In a Sea of Live Service Disasters, Rainbow Six Siege Plans 10 More Years with Its Biggest PS5 Revamp Yet

If you can believe it, Rainbow Six Siege is coming up on its 10th anniversary. That’s 10 years of new operators, new maps, meta changes, and plenty of battle passes. However, a literal decade down the line and Ubisoft is far from done with one of its few live service hits. In fact, Rainbow Six Siege X, a celebratory revamp of this beloved shooter, marks the beginning of another 10 years of support.

If you’ve frequented Siege’s lobbies over the last 10 years, you’ll know it’s an outlier in the ravenously competitive live service space. This tactical shooter carved out its own niche, with hardcore, slow paced, first-person combat, where a single bullet could turn the tide of battle.

Today, Siege is a beast, with close to 80 unique operators to choose from across 26 maps and a handful of competitive modes. So you have to ask the question: where does it go from here? Well that’s where Rainbow Six Siege X comes in, which aims to enhance the core pillars of the game with some tactical streamlining, technical improvements, and some selective expansion.

Let’s start out with the big hitter: Rainbow Six Siege is going free-to-play. New players will be able to try the game’s casual modes and unlock up to 26 of its operators. A paid version of the experience allows you to unlock the rest of the roster, whilst accessing all the game has to offer, namely its ranked competitive modes. For those that paid for the game pre-X, you’ll continue to have full access and will actually receive exclusive rewards tied to the specific years you played Siege.

Both free and paid players will have access to Siege X’s new permanent game mode, Dual Front. This is a 6v6 mode where players must both attack and defend three enemy points and three ally points. It’s the first time in Siege’s history that both attacker and defender operators can team up, and they’ll be doing so in the largest map the game has ever seen. It’s sort of like Breakthrough in Battlefield, where you must attack and capture the first point, before moving to the next, and eventually capturing the final point.

It’s an interesting mix-up to the typical Siege experience, with a symmetrical map, unlimited team respawns, the ability to change operators, and a far wider scope. We briefly played this new mode — although our PC decided it wasn’t feeling it (an us problem, not the game) — and the scale wasn’t something we really felt fit. However, we’re willing to give this mode the benefit of the doubt for the time being, as we hardly played enough to really set into the flow of this new format.

To keep things interesting beyond the initial launch, Dual Front features a limited roster of operators which will rotate and change each month, meaning the combination possibilities should keep things fresh.

If you aren’t bothered by Dual Front, what may pique your interest is the new visual revamp. Siege X has completely reworked the lighting engine, updated materials and their resolution, reworked the major surfaces, and improved shadows. Five modernised maps will launch with Siege X (Clubhouse, Chalet, Bank, Kafe, and Border), with three additional modernised maps joining the fray with each new season.

In all honesty, the side-by-side comparisons aren’t going to blow your mind. It’s definitely the kind of update that will impact the regular players the most. We suspect that if you drop in every now and again, you may not even notice the difference. Admittedly though, while very subtle it does give each map a more realistic feel, and it may be more noticeable when you're actually playing them.

Tying into that realism are the first-person shadows, which are arriving with Siege X. This will mean you can now see whether you are revealing your position with your shadow as you round corners, for example. It’s another string to the tactical bow that is Rainbow Six Siege.

Additional visual revamps include weapon inspect animation for every single weapon in the game, a fresh coat of paint for menu designs with a snappier and more responsive feel, and improvements to the navigation of the battle pass system. We really liked the inclusion of a new E-Sports menu, where you could see which Siege Invitational events were happening and where to watch them. Ubisoft also plans to refresh the game’s shop in the future.

It’s not all just visuals, however, as Ubisoft aims to deepen the gameplay experience with Siege X too. Players will be able to sprint whilst rappelling and actually round corners, a long requested feature within the community. New destructible items will now be littered across maps, like the fire-spewing gas pipe, the concussive smoke emitting fire extinguishers, and the now destroyable metal detectors.

We’re also getting an improved sound propagation and reverberation system called Audio 2.0. Siege already had pretty good audio in our opinion, but examples showcased a real improvement, where you could clearly hear where sounds were coming from, with appropriate and realistic muffling depending on what walls were in the way.

Of course, all of this could be incredibly daunting to a new or lapsed player. With a reworked onboarding system though, players will be able to gradually unlock more modes and operators through its first 20 levels. This hopes to help new players learn the game as they play, and steadily introduce them to the more difficult competitive modes.

In those more intense modes some players can get a little... testy. So Ubisoft is putting in some work behind the scenes to improve its anti-cheat and anti-toxicity systems, which it claims it will continue to work on as the year progresses. The idea is to reward the positive players, whilst punishing the negative.

In a world of constantly failing live-service games — including Ubisoft’s own XDefiant — it’s nice to see a game like Siege continue to thrive so far down the line, and actually increase its seasonal content output. And Siege X isn’t seen as a last ditch effort to bring in players either, as Ubisoft claimed X marks the beginning of the next 10 years of content.

Siege X might not be the complete overhaul that some people were hoping for, but we think Ubisoft is actually smart to improve what it already has, rather than changing things to the point of ostracising its core players. It’s bringing new reasons to play, upgrades to the base experience, and promising more content as it moves forward. It might not bring swathes of new players to the fold, but as lapsed players ourselves, we’re certainly keen to revisit this tactical experience.

Rainbow Six Siege X will launch on June 10th alongside Year 10 Season 2. Are the changes and updates to the game enough to bring you back into the fold? Rappel down to the comments to let us know.