While XDefiant has had a few errors and glitches after finally launching, most fans agree that it’s a pretty solid shooter, even if the progression system is absolutely pants. However, some issues persist, and players have found that one of the strangest bends bullet arcs if you jump too much.
Jump spamming is a pretty big problem in XDefiant at the moment. A player’s hitbox seems to become smaller or just harder to hit with gunfire when they’re moving, so you can be almost invincible if you sprint for the perfect amount of time. Jumping works a treat, too, but now that appears to have its own problem, and it is bizarre. Not only does it increase your crosshair size, it makes shotgun bullets fly sideways out of the barrel.
If you jump too much in XDefiant, your shotgun will fire left and right, not forward
Fans on the XDefiant subreddit have been discussing this issue at length because they can’t work out if it’s intentional behavior or not. User bopchara demonstrates what happens to a shotgun’s bullet spray after you’ve jumped so much that the weapon’s crosshair is as big as it possibly can be. While I’d expect to see some shots veer off to the side a little, shooting directly left and right feels like a joke.
Bullets shooting to the side of the barrel is obviously not how any weapon is designed to work in a first person shooter, and I’d be surprised if that wasn’t a glitch here. However, as user Billy3King points out, “It could also be to stop people from jump spamming, just a thought.” Herein lies the trouble. We don’t know if crosshairs are meant to behave this way, widening with every jump to deter jump spamming or if it’s a glitch that’s yet to be fixed.
Is this an issue or a design choice?
I jumped into the game to test this for myself and got the same results that others are reporting. If I jump to maximize the crosshairs with any weapon other than a shotgun, I can still land pretty accurate shots in front of me. With a shotgun, I can barely see any bullet holes where my shots have landed because they fly around me instead of toward the intended target.
Ubisoft will almost certainly address this in a future XDefiant update, but user SuttonTM points out that making shotguns suffer more than any other weapons might be intentional. “It’s almost certainly not intended to be that wide, but shotgun’s they have to be very careful with when it comes to adjusting because if they become OP they will easily become the most annoying gun to play against and ruin fun in modes like Hard Point etc, just look at the Akimbo Shotguns CoD recently had like a month back, required no skill to one shot people just by looking at them essentially, and ruined the flow of the game.”
It’s hard to argue that shotguns can ruin a shooter if they’re overpowered. I remember playing Destiny 1 and using the good old slide and shotgun or shotgun and melee tactics while they worked in Crucible. For now, all I can suggest is that you don’t jump spam in XDefiant so you can avoid an embarrassing encounter when an enemy is up in your face and your shotgun showers them in a glorious halo of pellets before they end you with a single pistol shot to the skull.
