Rainbow Six Siege distills the series’ gameplay “down to its core”

Rainbow Six Siege is coming in December – and right now, the general reception towards the game is one of ambivalence. Some are genuinely excited to engage in terrorist hunting again, while others have bemoaned the lack of a proper single player campaign in the game. That of course, doesn’t mean that the game isn’t worthwhile for the solo player, with modes and features that the team hopes are worth playing without others.

Chris Hendry, a Level Artist from Ubisoft Montreal told us that while the game does embrace its multiplayer first” philosophy, there are options for going it alone.

“The creative vision for Rainbow Six Siege has always been strongly focused on a team based tactical multiplayer/coop FPS set in Closed Quarter Combat,: Hendry affirmed. “The “multiplayer first” philosophy encouraged us to focus on making the best decisions to create a solid adversarial / cooperative Rainbow Six experience whether it is on technical choices or design choices. Ultimately, we believe we have a unique multiplayer / cooperative experience that respects the brand’s core values.”

Those values? Teamplay, tactics and tension. Can you still experience those values solo?

“For players who prefer to play solo, there are two different lone wolf options: Situations mode and playing Terrorist Hunt solo. Playing Terrorist Hunt solo provides a difficult, tense and dramatic experience,” Hendry says. “All the XP and Renown you earn is applied to your overall game, so you can level up before facing off against real players online. Our other mode named Situations offers a series of 11 training sessions that will enable you to learn the mechanics of Siege at your own pace. Each of these training sessions is replayable and has three difficulty levels (Normal, Hard, and Realistic). The secondary objectives/challenges will vary according to the difficulty level.”

There are those who believe that scrapping a traditional single player campaign means the game’s deviated, and lost the essence of what made Rainbow Six so engaging. No so, says Hendry.

“The first thing that the team did was look at previous Rainbow Six games and distill their gameplay down to its core. What we found was that every single game was a confrontation, Rainbow team assaulting a stronghold and their enemies dwelling within the stronghold.  From this, we built on this premise but added two new elements. The first was that we wanted to make the enemies fully aware of that the assault was coming and give them tools to prepare. The second element was then expanding the destruction capacities of the Rainbow team – allowing them to breach through walls. This was how we developed the core of Siege. “

It all comes back to the aforementioned three T’s; Teamplay, Tactics and Tensions.

“The R6 team has been trying to bring these elements into nearly every facet of Siege from the structure of the game modes to the lethality of the weapons. In the case of teamplay, we’ve evolved this core tenant in siege with the operator system. With each operator complimenting one another in interesting ways, it allows players to assemble and work as a team within a round.”

It’s incredibly hard to play a team-based game when your connection’s not up to par. South African internet is not known for having the best speeds or latency, which generally means that as far as console games are concerned, we’re not especially keen on dedicated servers unless they’re locally hosted.

While we’ve not been able to confirm local servers, Ubisoft has said it has its own servers all over the world, which will be used for most of Rainbow Six’s multiplayer. Terrohunt matches, though matchmade, will be player hosted.

As that’s arguably the most exciting mode on offer, will that work for us here? Probably.

“Our matchmaking tries to match players on game servers which are the nearest possible to their location,” Hendry says. “In the case of Terrorist Hunt, we match people together according to their proximity to maximize the chance of having a smooth experience.”

Rainbow Six Siege is out on PC, Ps4 and Xbox One on December 1 this year. We’ve played its sort-of-single-player and the multiplayer. Check it out.

Last Updated: October 26, 2015