An XDefiant developer has explained Ubisoft's plans for adding a mechanic that counters jump spamming, A.K.A. bunny hopping. The unreleased mechanic still allows for jump spamming to be possible in XDefiant, but aims to make it more punishing.

Shortly before this announcement, XDefiant developers also re-confirmed a handful of other features coming to the game, including a one-life bomb mode and killcams. It's unclear when XDefiant will receive its first major update, but the launch of Season 1 is expected to arrive on July 2, so it's safe to expect at least one major update in the next couple of months. However, some fans of Ubisoft's shooter are hoping to receive certain improvements before then.

Former Call of Duty pro player and XDefiant developer Patrick Price, who goes by Aches online, posted a tweet confirming that XDefiant's anti-jump spam mechanic is coming to the game "as soon as possible." Once implemented, players who perform too many jumps or crouches in a row are met with an aim-sway penalty that makes aiming noticeably more difficult. This mechanic was seen in some of XDefiant's early tests when the penalty lasted for a maximum of 1.5 seconds unless the player continued to jump or crouch spam, which made it last longer. However, it may have undergone some adjustments since then.

Aches further explained that the aim-sway penalty isn't intended to eliminate jump-shotting altogether, but is only meant to punish those who abuse it. Ubisoft's developers have made it clear that XDefiant is intended to be a skillful game despite the lack of skill-based matchmaking, so it's not surprising that they want mechanics such as jump-shotting to remain viable options, since they only increase the skill gap.

Also, XDefiant devs confirmed that hit registration improvements are in the works, but similar to the aim-sway mechanic, a release window is unknown. Despite early complaints regarding certain aspects of the game and major server issues on launch day, XDefiant seems to be off to a hot start.

In fact, XDefiant's launch broke an Ubisoft record by becoming the company's fastest game to reach one million unique users, doing so in two and a half hours. For comparison, this smashes the milestone reached by EA's Apex Legends, which took about eight hours to reach the same number of unique users. XDefiant went on to reach three million unique users within 48 hours of its launch, painting a promising picture of the FPS game's future.

Jump shotting (and spamming behavior in general) - The original clip has since been deleted, but wanted to share this thread from last year’s Closed Beta.

We do intend to penalize players for too many repeated jumps & crouches by adding aim sway. This was disabled after our… https://t.co/4ovPGVRFsU

— PATTYP (@ACHES) May 26, 2024

Posted: Jun 01, 2024 4:02 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://gamerant.com/xdefiant-bunny-hopping-complaints-developer-response/