XDefiant may not have been as spectacular a flop as Concord, but it was another stark example of how ephemeral online gaming can be in today's industry. Ubisoft's multiplayer shooter released in 2024 to not-insignificant critical acclaim, with PC Gamer's Jake Tucker calling it "a breath of fresh air" in a sphere dominated by Call of Duty. But it shut down less than a year later as its initially strong player count slid away all too quickly.
I always thought it a shame that XDefiant never got a proper chance to thrive, but I'm especially sad now that I've learned what XDefiant's failure cost us. Before they ended up making a live-service multiplayer shooter (and more recently, the superhero phenomenon Dispatch), the founding members of AdHoc Studio were originally working on a new Splinter Cell game.
According to a Bloomberg report (via GamesRadar), former Telltale designers Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette joined Ubisoft in 2017, bringing the storytelling chops that made Tales from the Borderlands so well-liked into a new Splinter Cell project, which Herman was thrilled to be bringing back from the grave:
"I was so excited to be a part of this and help revitalise it, because it's been dormant for a while," Herman explained. “And we thought we could tell a great story and do something the fans would love."
But according to the report, the project only ran for a few months before Ubisoft's executives weighed in, having decided that live-service games were where the future lay. Herman and the team "tried" to preserve some of their project by catering to these whims. "Let's make a narrative GAAS game. We were trying to make that make sense, and a lot of cool prototypes were made."
Ubisoft's interest in more Splinter Cell continued to dwindle, as the publisher grew obsessed with chasing Call of Duty—hence why XDefiant ended up looking and playing the way it did.
Herman says the Splinter Cell project was exciting to work on "for the first six months because we thought we were going to be able to make something really great." Yet over time, it became clear Ubisoft just wasn't interested in the team's ideas. "You realise that all of the things you care about, they don't anymore. It's a common thing in games."
The good news is that it all worked out for Herman & co in the end, with Dispatch proving an enormous hit and vindicating their belief that there's still a huge appetite for narrative-driven games. Ubisoft, meanwhile, has shown some glimmers of renewed interest in Splinter Cell, though so far it has only resulted in a reasonably good anime series. However, there is apparently talk of a remake of the original, which the show's director wishes he could talk about.
