head

of zelda i knew paul would probably kill me. So I'm going to go just below Zelda at 17. Right below Tears of the Kingdom. Yeah, Tears of the Kingdom, yeah. So below Fortnite, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, and Tears of the Kingdom, but above Endless Dungeon, Fallout New Vegas, and Hellblade 2. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, I think we're all, like overall, we're all kind of putting it like i was gonna

say with ryan one third down with ryan having 41 games on his putting it at 17 i think he's that it's it's a perfect reflection of i think he's a little bit higher than you and i paul but it's still in that like you know that very similar range up yeah middle tier range too which is funny yeah yeah it's almost like if we revamped our leaderboard in some way there might be a way to see that we're all in the same that's a good idea kind of like make more sense of our leaderboard and maybe make it a little bit easier for people to understand we should do that maybe next monday we should release an episode that revamps our leader and then like maybe like a consensus like where we all feel a game lands like where it averages out like how we all feel

yeah that's a good idea there's not a lot of time paul you should get on that yeah yeah i'm gonna have to get on some web design figure this out maybe we'll see yeah yeah all right so all right great i'm excited i'm glad we were able to cover x to find it we initially were not planning on doing a deep dive and then finally ryan was kind, guys, we're playing an awful lot of X to find, like we should probably just do a deep dive. We've already got the time. Let's just do an episode. Yeah.

So we're like, all right, all right, let's do it. And I know that, especially Ryan and I were really anticipating this one. We were so glad when it came out. So let me ask you real quick.

I know we, I know we got to end, but your y'all's anticipation for this game was much higher than mine. Did it live up to your anticipation? Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, does it play any different than when we did the beta, Ryan? It's like 95% to 99% the exact same.

They've tweaked stuff. It felt really smooth and good, and we played that beta a year ago. Yeah. I feel like they really fine-tuned a lot of this stuff yeah no it played played awesome met all my expectations and you know the best part it's free it's free that is really the yeah it's free this is that's the thing to remember this is a free video game that's quite enjoyable if it's the type of game that you want yeah you don't have to buy the skins you don't have to buy the battle pass and you can still hop on and have an awesome

time so i love it absolutely yeah if you enjoy the game and You don't have to buy the battle pass and you can still hop on and have an awesome time. So I love it. Absolutely. Yeah. If you enjoy the game and want to support it and buy a battle pass, all the power to you. I know the three of us tend to not buy battle passes, but you know, I've definitely enjoyed my time with X defiant.

If we didn't do the podcast, I would seriously consider it just to support the game and play it a lot. But I know we're going to have to jump off X defiant soon and start covering more stuff. All right. Well, that wraps up everything here for X Defiant. We hope that you guys out there have been enjoying playing it. I would highly recommend picking it up. Go give it a shot. It is available on console and PC. And yeah, it's free. Go check it out. Please remember to rate our show five stars. Check out support options to unlock all those amazing perks Ryan talked about earlier, like bonus

episodes at MultiplayerSquad.com and find us on socials at VideoGamersPod. We love and appreciate all of you out there. Thanks for listening. Until next time, happy gaming. See ya! Alright, see ya everybody! everybody.