Why Would You Name A Game XDefiant?
XDefiant is the most recent in a long line of games with terrible titles.
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What is XDefiant? Is it supposed to be a play on that old XD emoticon that I haven’t seen in years? Why would this Tom Clancy shooter have a laughing face emoticon in the title? Defiant seems like a perfectly fine name without the X, doesn’t it? I hate to ask this, I really do, but does the X stand for Xtreme?
I have a lot of questions about XDefiant, and to be honest, they’re all questions I’ve had before about other game titles. It’s always fascinating when a game with a bad name gets announced because you have to assume that a lot of people signed off on it. XDefiant was surely written on hundreds of internal documents and spoken out loud around the Ubisoft offices for years, so it’s incredible that this ended up becoming the official title. I imagine any random group of people in a playtest would have told Ubisoft that XDefiant is a weird and confusing name, yet here we are. Maybe it’s supposed to be a homophone, like “XDe” sounds like “extra”? I’m reaching, someone please explain.
Ubisoft is on an incredible run of bad titles these past few years. Its previous free-to-play online shooter, Hyper Scape, is another title that seems like it’s trying to sound like different words (Hype Escape?) while Immortals Fenyx Rising is just a grammatical disaster. If you dig further back a bit in Ubi’s catalog you’ll find gems like IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover and perhaps my favorite title ever, a horse training game called Pippa Funnell: The Stud Farm Inheritance.
Ubisoft has turned bad names into an art form, but it’s far from the only perpetrator of unfortunate titles. One of my favorite categories of bad video game titles is the unnecessary colon. This happens a lot with licensed games like Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II: The Rise of the Witch-king, but it also happens with original games that have no business including a subtitle. Why isn’t Remnant: From the Ashes just called Remnant? Resistance: Fall of Man, Halo: Combat Evolved, A Plague Tale: Innocence, and Ark: Survival Evolved are all titles that gain nothing from their subtitles.
Sometimes games make bad titles into their entire brand. Battlefield likes to have fun with numbers. The Series started as Battlefield 1942, then went to 2, 2142, 3, 4, 1, 5, and now 2042. Neat. Kingdom Hearts likes to get funky with numbers too. Not only is there a game called 358/2 Days, but Square Enix thought it’d be a hoot to number the collected editions 1.5, 2.5, and 2.8.
Then you’ve got the acronym titles, which are just so cutesy and clever you have to hate them. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and F.E.A.R. are the most well known, but you’ve also got H.A.W.X. (thanks Ubi), S.W.I.N.E., M.U.L.E., and M.U.G.A.N., I guess.
Personally, my favorite type of bad title is the single, nondescript word that doesn’t tell you anything about the game or invoke any kind of emotional reaction whatsoever. I’m not talking about games like Journey, Fable, Rage, or Portal. All of these titles tell you something about the game, at the very least. I’m talking about names like Brink, Chrome, and Haze. It’s as if the games themselves are so forgettable that they demanded an equally forgettable, meaningless name.
Titles are, of course, completely meaningless. PlayerUnknown’s Battleground sounds like a game destined to fail, yet it’s one of the most successful shooters of all time. XDefiant will live or die based on nothing but its gameplay (and whether or not big streamers want to play it) and no one will ever mention its lousy name again if it turns out to be a hit. Look at Horizon Zero Dawn or Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Great games, horrible names. I’m XDefinitely going to give it a fair shake, but I think that title is pretty XDefective.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/xdefiant-bad-name-hyper-scape-immortals-fenyx-rising-ubisoft/