After four years, Rainbow Six Siege's core team is moving on, though still staying at Ubisoft. Creative director Xavier Marquis, brand director Alexandre Remy and other members of the team will be hopping onto new projects, leaving the game in the hands of a new squad of Rainbow Six Siege veterans.
Before it launched, the prospect of a multiplayer-only online Rainbow Six seemed to hold little appeal for fans of the series, myself included, but it quickly proved itself to be as tense and inventive as its singleplayer counterparts, and completely unlike most other competitive multiplayer games. It's had a great run under Marquis, and Ubisoft is adamant that it's here to stay.
Remy described it as passing a legacy onto the new team in a video announcement. It's led by Leroy Athanassoff, who was lead designer on For Honor before he joined Rainbow Six Siege. While it's a new core team, they're not new to Rainbow Six Siege, having worked on the game for some time.
Siege relied heavily on Marquis and the original team during the early days, according to the former creative director, but it's grown better and larger, in great part thanks to the community, and now it's more than just their vision.
"Today we need to prepare new developers, new people, new teams to be able to embrace that," he said. "It's crucial to the very existence of the game."
Athanassoff also shared the team's goals for Rainbow Six Siege now that the transition has happened.
"We will start expanding the 'game universes,'" he said. "If you look at player experience, we need to stop thinking about exclusive features and start implementing inclusive features instead. What I mean is that we need to deliver content that will impact every player and the whole community."
Specific changes and new features weren't mentioned, but generally it sounds like they're aiming for broader, more holistic updates. I'm a bit out of the loop these days, though I've been following the big updates, but at the four year mark a shake-up is probably a good thing.
