It’s been a long time coming, but the big day is finally almost here: Following a weekend-long stress test that ran earlier this month, Ubisoft’s long-awaited free-to-play FPS XDefiant is set to launch on May 21.

XDefiant was announced in 2021 and it didn’t go especially well: The initial response, right down to the silly, stylized title, was so negative that Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing for almost a full year, later emerging reworked branding a decidedly more “tacticool” attitude. A well-regarded open beta and  multiple delays followed, but a promised stress test in April went ahead and Ubisoft was apparently satisfied by what it saw.

The XDefiant launch will begin with a “preseason” that’s slated to run for six weeks with five factions, 14 maps, and fi…