I remember back when Cyberpunk 2077 was released, a game that PlayStation would eventually take down from its entire store for six months, a common question was “how did that pass certification?”
But the certification is more than just bugs and performance issues, and when you fail it can be a setback. That’s currently what we’re seeing what Ubisoft’s XDefiant, its upcoming shooter that has been in early, somewhat promising testing for a while now (will never get over that name, but whatever).
In a very transparent blog post, Ubisoft’s Mark Rubin reveals that XDefiant failed certification on Xbox and PlayStation. As such, if they’d passed, the game would have gotten a release date, now it remains nebulous as they work on resubmission.
While it’s certainly bad news (though failing cert happens far more often than you’d think), the blog post is a pretty interesting look at how this process works and answering the “Cyberpunk” question:
“These are two different types of bugs. Functionality means “does this gameplay feature work as intended” (e.g., there is a bug where the damage from your weapon is altered after using a certain ability.) This is not something the 1st parties will be looking for unless of course it prevents them from testing. Those are on us to find. Compliance bugs are ones that relate to the systems and overall experience that the first parties expect from games on their platform. (e.g., Are trophies being properly tracked, is my friend’s list being properly updated with game status, etc.)”
Without saying specifically why XDefiant failed, they lay out the timeline here:
- XDefiant failed certification in mid-August
- They have been working on resubmission since then, and will do that in a week.
- If they fully pass, the game should be out in mid-to-late September.
- But a “likely” scenario is that they get a conditional pass, which means they have to do a day one patch to make sure its compliant. And that will mean launch gets pushed to October.
The point here is that the certification process is not about whether “is your game buggy or not” and rather things that have to do with specific functionality within the platforms you’re submitting to. But regardless of what the problem is, the end result is a delay. Again, I will say that this is probably something Rubin and Ubisoft could have just said…nothing about, and said some sort of “we’re polishing the game a bit more” to cover for the delay, but they were honest about it and informative. So I’ve got to respect that. Hopefully things will be back on track soon.
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