Rainbow Six Siege: My Concerns
I’m what you would call a Rainbow Six Veteran in that I’ve played pretty much every single title in the series all the way back to the old PC titles. I spent hundreds of hours on the R6 Vegas games in both the Single Player and Multiplayer so I’m well positioned to voice my concerns over the direction of Rainbow Six Siege.
From the moment Ubisoft shit canned the Patriots project that took the well established core mechanics and transplanted them into a more moral based game play world alarms bells were ringing as to whether we would actually see another Rainbow Six game. All was quiet for over a year until the first whispering around a more focused, close quarters based game began to filter out of Ubisoft. These were soon followed up by the first game play trailer at E3 2014.
The trailer was very brave showing exactly what Ubisoft had in store for the series and in spite of the boring monotone voice over it set the tone nicely. It was clear from the off that Siege was a very different game to the Vegas titles but at the same time it still looked and felt like a Rainbow Six game. Key points were the crazy amount of destruction, the focus on close quarter battle & teamwork. Communication between team members was key and the level shown off had a real sandbox feel to it allowing players to blow out walls, doors and even floors to get to their hostage. This added a unique sandbox feel to the series that hadn’t existed before.
Previous entries especially the Rainbow Six Vegas titles were very linear and at most gave a couple of different entries point into buildings but Siege was all new & all destructible. This destruction is important to the game in a very fundamental way as in theory it prevents 2 matches from ever playing out the same way. By allowing you the freedom to blow almost everything up you can open up new routes through the environment, funnel attackers into a trap or simply barricade your team behind shields and heavy cover. I was also pleased with the streamline nature of the shown off game play as personally I’m not a fan of multiple modes i prefer a more focused offering.
I was pretty excited until details started to emerge about the multiplayer side of things and in particular the way the levels play out. As you would expect the Multiplayer features 2 teams playing as the attackers and defenders in turns. The problems begin when you start looking into the possibilities for playing the game like a total jerk through camping and just griefing the other team. Games will naturally play out in the same way with team mates abandoning the objective and going nuts for kills in the short intense rounds. I can see it working well in a lobby with friends but how many players go it solo and rely on matchmaking?
Another massive concern is re-playability or the lack of it as there is rumoured to be only a handful of environments to blast through and knowing Ubisoft DLC will be priced crazily high and take forever to arrive.
Games like Rainbow Six Siege always rely on their communities to keep it going, to keep servers populated but with the notoriously poor community that frequents both PSN and Xbox Live it’s not hard to envision the majority of players tiring of the same game types on the same maps and moving onto the next big shooter. It’s not that it looks bad, or i don’t like the direction the series has taken but the aim appears to be creating a tightly packaged, intense CQB shooter which sounds great on paper but in practice could be a disaster.
The final area of concern is the ever increasing delays the game has faced throughout production, maybe Ubisoft are just polishing it to death but i fear at it’s core the game play is broken and simply doesn’t work in a multiplayer environment.
We’ll find out on December 1st that’s providing it doesn’t slip into 2016
