XDefiant was apparently born from the ashes of a Splinter Cell game being made by the team behind Dispatch

The leads behind the, potentially surprisingly, hit superhero game Dispatch, AdHoc Studio, have been all over the place. Telltale Games, Ubisoft, Night School Studio, some pretty notable names, but today we’re honing in on their time at Ubisoft in particular. That’s because a recent report that dives into the long story that led AdHoc to making Dispatch revealed that before doing so, they were working on a completely new Splinter Cell game at Ubisoft.

Nick Herman, one of the co-founders of AdHoc, shared said detail with Bloomberg, saying that he was “so excited to be a part of this and help revitalize it, because it’s been dormant for a while. And we thought we could tell a great story and do something the fans would love.” Obviously this game never materialised, and according to Herman it was partially due to the whims of executives at the time.

This was back in 2017, a time when Ubisoft was gaining interest in live service games, and so this new Splinter Cell game just didn’t fit into that vision. “We tried,” Herman said. “Let’s make a narrative GAAS game. We were trying to make that make sense, and a lot of cool prototypes were made.” Nothing they did try worked, apparently, but eventually it somehow morphed into xDefiant, though this was post the AdHoc team forming.

If you need a reminder, xDefiant was shut down only a year after it was released, resulting in mass layoffs. It also started life as a Tom Clancy game, so you can see the Splinter Cell connection at least.

It’s probably worth noting that xDefiant producer Mark Rubin commented on his personal Dwitter account regarding this report from Bloomberg, claiming it wasn’t true, and that the shooter had never started life as a Splinter Cell game. However, as pointed by the author of said Bloomberg report Jason Schreier, Rubin joined Ubisoft in 2019, two years after the Dispatch team was working on Splinter Cell. So, yes, the folks that made Dispatch were working on a Splinter Cell game once upon a time, as long as nobody is lying to us, and if they are, please don’t shoot me (the fabled messenger).