This Week at Ubisoft: Roller Champions’ Wild Ones Live Now, XDefiant Closed Beta Coming Soon

This week at Ubisoft, Roller Champions released a new season, XDefiant announced a 10-day closed beta, and Ubisoft News celebrated April Fools’ Day with some of Ubisoft’s funniest games. Check it all out and more in this week’s roundup of all Ubisoft news.

Roller Champions’ Wild Ones Season is Live Now

Roller Champions released its newest season, Wild Ones, on April 4. Wild Ones brings three new arenas and several new cosmetic items, all inspired by the season’s jungle and lost civilization themes. Wild Ones also introduces the new Pick a Prize system that lets players choose what items they want to earn.

XDefiant Closed Beta Coming April 13

XDefiant is hosting a closed beta from April 13-23, introducing Ranked mode and letting players experience five game modes, four playable factions, and all the maps and loadout options that will be available at launch. The closed beta will have crossplay enabled, and anyone is welcome to register now at playxdefiant.com. The team will kick off the closed beta with an XDefiant Showcase on April 13 at 10AM PT on Ubisoft’s official Twitch and YouTube channels.

Funniest Ubisoft Games to Play for April Fools’

To celebrate April Fools’ Day, we made a list of some of the funniest games in the Ubisoft library. From the wacky quests in Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, to the sassy dialogue of Immortals Fenyx Rising, to the unexpected antics in Far Cry 5, these are our favorite games to play when we’re looking for a laugh.

Ubisoft+ Spotlight – Beholder 2

(Editorial note: This is a series of quick weekly highlights written by Ubisoft News team writers that feature games available with a Ubisoft+ subscription. We hope you’ll enjoy reminiscing with us, or perhaps discover something new.)

Brittany Spurlin, Writer/Editor: Beholder 2, the second game in Alawar Premium’s Beholder trilogy, is a simulation strategy game that puts you in a world riddled with intrigue, suspicion, and corruption. The story centers on Evan Redgrave, a newly hired grunt working in the central government office of a totalitarian state. Oh, and by the way, his father, a high-ranking ministry official, is dead, pushed out of a window on the 37th floor. Now, as he investigates his father’s murder and the mysterious Heimdall project, Evan has two paths before him: scheme his way up the corporate ladder and rise to ultimate power, or tear down the ministry by exposing its rampant corruption.

Beholder 2 is a game of choices, and every choice you make will have an effect on how other characters interact with Evan and how the story progresses. As you walk through the world, you’ll have the option to eavesdrop on NPCs, gather intel by interacting with different objects and collecting paperwork, and talking to your colleagues. The conversations you have could mean the difference between life and death (or worse, getting fired), so be careful how much you reveal or how deeply you pry into the government’s secrets. And it never hurts to get to know someone and learn how they can be bribed.

The game has a few unique mechanics, most notably time and authority. Each day, you have a set number of hours, and certain tasks will cost time in order to complete, like 15 minutes to break into a coworker’s cubicle, or an hour to watch a hit TV show to enhance your water-cooler gossip. It’s always good to have an abundance of time on the clock, and you can earn more by doing Evan’s job or completing quests. Authority, on the other hand, represents your standing at the Ministry and how much respect you command, and you'll need it in spades to get increasingly sensitive information out of your coworkers. You can also use good old-fashioned money to bribe it out of them, but be cautious of spending too much – you have bills to pay, and if you don’t, the Ministry will come for you.

And whatever you do, don’t talk to the vending machines.

You can play Beholder 2 with a Ubisoft+ subscription from now until September 29.

Game Updates

In addition to wild new content, Roller Champions’ new season rolled in a number of gameplay improvements and bug fixes.

• Improved ball focus camera activation and tracking, including resolving issues about the ball becoming invisible to players.

• Improved AI, including making opposing AI an easier difficulty for new players and ensuring AI teammates can reach the ball.

• Fixed multiple instances of crashing.

On April 5, Rainbow Six Siege deployed a hotfix that addressed crashes for PC and console players in the Rainbow is Magic game mode.