I was at GDC one year and was talking to a programmer who used to be a literal rocket scientist and it always stuck with me that he said game coding was way, WAY harder than working as an aerospace programmer.

I'm counting playing it in development. One of the mantras that I have when developing is that the game needs to be playable everyday. And so we would playtest everyday. Obviously the content was unfinished and buggy but it was still fun even in development.

We were missing the tech to really go all out and our pipeline was really slow, so it was hard to have enough content.

It's still crazy to me that #XDefiant became the fastest-growing game in Ubisoft history. Fastest ever to 5 million players and topped out over 15 million players. That was done not by fancy marketing campaigns but by pure word of mouth. And yea free-to-play of course made that possible but if I did it again I would prefer paid over free-to-play. But it was absolutely tragic that we couldn't get the netcode in a good enough place and that our cosmetic content was such a struggle. But I really do miss this game and I played it almost everyday for 6 years. And I still miss playing it.

Will be visiting my wife's family there at some point.

Sadly, nothing i have access to anymore and of course the rules are actually pretty clear. If Ubisoft called and said let's re-release the game I'd be all over it.

I would love to play it again, too, to be honest! Was really a lot of fun. I was one of the lucky ones that didn't have connection issues but I know there were many that did. Also there was some really cool content that didn't get released even with the big content push at the end. The map team will always amaze me as they just kept making insanely good maps.

I really loved playing XDefiant. It had the same pure fun feel I got from the early CoDs. The tech hurdle unfortunately was too high. I asked to use another engine in the beginning but was told no. Although I wish I had asked harder. I think we did amazing things with few resources. And the game when the servers went down had so much and yet was still barely complete with what we had planned. But unfortunately Ubisoft wasn't in the position to support our game and we were an expensive team being in SF. I don't blame them for that. I do miss the team though. I hope everyone is doing well.

Sadly, no. I felt the best thing for my family was to leave that industry.

I miss it too! That would be up to Ubisoft I imagine they could if they wanted to but I think they have a lot going on right now staying afloat.

I wish. The engine doesn't support offline or private servers. At least it didn't when I was there. To be honest the engine didn't handle our high-speed fps very well and we didn't have the people to make it work. But I would have loved having private servers and mods.

Consider the date of the post.

Won't be playable as far as I know but I dont work at Ubisoft anymore. Not sure why you can still download.

Me too. The challenge of making that game was immense but I still loved the heart of what it was trying to do.

I miss it too. In a more suitable engine (Snowdrop is great but turned out to be not suitable for what we needed) and with more of the right type of devs to make content the game i think could have done really well.

Not to me.

Appreciate it but im not working on any games right now.

Hehe...it is a great pic.

Yup. CoD4 and MW2 covers were both me and created by our amazing art director Other titles were made by an agency but I liked those two the best.

I just saw that Vince Zampella passed away yesterday in a car crash. I had to read it multiple times to believe it. He was an amazing mentor and friend. He will be sorely missed. My heart goes out to his family. RIP my friend!