Ubisoft Montreal have announced that the second season of Rainbow Six Siege’s year two content plan will be delayed so that the devs can focus on improving the game’s health. In place of the expected second season of content, which traditionally brings two new Operators and a new map, Ubisoft Montreal are running season two as Operation Health instead, the goal being to overhaul the technical side of the game so that it’s more stable and fair for players going forward.
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So how will that change the content plan for year two? A new ranked season will run as usual over the next three months, but both Hong Kong operators and the new Hong Kong-based map will launch in season three. In addition to all of the second season’s content, season three will also feature one of the two expected Polish GROM operators. The last Polish GROM operator will appear in the South Korean-themed season four.
While there won’t be any changes in season two in terms of gameplay, a number of issues are set to get Ubisoft Montreal’s full attention, from connectivity and matchmaking, to hitboxes and bug fixes. According to brand director Alexandre Remy there are three main features Operation Health is going to address. “Pillar one is technological improvements, so everything the relies on matchmaking, hit registration, and connectivity. That’s the absolute priority for us, as well as for the players, and we’re really going to make a big, big push throughout the whole season with one-step matchmaking and better servers.
“The second pillar of Operation Health is switching over to a new deployment process, so that we are gradually deploying our patches, first on technical test servers, then on PC, and finally on console.This is to make sure that there are more safety nets, if you will, rather than pushing all of the content at the same time on every console. The last pillar is how we do bug fixes, whether that’s on operators or maps. The change is that we want to do smaller and shorter brackets of bug fixes, around five or ten in each sprint, instead of doing bigger updates that were sometimes causing more regressions.”
The technical changes are targeting bug fixes and grievances that have plagued the game’s dedicated community since day one. The postponement of content will likely anger some, but those players who have been calling for better matchmaking, better servers or a fix to Hibana’s pellets will be relieved. Two pieces of content that appear to have been overlooked are the second season’s Polish map and mid-season reinforcements, which are expected parts of each new season. The newly unveiled content roadmap, which you can see above, suggests that both have been scrapped in order to keep the content weighting of season three and season four relatively similar to that of previous seasons.
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