Rainbow Six Siege’s latest test server has gone live, and it looks like Ubisoft has some big changes in mind for Jackal. The TTS has brought some major changes for the operator, most of which focus on Jackal’s scan ability. The devs hope that these changes will give players better information and more interesting decisions to make – and they’ll certainly give us something interesting to consider as we look down the Year 4 roadmap.
Jackal will now receive a different number of pings depending on how old a scanned footprint is. If it’s less than 15 seconds old, he gets five pings – 30 seconds means four pings, 60 seconds gives three, and 90 second-old prints give two pings. Each tier of age is represented by a colour while the Eyenox is active, which will let you see how old a print is at a glance.
Once you’ve scanned, you can share the information with your team, which causes the footprints to disappear but gives the entire team a ping on the enemy’s location. You can also choose to keep the info to yourself – that’ll keep the footprints on-screen, so you can track them all the way to the enemy.
“We’re aiming to make the information Jackal can get more effective and nuanced,” Ubisoft says in the patch notes on Reddit, “but increase emphasis on cost-reward decision making when Jackal decides how to use that information.”
For now, this is just a test server effort. The changes may look much different in the final game, or disappear altogether, but for now it looks like the developers have some major plans to shake up Jackal play.