Update November 23, 2016: The ever-successful Rainbow Six Siege is going strong into 2017, with the announcement that more everything will be coming to the game in year two.
What exactly that means – and specific numbers of operators, maps and more – hasn’t been explained, but Ubisoft have revealed that they will show off what’s in store before the end of this year.
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In an interview with PCGamesN, vice-president of live operations at Ubisoft Anne Blondel confirmed that we’d see more in the coming weeks, responding “Yes, absolutely” when asked specifically about getting more info this year.
We did attempt to get specifics from Blondel, but she declined to provide more details, saying that “I don’t want to spoil, [the team] are really looking forward to revealing to the community. What I can say is Season 4 came out last weekend, patch 5.1 is [out now too] and we’ll be announcing much more about year two in the weeks to come, but I would hate to spoil what they have in store for the game.”
Current community assumptions say that the same schedule – two operators and a map every three months according to Rainbow Six Siege expert and PCGN contributor Jake Tucker – is likely to hold true, given it was successful and managed to shake up the game on a satisfyingly regular basis. Of course, there’s also now far more rebalancing to take into account, along with eSports concerns – as stated, we’ll find out more before the end of December.
Original story November 14, 2016:Rainbow Six Siege has had a very, very good 2016. It’s got a large and active community, a surprisingly robust eSports scene and has had regular patches adding new stuff and rebalancing as necessary. It’s all been free too, an optional season pass giving early access and not necessitating grinding for in-game currency. Now Ubisoft are prepping to do it all over again, announcing at their Proleague finals last night that a second full year of support was on the way.
Here’s the Twitch clip of the announcement from Geneviève Forget, product manager on the game:
Shortly thereafter it was confirmed that this meant maps, operators and more, as were distributed during the past twelve months. Beyond that there haven’t been any specific announcements, as there’s content and patches still to come in 2016, but it was confirmed on the R6 Twitter:
The past year has been an incredible journey, and we are excited to have you join us for another full year of content! pic.twitter.com/2W9youloDJ
— Rainbow Six Siege (@Rainbow6Game) 13 November 2016
Speaking of upcoming patches, the Japan-based Red Crow is still due for release later this week. As part of the livestream at the weekend, a batch of new details were revealed about its operators, Echo and Hibana, and map, Skyscraper. All that’s been collated in this Reddit thread, if you’re interested.