2021 marks the 6th year of Rainbow Six: Siege and developer Ubisoft Montreal plans for its premiere tactical shooter are quite honestly mind-blowing. For a game that has continually grown and developed to be one of, if not, the best first-person shooter out here today, it’s crazy that Ubisoft is still finding ways to improve upon its greatness.

In their Rainbow 6: Siege Year 6 Reveal, the Siege development team showed off a bunch of additions and changes to the game including a new visual and presentation style, major improvements to gameplay such as more active downtime and attacker repick, and long-awaited features such as the more robust character customization system and match replay!

Oh and also Rainbow 6 Siege: The Board Game because why not.

Here are all the crazy updates that are coming to our favorite tacticool shooter!

 

Year 6 R6 Road map 

In their Rainbow 6: Siege Year 6 Reveal, Ubisoft presented their overarching Road Map of changes and improvements coming to the game this year. The year will be divided into 4 Seasons with each season having a new operator, a map rework, a seasonal event and arcade events. Core gameplay features will be littered throughout the whole year. New Operators will now also be unlockable through the Season pass!

For Season 1, the first new operator of the year, Flores (who we’ll talk about in a moment) will be hailing from Argentina. For Season 2, the new operator will be hailing from Nakoda, an indigenous North American people. The latter half of the year will welcome new European operators from Croatia in Season 3 and Ireland in Season 4. The map reworks for each season will be for Border for Season 1, Favela for Season 2, and Outback for Season 4. For Season 3, the Siege team will be many tiny tweaks to a bunch of different maps. 

Crimson Heist Season

Speaking of the new season, the first season of Year 6 is almost upon us by way of Crimson Heist! The newest operator to join the fold this year is Flores, a medium armored breach support attacker with a flair for eliminating enemy devices with a bang! Their device, the RCE-RATERO Drone is basically just an explosive device strapped to a drone. When deployed the RATERO will constantly move without being able to slow down or stop until it’s detonation is activated. Once its detonation mode is activated the RATERO will anchor to the nearest surface becoming bulletproof and will explode after a 3-second timer taking out everything and everyone in its radius. This is basically an attackers dream come true!

In place of some operators’ secondary weapon, the new Gonne 6 is a basically a one-shot, grenade gun that destroys any gadget/utility that it comes in contact with. The Gonne 6 gives attackers another option to easily clear out pesky defender utility in place of a secondary firearm. 

Crimson Heist will also herald a rework for the Border map, reducing the sound of the hovering helicopter as well as relegating the annoying announcer man’s chatter to within just the preparation phase. 

Also coming this season is the much-awaited match replay feature which allows players to look at and review previous matches which will be great for analysis as well as showing off your favorite clutch plays to your friends!

Esports

The Siege team also lightly touched the esports side of things by mentioning how last year’s point system was heavily impacted by the ongoing pandemic. Wei Yue, Esports Director for Siege, stated that for this year they have developed a more robust and solid point system that will be able to address the difficulties of the current state of the world to be able to have a global competition featuring the top international teams once again.

Presentation

Year 6 will also introduce a new visual style through the course of the year─one that leans toward an infusion of more color and vibrancy and less of the dull and drab military hues. These touch-ups will include the new menus, new key art, and a new logo. 

Behavior

Player behavior is also going to be further addressed thanks to the new Reputation System and Streamer mode settings, as well as improvements to the Anti-cheat and DDoS countermeasures.

The new Reputation System is a 5-level scale that measures players in-game behaviour and categorizes them into Positive, Neutral, and Negative standing depending on where you are in the scale. This system rewards those with positive standing with Feedback and Rewards bonuses such as in-game items while those with negative standing will be handed out sanctions. These rewards and sanctions can also be forfeited or alleviated depending on how the player is behaving to ensure that behavior trends towards positive standing.

The new Streamer Mode will give streamers the ability to combat stream sniping by giving them the ability to hide essential gamer information such as their name, region, ping, other players, matchmaking delay, clearance levels, and profile image. 

New Gameplay

Now on the most exciting part of the Year 6 Changes for Siege, The gameplay improvements!

First off, Ubisoft is working to make Attacking a better experience with Attacker Repick! With this system, Attackers will be able to choose and change their operator during the whole of the preparation phase. This means that Attackers will be able to scope out the site and the operators they’re dealing with and figure out which operators and utility to bring!

Another exciting change is that when a player dies, they will still have full access to drones, cameras, and gadgets! This means that dead players will be able to run around as drones and ping opponents as well as use their drone’s gadgets such as Twitch, Echo and Flores. Defenders will also be able to use their camera gadget utilities such as the Maestro’s Evil Eye even when dead. This change will significantly reduce downtime in matches and will increase player activity in influencing the result of the round despite being eliminated.


The Speed and Armor system will also be changed to the Speed and Health System to make the increased hitpoints of a character more visible to the player instead of the previously hidden back-end modifier.

Operator Reworks 

Some operators were to be reworked some time this year to further balance their effectiveness. Some of the operators and changes mentioned were:

Goyo: The Volcán gadget will no longer have a shield.

Melusi: The Banshee Sonic Defence device will expose a weakpoint when opponents get close which can be shot to destroy the device.

Mira/Maestro: Opponents will be able to melee the Black Mirror and the Evil Eye to impair their vision.

Fuse: No solid change detailed but they aim to make the Cluster Charge more viable in more situations

Finka: Nano boost will be able to revive Finka when downed. 

Customization

Year 6 will also introduce much more flexible customization options to tailor-fit your favorite operator’s appearance. Players will now be able to mix and match various elite armor pieces and custom elements with each other to create your ideal tacticool aesthetic!

The Siege Team also announced a couple of exciting partnerships that have brought cool and interesting skins to the game. The first is a collaboration with Capcom resulting in this gorgeous Jill Valentine Zofia skin! 

The second partnership featured beloved artist Ikumi Nakamura , formerly of Capcom, Platinum games and Tango Gameworks fame, which resulted in some really creepy Japanese horror-style designs, Echo Whisper and Dokkaebi Spirit!

The team also teased more fun collaborations within the year with other interesting franchises like Rick and Morty!

Rainbow 6: Siege: The Boardgame

Finally, The Siege team had one last tease that they wanted to put out which is the Rainbow 6: Siege Boardgame!? I guess when you’re arguably the most refined shooter on the planet, you can just do this kind of stuff now.

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Which announcement are you most excited for? Let us know in the comments below! For more game stuff check out Well, Dark Souls is Halo now and 6 Video Games You Can Play With Your Valentine

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