A well-rounded comms system is essential in multiplayer games, but in tactical shooters, it’s absolutely indispensable. While Ubisoft included voice chat support in its latest free-to-play hit, XDefiant, it missed out on adding a crucial feature: callout pings. Luckily, though, they should be coming soon.
In a tweet on May 25, Mark Rubin, Executive Producer for XDefiant at Ubisoft San Francisco, confirmed that a comms ping system is currently “in the works.”
Replying to a player’s concerns for the missing ping feature that helps “collaboration as a team,” Rubin said, “I think it’s stalled out just because we needed those people on higher priority stuff. But hopefully we can get back to it once we get deeper into being live.”
Not that it isn’t fun, but XDefiant is a bit too chaotic without a ping system, especially because very few players use the voice chat feature.
Let’s face it—we can’t always use a microphone in video games. Some players prefer to avoid all the toxicity, some don’t have a microphone available, and others just prefer not to speak. But it’s a multiplayer game at the end of the day—you can’t function in a tactical shooter without some form of communication. This is where a ping system will save the day.
Whether you need healing from a fellow Libertad or want to mark the location of a camping enemy, a ping system helps bypass the need for voice chat while letting you communicate with your teammates easily. It isn’t a complete substitute for voice chat, but it does the job.
While Ubisoft has confirmed its intention to bring comms pings to XDefiant, the developer didn’t give us a time frame. So, we better be prepared to wait.
