Releasing just a little over five years ago, Rainbow Six Siege has had a pretty interesting post-launch story. On release, Siege was reviewed as an incomplete game with potential, while many critics were willing to forgive the slight lack of content for the fresh and exciting matches. Siege took environmental destruction to a level that no other game of its kind ever had before, and when combined with the unique operators that each had their own abilities, Siege had a flavor unlike anything else.
But things weren’t all sunshine and rainbows from the start. Shoddy hit detection and a few severely unbalanced maps made for an occasionally frustrating experience. While the bones of the original Rainbow Six Siege experience are still there, there have been a lot of changes and additions, creating a pretty stark difference between what Siege was at release and what Siege is now.
At launch, Siege had twenty different operators to choose from. Now, it has almost triple that, coming in at fifty-eight operators to choose from. This has definitely steepened the learning curve of a game that already had the Mt. Everest of learning curves. Back in the day, if the Attackers wanted to open a wall that Defenders reinforced, they would need to employ the use of the operator Thermite to do so. Now, there are four different operators (including the newest hard breacher in Siege, Ace) who can open up holes of varying sizes in reinforced walls, not counting a few different operators who can achieve this with a secondary gadget, like Fuze.
Over time, operators have begun being more or less categorized into groups like this, where they fulfill a certain role within the group. Jager, Wamai, and the new Defender Aruni all fit into the utility-denial category, each excelling at preventing Attackers from using their throwables like grenades and gadgets in a different way. Certain situations or certain playstyles may favor one of these operators over the other, and over time, Siege has given players a plethora of operators to choose from for each role.
Some players have criticized the shift from operators that employed realistic gadgets like the original twenty, to the operators that the game has now who have more far-fetched gadgetry. There are operators with holograms that run around, there are operators that can look at a footprint and immediately know an enemy’s location across the map, etc. But, it was a step the game was always going to have to make in order to continue increasing the operator count. At a certain point, there are no more modern-day gadgets to give new operators, and Ubisoft had to start using their imagination (or add characters from other games, like the recent addition of Sam Fisher to Siege).
The maps in Rainbow Six Siege are some of the most complex maps in any game out there. Over a short period of time, players began looking at Siege and the things they could do in it and exploited some of the maps’ weaknesses, especially in regards to the sightlines players could create with the destruction. Ubisoft took note of this and, over time, has made huge reworks on Siege maps that have dramatically altered how the maps have played, and have created a much more balanced experience. Some of the original maps that have been reworked are considered some of the best ones in the game, such as Kafe Dostoyevsky.
Ubisoft has also added a ton of maps post-launch; some of these maps have been well-regarded, others have been less so. Favela, for instance, was the first post-launch map added to Rainbow Six Siege, and it was largely designed before Ubisoft quite had a hold on exactly how players were playing Siege. It boasted the most destructibility of any map Siege had to date, but players found that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Since Favela, Ubisoft has gone on to develop some of the best maps in Siege, such as Villa, which has been mostly untouched since it released back in 2018.
The overall health of the game was a major concern around release, and for a year or two after. There were many lingering issues in the game, ranging from some game-breaking bugs (where operators have been removed from Siege) and hit-detection issues that were causing a lot of players to drop the game altogether. In order to combat these issues, Ubisoft decided to hold onto a season’s worth of content and deploy Operation Health, aimed at fixing the lingering issues with Siege, and also make it easier for it to develop content for the game going forward.
Over time, this proved to be a great move. While the game has absolutely not been perfect since then, there has been a stark contrast to the game before and after operation health. Since then, Ubisoft has come to improve many of the base aspects of the game, from adding a map ban system to Siege, to drastically overhauling the lighting, adding a new ping system that does a lot more to inform teammates of what exactly what is being pinged, and to a match replay system that will be added sometime in the near future.
Siege also has near-constant balancing updates that continually tweak the operators in order to make each and every one of them viable. Each time a new operator is introduced there are about a dozen new things to take into account in order to keep the experience balanced, and over time, certain operators have become drastically different than they were at launch (like Lord Tachanka’s recent rework). Jager, for example, used to be a 3-speed Defender with a high-zoom scope and a gadget that functioned very differently than how it functions today.
These balancing changes have been necessary to keep the game fresh; when a character is ejected from the meta, it forces players on both sides to adapt to the difference, making for radically different matches each time a balancing pass is completed. This constant refinement of existing content and addition of new content has been what’s caused the game to blow up in popularity as it has, and it’s been crucial in keeping it near the top of the competitive FPS food chain, with Siege even receiving a free PS5/Xbox Series X upgrade.
Rainbow Six Siege is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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