Rumours of a new Tom Clancy title that mashes up The Division, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell series were swirling for quite awhile. Ubisoft has finally announced the game, giving it the name Tom Clancy’s XDefiant. And to put it really simply, it’s the publisher’s free-to-play version of Call of Duty multiplayer or Overwatch.
And the game really mashes many elements of the three series. From the reveal trailer, we can see that the game has the Ghost Recon’s gunplay and The Division’s skills. And it’s been put together quite well. Then there are the four playable classes, or factions as Ubisoft calls them. The Wolves from Ghost Recon Breakpoint serve as tanks, The Division’s Cleaners and Outcasts are the assault and healer classes respectively. The only contribution from Splinter Cell is the Echelon Support class.
But while it looks like a well done mashup, they really eat at the identity of the factions involved .The shoehorning in of skills make the Wolves feel very different to who they are in the game they came from. The Division’s Outcasts, another fire-using faction like the Cleaners, getting relegate the healer role is also strange. There’s also something about it that’s just very uninspiring about Tom Clancy’s XDefiant, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. It might have something to do with the fact that Bandai announced something similar for its Gundam franchise.
But at any rate, Tom Clancy’s XDefiant has no release date yet. No surprise, since it’s still in early development. In fact, Ubisoft is still looking for closed beta testers, but this is only open for PC players in the US and Canada. Eventually, the game will be released on PC, and both generations of the PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
(Source: Ubisoft [1], [2])
