Ubisoft wants to crack Rainbow Six Siege’s attacking meta wide open. Currently, team composition feels hamstrung by the importance of hard breachers and electronic disabling operators like Thermite, Hibana, and Thatcher. On certain objective locations, attackers are at a huge disadvantage if they can't pop open a key reinforced wall. To add more variety to the meta, Ubisoft plans to distribute these roles to more operators via new secondary gadgets.
The first one, announced by Ubisoft during the Six Invitational 2020, is a small hard breaching tool for attackers. Speaking to lead game designer Jean-Baptiste Halle, it’s clear that this secondary gadget can partially fill the role of a hard breacher. Halle still wants dedicated hard breachers to be the best at their jobs, but the mini breach tool will be no slouch.
He explained that for the mini breach to be worth using, it’ll have to destroy hatches and make holes big enough to navigate through. Based on that, it sounds like the hole it creates might be vault-able, not not tall enough to run through while standing.
- Rainbow Six Siege Void Edge release date: everything we know
Both game director Leroy Athanassoff and lead game designer Jean-Baptiste Halle also told me their plans for a secondary attacker gadget that rivals the roles of Thatcher and Twitch. Halle said this gadget is still in the early stages and the team isn’t sure what form it’ll take.
Athanassoff believes that letting more operators participate in the core breaching meta opens up more “exotic picks” on a viable attack. He used the example of Nøkk, a fun operator to play that doesn’t usually fit in with a rigid breach-heavy meta. If she had the option to bring an alternative hard breach or EMP tool, it’d give the meta more variety. Still, Halle recognizes that this can be a slippery slope to making certain attackers too useful. When it comes to both new secondary gadgets, he said the team will be carefully picking whose loadouts they belong in.
Nobody at Ubisoft could tell me when we’ll get our hands on these new secondary gadgets. I got the sense that the hard breaching tool is farther along in development than the Thatcher/Twitch equivalent, so we might see it sometime in 2020.
