Update: Maverick has been officially revealed, and the leaks and rumors have been confirmed. As you can see in the teaser above, he indeed uses a blow torch, though rather than breaching the wall in this case, he creates a horizontal slit which he can shoot through. His bio indicates that while creating "murder holes" is one of his talents, his blow torch has other uses, too. Maverick’s full reveal will take place during the Six Major in Paris, which begins tomorrow and runs through the 19th.

Our original story, in which fans dug up his name a bit early, follows below.

Original story (Aug 14): Following the official reveal of Rainbow Six Siege’s newest defender, Clash, fans have already been digging for even more info. And thanks to their tenaciousness, we now know the likely name of our new blow-torched attacker: Maverick.

There are already a few things that are adding credence to this theory, the main one being video tags that can be found in the reveal video for Clash on Ubisoft’s YouTube channel. As you can see below, “new operator maverick” is embedded in the video’s keywords for anyone to see. Well, not anyone—YouTube hides these tags on the normal video page, so they’re only visible when viewing the page source in another tab.

Maverick’s mention sits right next to other keywords that we would expect, like “new operator clash” and “hereford base,” so this seems pretty cut and dry. But for good measure, clever redditor veolicitycontrol noticed that trying to open the page for “maverick reveal” on the Siege website doesn’t simply redirect back to the main site like other bogus URLs. Instead, it hits a 404 and stays there, suggesting the page may exist and just isn’t visible yet.

We know from leaks back in May and the Operation Grim Sky reveal that Maverick is an attacker from the Delta Force who will carry a blow torch gadget. This likely means he’ll be Siege’s third hard breacher alongside Thermite and Hibana, an addition players have wanted for a long time. Ubisoft will probably officially unveil Maverick’s name sometime this week, leading up to the full gameplay reveal on Sunday during the Six Paris Major.

Ubisoft has also released a new Designer Notes blog post detailing a few small operator changes before going into Grim Sky. The most interesting change will be coming to Thatcher—his EMP grenades will no longer destroy cameras, only disable them temporarily. “This is a small part of a larger project that we are working on, but have too many dependencies on current systems to implement this at the same time as the rest of the changes. Future changes will include elements that will make Thatcher stronger, but we needed this interaction in place before we can begin working on those,” the post states.

Valkyrie’s throwable cameras, bulletproof cameras, Maestro’s Evil Eye turrets, and the default map cameras all apply here. Right now, this comes across as a simple nerf, but Thatcher isn’t typically used to destroy cameras in the first place. His EMP grenades are most commonly used to safely destroy Bandit's batteries and Mute’s jammers to free up a wall for hard breaching. The nerf is in line with what Ubisoft designers said last month during a Reddit AMA, admitting that they weren’t satisfied with how the EMPs leave little room for counterplays. 

After feedback that Twitch’s shock drones were too hard to hear even in a quiet room, Ubi will be making them a bit louder when moving around in Grim Sky. If this nerf is as slight as they make it sound, it shouldn’t change up Twitch’s playstyle too much, but it’s important to know for the Twitch mains out there who might not notice they’re suddenly making more noise when trying to stealth around.

We'll surely have more on Siege's new operators come the Paris Major this weekend.

The slow, steady rollout of the next season of Rainbow Six Siege, entitled Operation Grim Sky, continued today with a teaser introducing one of the game's two new operators: Morowa "Clash" Evans, a defender who bears an uncanny resemblance—at least for a brief, flashing second—to Shodan, the infamous AI villain of System Shock.

Clash, a Scotland Yard crowd control specialist, is the first Rainbow Six defender with a shield. And not just a shield, but a massive, transparent, person-height shield with a built-in taser. And not just a taser, but a howling Tesla coil, basically, that looks like it's cranking out enough juice to drop six men and the elephant they rode in on.

A native of England, Clash served with the Territorial Support Group during the 2011 riots, before earning a spot in Specialist Firearms Command, the branch of London's Metropolitan Police Service that provides armed response capability. Her shield, the Crowd Control Electro Shield, is actually a DIY rig put together by Twitch and Mira. 

