On Monday this week Patch 2.2 for Rainbow Six Siege went live, bringing with it some significant balance changes to characters such as Blackbeard, Glaz and Finka. However, the patch also changed the names of many gadgets – and the majority of the new names were dull and matter-of-fact. For example, ‘Logic Bomb’ became ‘Hacking Device’, ‘Grzmot Mine’ turned into ‘Concussion Mines’, and the beloved ‘Yokai’ became ‘Hover Drone’.
Naturally fans were very unhappy with these changes, which seemed to be appealing to new players but actually undid names which were based in the operators’ lore. Fortunately however, Ubisoft says that these changes were “not intended to be included with Patch 2.2” and they will be rolling them back with the next update.
Ubisoft admitted the mistake on Reddit , where it said, “our goal is to maintain the personality of each Operator’s Gadget, but also provide additional context. For example, in the future, gadgets may have a name such as ‘Yokai Drone’, ‘Black Eye Cam’, ‘Grzmot Mine’. We are going to continue working on this over the coming months, and will have more to share with you as the project comes along.”
So it seems that Ubisoft are still intending to change gadget names, but not as drastically as the ones players found in Patch 2.2. Here’s the full list of name changes, which will presumably all be rolled back in the next patch. The patch notes for the latest update don’t mention these controversial name changes so it’s entirely possible this was indeed a mistake.
Of course the big Siege news this week was the anti-cheat ban wave, which hit the same time as Patch 2.2 and ended up being bigger than expected – more than 600 players got banned worldwide for “being boosted by a cheater.”