How Rainbow Six Siege Quietly Became One Of The Best Multiplayer Shooters

When Rainbow Six Siege launched two years ago to mixed reviews and somewhat lackluster sales, it would have been fair for Ubisoft to write the game off. However, the team at Ubisoft Montreal wasn’t content to leave it alone. Instead, the launch was just a rocky first step in what has become a remarkable evolution for the tactical online first-person shooter.

Over the past two years Ubisoft Montreal continued to release a stream of free content, patches, updates, and player-friendly features, building up trust with its ever-expanding player base and quietly making Siege into one of the most dynamic, well-balanced, and content-rich shooters on the market. 

However, the journey to this point wasn’t easy. At one point Siege wasn’t even a twinkle in Ubisoft’s eye. Back in 2011, the studio’s next entry under the Rainbow Six banner was Rainbow Six Patriots, a more traditional project that featured both a campaign and multiplayer. The game was in development for some time (Game Informer even announced it as our cover back in 2011), but Ubisoft decided to cancel the project due to one big factor: timing.

The last proper Rainbow Six game was Rainbow Six Vegas 2, which launched back in 2008, so the franchise wasn’t exactly fresh in the minds of players. With a new console generation just on the horizon, Ubisoft decided that creating a new entry in the franchise at the tail end of a console generation wasn’t the right move. 

“That’s the moment that management and Ubisoft decided that it was best to aim for the next generation of consoles at the time,” says Alexandre Remy, brand director for Siege.

An early look at Patriots

Remy was a part of the Patriots team back in 2013 and has been with Siege from inception until now. As the Patriots team dissolved, he migrated to a new core team of about 25 people whose job was to design a Rainbow Six game for the next generation of consoles. 

It just so happened that most members of the new Rainbow Six team had multiplayer games embedded in their DNA. They were huge fans of competitive shooters, but also MOBAs like DOTA 2, something that would become much more relevant in Siege’s design. 

Thanks in part to creative director Xavier Marquis, there was one image that the team focused on more than anything else: The titular siege. “I remember very vividly, a presentation with one very striking image and visual which is that old medieval siege,” Remy recalls. “[Marquis] basically said, ‘Hey, this is the game that we’re going to be making. The whole game is about the siege.’ Attackers, defenders, and all those mechanics and everything started from there all those years ago, with that single image pretty much summing up the gameplay equation of Siege.”

In the same presentation, Marquis presented to Remy and a handful of other team members the three ideas that would end up sustaining Siege for the next two years: tactical siege gameplay, multiplayer-first design, and a game that would be built to last.

Remy and the rest of the team were in.

“That really touched us a lot,” Remy says. “At that time, in the room, of the ten of us, a lot were playing MOBAs as well, so we had an experience as gamers and as players with those games that can last such a long time. And it’s like a good wine. The more it aged, the better it is. We’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is such a disruptive idea in the genre as well as in Ubisoft, to be honest. So we’re in 100 percent. Let’s go!’”

Mother of Invention
Once the team had settled on this central principle, they set out to create the foundation that would support Siege for years to come. The idea was ambitious and Ubisoft’s choice to design the game for a new generation of hardware only made it more so. With so many ways Siege could fall apart, how would Ubisoft Montreal pull it off?  

Despite the complaints that players and critics had about the game at launch, it was hard to deny the game’s strengths. Environmental destructibility makes each map a dynamic arena that encourages operators to adapt to their surroundings. Each operator has a tactical ability that affects the game in interesting ways, whether it’s a small shock drone that zaps opposing players or a wall charge that shoots grenades into the next room over. Plus, Siege’s incredible sound design and focus on teamwork make each match a tense battle that depends just as much on gathering intel as it does good shooting.

However, the game’s rocky launch in December 2015 was a growing pain for both Ubisoft and players. Ubisoft Montreal had never released such an intensive online experience, and players and critics alike saw only the foundation of what would become a massive platform. A slew of matchmaking and networking issues, like inconsistent connectivity and server errors, plagued Siege from the start. The lack of content didn’t help; Siege launched with 20 operators, 11 maps, three multiplayer modes, and a player vs A.I. mode called terrorist hunt – and some serious gameplay flaws like poor hit detection marred what was otherwise a good online shooter. 

Necessity really is the mother of invention, and Remy now realizes how important this turbulent time was for the team. “Looking at it now, that made us a team able to work and iterate as much as possible,” Remy says. “We had the necessity to keep the game alive, to keep the players and community happy or happier, to iterate and work really hard to make the game better and better. Launch was very rocky, but it helped us find that structure, organization, and process to improve the game.”

Despite the setbacks and pitfalls of development and launch, Ubisoft Montreal stuck with Siege. It spent the next few months not only fixing issues that were present at launch but immediately jumping into their post-launch plans. 

From the get go, the team intended for Siege to be an experience that was built to last. The games-as-service model has come under fire recently for its reliance on monetization – Siege does include lootboxes with cosmetic items only – but even before launch Ubisoft Montreal had a player-first philosophy.

“How do you build trust in the long term with your players?” Remy asks. “It’s about not segregating, not putting gameplay behind a pay wall. That was the general philosophy.” Any piece of new content in Siege, whether it’s an operator or map, is available to all players. Players can purchase season passes to get new operators early, but all players are essentially on an even playing field.

The idea was, and still is, disruptive in a genre that’s only now embracing ways to create sustainable, evolving experiences. Destiny, with its massive expansions, has always billed itself as a platform more in line with MMOs, but Siege was experimenting with free content and hero-based design philosophies pulled straight from games like DOTA 2.

The core team had a lot of discussions about their post-release roadmap. How do you keep players involved with your game over months let alone years? In the end, they settled on “seasons,” a reference that points to both consistent annual divisions and the serialized format of television. 

A season of Siege content comes every three months, bringing with it around two new operators and occasionally a new map. A free weekend, heavy discount on the game, and pro-league competition also accompany a season of content. This 360-degree content push gets existing players excited and gives newcomers an opportunity to jump in.

In the six months after launch, the team released two seasons of content, 17 title updates, and a host of smaller tweaks and patches. Siege was evolving, and gamers were taking notice. “The shift really was between Season 2 and Season 3,” Remy says. “We started for the first time at the launch of Season 3 and the end of Year 1 to see an increase of player activity. Before it was almost a steady line, and then all of a sudden, we had a boost of activity, a very major boost. That’s the moment we felt that the game can actually live for a very, very, very long time.”

Players were realizing that Siege was here to stay and that Ubisoft Montreal was willing to dedicate the time and effort to making Siege a top-notch shooter. Establishing trust takes time, but at almost every turn Ubisoft Montreal proved it had its players in mind. BattleEye, the anti-cheater program that launched in August 2016, made for a safer experience, removing almost 95 percent of cheaters from Siege. Operation Health, which began this past June, was a massive quality of life effort to fix the game’s ongoing gameplay and networking issues.

These fixes have paid off in a big way for Ubisoft. Over the past two years, Siege has quietly become one of the best-selling shooters on the market. It recently cracked the 25 million player mark two years after its release, an incredible feat considering that most player counts for online games usually trend downwards after launch. Back in August, Ubisoft announced that Siege had 2.3 million players a day. The game has re-appeared as a regular entry in the NPD sales charts this year. It may be two years old, but Siege shows no signs of slowing down. And neither does Ubisoft Montreal.