"Clash is the perfect Operator to handle this new gadget and weapon because she understands mob behavior and she pioneered snatch squad tactics, not to mention her experience as a riot officer," Ubisoft said in her character announcement. "She knows exactly when and where to deploy this shield to deny entry and slow down her opponents." 

Clash, and all of Operation Grim Sky including the reworked Hereford Base map that we checked into last week, will be fully revealed on August 19 during the Six Major in Paris. And in case you missed it, this weekend is a fine time to find out what Rainbow Six Siege is all about: From August 16-20 it'll be free to play on Steam. 

And in case you thought I was kidding:

Ubisoft is offering another free weekend for its wildly successful tactical FPS Rainbow Six Siege.

In a slightly unusual interpretation of the word “weekend”, Siege will be freely available to play from Thursday 16th of August, continuing through until Monday 20th. According to Ubisoft, this will offer full access to all maps, modes and operators.

On PC, the free weekend commences from 6pm, while console players will receive access to it earlier in the day. PC players can pre-load the game as early as tomorrow, however, enabling you to blast a hole in your evening plans as soon as the game becomes available to play.

The free weekend coincides with the first ever Rainbow Six Major championship in Paris, where sixteen teams will compete for a share of a prize pot worth $350,000. Starting on the 17th, the event will also reveal Operation Grim Sky, a new content update that will introduce two new pperators to the game.

The specifics regarding these operators are still under wraps, but Ubisoft has offered a broad sketch of the new characters. According to Ubisoft’s announcement of Grim Sky, the first is a “tough police officer” from the UK specialising in “mob behaviour and snatch-squad tactics”, while the second is an American attacking operator who “remains an enigma within Rainbow Six”. You know you’re black ops when your own team doesn’t know anything about you.

Grim Sky will also see the first reworking of a Siege map, as the Hereford Base gets a remodelling. A teaser trailer for the altered map is below. Full details of the update will be unveiled at the Paris event, assuming you’re not too busy playing Siege at the time of the reveal.

The new Hereford looks fantastic, with the old, bland concrete blocks being scrapped in favour of a WWII aesthetic that gives the map a far more distinct visual style, full of fighter planes, antique cars and crumbling brickwork. The map will still feature plenty of nods to the old Hereford however, something that the developers hope will retain the “soul” of the map, while making it far more visually interesting.

The rework will overhaul more than just the skin of the map. Hereford Base was the first map ever prototyped for Siege, and since then the game has shifted significantly, leaving Hereford behind. Nowadays, it feels clunky and bland to play on, in stark contrast to newer maps like Villa or Theme Park. Compared to the rest of Siege’s maps Hereford is tiny, leaving defenders very few options in terms of objective locations, and it’s far too easy for attackers to lock down the central staircase, preventing rotations and bottling defenders into the site, where they can easily be picked off. 

Changing this imbalance is the main focus of this rework. The map has been made bigger, opening up the cramped interior spaces to allow for more free-form firefights, and new rotation paths have been added, including a new set of interior stairs, which should make the map far easier to defend, with roamers now having far more options to set up flanks and ambushes. Overall, these changes are so significant that it looks like the new Hereford base will feel like a totally new map. It’s not yet confirmed whether or not the map will be heading straight into the ranked rotation like Villa did last season, but based on the confidence expressed in the blog post I would imagine it will be.

Also interesting is what this new map rework might mean for Siege in the long term. Ubisoft has differentiated this full rework from the “map buff” that Clubhouse got last season, which added some new passageways but left the map relatively in tact. These map buffs are expected to come every season from now on, but the rework clearly involves much more work than the buff, so it’s unclear when we can expect to see another one, especially if Ubisoft wants to return to the one new map a season format we’ve seen in the past. Many of Siege’s maps could benefit from major changes, especially maps that have been relegated to casual, like Yacht, Tower and Presidential Plane, or ones removed from matchmaking entirely, like Favela. These maps are some of the most interesting available in Siege, so making them more viable by adding new objective sites and rotation lanes for defenders, or by adding extra protection against spawn peeking and entry locations for attackers, could really help in making these old maps fun again.