Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege was released in 2015 and has had a surprisingly long shelf-life as a live-service game. Now, coming up on its 10-year anniversary, Rainbow Six Siege is getting an overhaul titled Rainbow Six Siege X. This includes new content, enhanced visuals, and a new game mode called Dual Front, which turns the traditional Siege gameplay formula on its head.
As someone who had never played much Rainbow Six Siege before, I was surprised at how newcomer-friendly the new mode is. Despite my inexperience with the game, I was able to hold my own against other players during a three hour demo thanks to the mode’s new mechanics. In an interview, I got more insight on the project from game director Joshua Mills about what to expect from Siege X, how Dual Front caters to new players, and why the team didn’t go for a direct sequel.
Switching it up
Dual Front is a new 6v6 game mode where two teams must battle for control of zones. Both teams are simultaneously attacking and defending, trying to capture their opponent’s zones while keeping their own from falling into enemy hands. This is a departure from the usual Siege multiplayer gameplay loop.
In traditional Siege rounds, players are split into two teams and they always have defined roles. One team is the attacking team while the other is defending. The objective on the attacking side is usually to rescue a hostage or diffuse a bomb, and the defending side has to hold the hostage or protect the bomb, respectively. The characters that players can choose from are called Operators, and they’re organized into attackers and defenders.
When you’re on the attacking side or defending side, you’re only able to use that specific category of Operators. This is where Dual Front’s first big change is. Instead of pitting attackers and defenders against each other, teams can now mix both types of Operators together onto one team. This opens the door for entirely new team compositions.
For example, the attacker Deimos and the defender Azami can now be on the same team. Whereas their unique abilities were suited towards their Operator type, players can now explore them in new ways in Dual Front. Deimos’s Deathmark Tracker reveals the location of a chosen target while revealing his own, but it now can be used in a more defensive context, such as allowing him to track down someone as they escape if he’s protecting his team’s zone. Since the entire Operator pool is now entirely open, the team has actually decided to restrict who is playable, with the goal of switching out characters every so often. This works towards the approachability philosophy for Siege X.
“A smaller roster allows people to focus. It makes it easier for them to learn the ins and outs of different operators, because you’re not facing the entire giant roster of Siege at one time,” Mills tells Digital Trends.
There are two other big changes that make Dual Front the most approachable point for Siege. Traditional multiplayer modes in Siege are 5v5, but Dual Front is 6v6. Additionally, there is respawning in Dual Front whereas there was none in other game modes. A 6v6 mode is actually less stressful than a 5v5 one, because a comeback is much easier to achieve when you’re down 5v6 compared to if it was 4v5. The respawning also simply provides players more chances to improve and there’s less pressure from teammates.
“The social pressure in 5v5 if one of our players is eliminated, and becomes a 4v5 situation is extremely impactful. At that point, the five players have way more of an advantage,” Mills says. “With respawn coming around the corner in 30 seconds, you actually don’t have that immediate defeatist feeling where you let your team down like everything’s gonna fall apart now, because it won’t.”
The next decade of Siege
It’s impressive to see Siege last for 10 years, as live-service games can sometimes become monumental successes or catastrophic failures (see Concord). Siege X isn’t so much a follow-up or a sequel to Siege, but rather a “transformation.” While that does seem vague, Mills explained why they’re not doing a direct sequel.
Unlike another one of Ubisoft’s live-service games, The Division, which is now on its third entry, Rainbow Six Siege is entirely PvP whereas The Division has both PvE and PvP elements. Additionally, the development team is trying to update Siege every three months, so they have to be flexible.
“Because of the nature of Siege being a PvP game, the players are part of the experience and built into the structure of the game. That leads into a very different conversation about how you rebuild,” Mills says. “We’re talking about just gun mechanics, destruction systems, and all of the other different systems that we use. The way we’ve moved forward with our tech is to be highly modular.”
It would be nigh impossible to condense 10 years of Siege into a two year development cycle for a sequel. However, it would most likely just result in an inferior game. “You could do it, but you’re fundamentally going to compromise it in one way or another,” Mills says. “So there’s a lot of lessons that are learned in live development and being able to find a way to make it sustainable.”
After playing the new mode, I tried Siege’s traditional multiplayer offerings, and I now understood why Dual Front was made how it was. The lack of respawn left me uninterested once I died, I was forced to just watch a teammates POV camera. In Dual Front, I always found myself absorbed back into the action. This new game mode was the perfect way for me to try Siege for the first time, and I can’t wait to go back home and give another Siege X a spin.
