Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege’s fourth year has been officially announced, with the first part dropping in the next month or so. We’ll be getting our first glance at the new operators soon, but we figured we’d add everything we know about the new year to our guide. For those new to our coverage, there’s also some important things to know when first starting out, as well as specifics for playing as the attacking team or defending team, and more in-depth stuff on each operator and the specific maps being added as the game continues its long run. (more…)
Roaming defenders have largely gone unpunished in Rainbow Six Siege, but all that’s about to change. With the introduction of Gridlock in Year 4 Season 1, the attacking team can now leave a little present for any would-be roamers in the form of Trak Stingers. Gridlock does have more to offer however, so we’ll be going over all the weapons, stats, and gear she has on her. (more…)
Rainbow Six Siege’s got a couple of new operators coming within the next few weeks, kick starting Year 4 of updates. So before then it’s probably best to learn what each of the other operators does in the game as of the most recent update. They all have unique abilities, as well as their own gadgets and weapons. In this guide hub, we’ll be looking at all the various operators to see how they stack up today; making recommendations about who to use if you’re new, as well as detailing which operators they have advantages over, and the latest updates within the affected operators. (more…)
It's the end of another long day at Fags & Mags & Rab(bid)s, a wee family-owned shop and video game company on the corner of a sleepy street in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil.
Michel Guillemot is down on his hands and knees, fishing under the pick 'n' mix display for loose sweets he then dusts on the lapel of his brown cotton shopcoat before popping them back into their correct box.
A yelp rises from the back room. Yves Guillemot rushes out, a dusty bottle of prosecco in his hand and a wide smile across his face.
"Brother!" Yves cries. "They did it! We're safe! We did it!"
Michel slips a gummy egg between his lips and waits for Yves to calm down.
"Vivendi! Finally! They said they would! They have!" he gasps while tearing at the foil on the bottle. Yves notices his brother's bemused look (and pretends not to notice he's eating the stock again) and pauses to catch his breath. "Vivendi finally sold their remaining Ubisoft shares. That's the very end of their takeover attempt. Our family business is safe."
Michel swallows and reaches for a pack of plastic picnic champagne flutes.
Winning duels in Rainbow Six isn’t just about aim.
Being able to flick to headshots with your mouse is only one part of the equation. The other part involves fine-tuned restraint, awareness, and appreciation for tactics.
Running headlong into firefights is a recipe for disaster. Know when to push, but also know when to hold back and wait for your opponent.
Being good at Siege is a real test of your ability to be patient. These are some ways to develop that tactical patience and excel at one on one battles.
Rainbow Six is not a death-match game that rewards brazen and open conflict.
We’ve written that Rainbow Six is Counterstrike’s sexier cousin. In many ways, Rainbow does inherit some of the same tactics from its meta.
Crouching and leaning, and reducing your visibility to an enemy is essential.
Pros hold corners tightly. Observe the movement of pixels rather than entire character models that cross your field of view. Expose your operator as little as possible. Gain information on your opponent through ambient sound, cameras, and other special abilities that Rainbow Six’s operators provide (e.g. Pulse’s heartbeat monitor, Lion’s EE-ONE-D, or Dokkaebi’s Logic Bomb).
Tactically, Rainbow Six is a game of information. Seeking that information by rushing into open areas without prior knowledge cedes initiative to your opponent.
Initiative, or the ability to engage first before your opponent can, is key to winning firefights.
Once engaged, battles last only seconds. If you’re good, fights are over before the enemy has a chance to even return fire.
Anticipation is everything in Rainbow Six. Use the small clues the game drops to anticipate movements. Even shadows generated by the environment can tip you off to an opponent’s location.
Being a quick aimer is different from being smart aimer.
If you know the direction and general area your opponent is in, you can pre-fire down corridors or around corners.
Keep that last lesson in mind — you also do not want to give your opponents the kind of information that allows them to anticipate you.
Sound reveals a great deal of information. Sprinting is one of the noisiest behaviours in Rainbow Six. Avoid it when you have the luxury of doing so.
Keep discipline with your weapons. Unless you’re pre-firing with solid information, gunfire can let your enemies know your location more so than footsteps.
Stationary targets make for easy headshots.
Although Ubisoft has committed to reducing crouch and lean spam, you will want to always keep moving, crouching, and strafing in engagements.
Practice how to track targets while also pressing your movement keys. If caught in a direct firefight, strafing left and right while laying down fire on a target is imperative. Use natural cover in the maps to duck behind as you reload and plan your next move. Duck frequently in and out behind that cover to throw off your opponent and give yourself critical protection.
Rainbow Six’s weapon and gadget loadouts are balanced in favor of the attacker. Attackers have more powerful and accurate rifles, less recoil, and almost total access to the ACOG optic. Defenders mostly have access to weapons that excel at CQB, such as shotguns and submachine guns.
