Rainbow Six Siege is getting its first permanent mode in 10 years, and it throws every Siege rule out the window

When you've been playing Rainbow Six Siege as long as I have, it's hard not to reflexively snarl at your first round of Dual Front: a new permanent, 6v6 mode coming in Year 10 Season 2.

In development for years as part of Siege X, the tactical FPS's "not quite a sequel" refresh coinciding with its 10th year of updates, Dual Front goes beyond a gimmicky event mode. It throws all the rules of its time-tested, highly competitive Bomb format out the window, expanding the lobby size by two, enabling respawns, and most heretical of all, letting attackers and defenders play on the same team.

It's enough to make a grizzled Siege vet go pale, but after playing a few rounds for myself, I'm starting to get what Dual Front is going for—a faster, less punishing spin on Siege with a greater sense of momentum.

This is Dual Front in a nutshell:

• 6v6 with a limited operator pool of defenders and attackers
• Takes place on one large map with multiple buildings
• Teams have to simultaneously defend their zone and attack the enemy zone
• Respawns are 30 seconds, and you can swap operators between lives
• Capturing a zone pushes the enemy back to their next zone, capture all three to win
• Matches last around 20 minutes

The format is strange, and in true Siege fashion, it took a few rounds to fully understand how it works. My first hurdle was reading the map—both teams can roam outside freely no matter your operator choice, but it wasn't immediately clear what zones were fair game.

I kept walking into restricted areas that automatically spotted me for the other team (like going outside as a defender in standard Bomb) until I noticed an on-screen minimap showing the current active zone and a central neutral area that splits the map in two.

Dual Front started to make sense once I thought of it as Siege's version of Battlefield's Breakthrough, or Overwatch's extinct '2CP' mode: You push deeper into enemy territory one zone at a time, but because the other guys can also push into your territory, there's a little bit of MOBA in there too.

Who attacks their site and who stays behind to defend? That will probably be the first question randomly-made squads will be asking in Dual Front matches. At first, we defaulted to the most natural strategy of three attackers and three defenders—hey, that's probably why it's 6v6—but that ratio went up or down depending on where the momentum swung.

At times, we had five players pushing their site and just one guy holding down the fort. In one match I was that lone defender, and there was a stretch of three or four minutes when I had nobody to fight because the enemy team was busy holding us back.

I think that's going to be one of the growing pains with Dual Front: Unlike Bomb mode, where you can't lose as long as you wipe out the other team, there is a way to play Dual Front that guarantees you'll lose. You can't go all in on defending, or leave the attacking job up to just one or two players, or else you'll never make progress on those enemy zones. But when your team is getting stomped, it can feel like the only option is to hunker down.

Perhaps with stomps in mind, Ubisoft included a couple of catch-up mechanics. The longer a zone goes uncaptured, the more it "destabilizes," meaning its capture bar will fill faster. This came up a few times in my matches—usually capturing a zone takes a full 90 seconds after planting the defuser, but when a zone fully destabilizes, the capture becomes instant.

The other catch-up is a secondary objective that appears in the neutral zone around halfway through the match. Completing the assignment—in my matches, we had to escort a hostage—will partially progress the capture of the enemy zone. It's essentially a shortcut.

I was surprised by how not weird it was to mix attackers and defenders. There are inevitably some busted team comps players will discover once the mode's out for real, but I mostly tried playing operators outside their usual roles. I finally got to live out my fantasy of attacking a site with Doc, pumping healing drugs into teammates from the safety of a window rappel. I also got blown up by a crafty attack Kapkan who snuck into our zone and boobytrapped our doors. The experience highlighted for me how many operators work as both attackers and defenders—does the distinction really matter anymore?

It does to Ubisoft. Dual Front will be here to stay when it arrives in Year 10 Season 2. Future seasons will build upon its singular map and refresh the operator pool, but traditional 5v5 Bomb will remain Ubisoft's primary focus.