What defenders lack in damage and range, they make up for in fire rate and recoil, and therefore thrive in close quarters combat. With rare exceptions, like Jager’s HK-416, defenders will almost always be at a disadvantage in longer range engagements.
Rainbow Six’s customisation offer some degree of choice over how your aiming profile looks and acts.
For some, the added magnification of the ACOG scope is essential to staying accurate and pulling off critical headshots in engagements. For others, the added shake and recoil of the ACOG can be distracting, finding it easier to use the unmagnified Red Dot, Holographic, or Reflex sights.
Choose the sighting that is most comfortable for you. Never feel like you’re second guessing the outcome of a match because you felt that your sights were off or forced you to miss a shot.
Although being sharp with your senses and instincts helps, don’t forget that Rainbow Six isn’t a free for all.
Head to head engagements can turn on whether your teammates are able to give you intel regarding the location of your opponents. Even when dead in ranked or casual, your teammates can watch cameras and give in-game voice callouts to enemy locations.
Even if your team is silent, it never hurts to ask (or plead). If someone has been knocked out of the round, diligently watching cameras can be a huge help.
Tactics and knowledge can only get you so far.
Aim will always be a critical component of winning at shooter games, and Rainbow Six is no different.
No matter how well-trained in tactics you are, as you climb the Ranked ladder, your opponents will only get faster and more disciplined.
Quick and accurate fire is a way to bail yourself out of mistakes. While the time to kill in Rainbow Six is very short, being able to “flick” your aim and make quick turns on potential ambushers can make all the difference.
After two weeks on the Technical Test Server, Rainbow Six Siege Operation Burnt Horizon is officially releasing Wednesday March 6. As always, new operators Mozzie and Gridlock will only be available to Year 4 pass holders for the first week. Outback, Siege’s excellent new map, will be available to all.
Ubisoft aggregated the weeks of testing in an addendum to the original Burnt Horizon patch notes.
Ubi is intensifying the original nerf introduced to the Logic Bomb at the beginning of the test server. In my experience, 18 seconds was still long enough that I always felt the need to stop and hang up the call myself. Bumping it down to 12 sounds like a good middle ground where you can easily let it ring without much annoyance.
Ubi is completely reversing the changes to Capitão’s fire bolts. The new bolts did feel a bit overpowered. The effective radius was march larger and had huge potential for denying areas from defenders. The devs are going to “take a look at and evaluate the data and feedback we've gathered.” For now, we’re back to the wimpy fire bolts of old.
Some small, previously unlisted changes were noticed early on by players on the test server, but Ubi took this opportunity to make them official.
Most notably, “resetting” (in which you intentionally shoot a near-death teammate into the DBNO state and revive them back to 50 health) is effectively going away. Instead of being revived back up to 50 health, you’re now revived to 20. With so much less health after a revive, resetting will almost never be worth the risk.
Despite its inherent ridiculousness as a mechanic, resetting has always been treated as a normal part of Siege’s meta. It was always treated as a sort of workaround to the fact that attackers have no reliable way to regain health. Finka can save a life in a pinch, but her healing is temporary. A proper medic on attack could help fill the hole left by resetting, but I’m not holding my breath.
Ubi has also fixed an issue with head alignment following the lean spam fixes coming to Burnt Horizon. “Previous camera placement at a full lean allowed players to fire without being completely exposed. As part of our fix to counteract lean spamming, we are shifting the camera to the center of the head instead of the far side of the head, even when at a ‘full lean,’” the post reads.
The devs are also using this patch to consolidate the file size of Siege from its whopping 81GB (!) to a more reasonable, yet unspecified size. Unfortunately, that also means the Burnt Horizon patch will be larger than usual. A whole grip of general bug fixes are also on the way. You can check out all of those here.
Of course the original editions of the Steam Charts focused on those maps used by the early pioneers of steam-based exploration, so this week we take a historical look back at the origins of your favourite game series. For just one week, put aside your modern electricity-based computing, and come on a journey through time.
Ubisoft's latest Rainbow Six Siege teaser reveals that the upcoming Danish operator, arriving in Season 2 of Year 4, will be an “expert in covert reconnaissance and stealth tactics"—and also suggests that a proximity alarm gadget will come to the shooter soon.
The image is taken from a trailer Ubisoft released last week, but this version is much higher quality, allowing players to zoom in and pick out small details. Towards the bottom left is a map of Denmark, over which is a post-it note hinting at stealth skills and the ability to "blend and adapt" to the environment. Could that mean some kind of cloaking device? We'll have to wait and see.
The info also appears on the attacking side of the board, which means the Danish operator is likely to be an attacker.
The other tease is at the far left of the image: it's a piece of blue paper that lists the game's gadgets, and on there is a "proximity alarm", with a red arrow pointing to it. No such item is in the game at the moment, but it's not hard to guess how it'd work. Place it down to watch your back and it'll tell you if an enemy gets near, is what I'd imagine.
For more details on Siege's upcoming Australian operators and their gadgets, click here.
Thanks, PCGamesN.