Rainbow Six Siege Is Planned to Continue Into Next-Gen

By John Wilds

In a recent interview, Ubisoft Montreal hinted at their plans for bringing Rainbow Six Siege to next gen, and how it will do so without asking fans to segregate or stump up a load of cash.

Rainbow Six Siege might be the greatest long-term success story in all of the games as service genre. Although not the biggest or the most profitable, Siege touts a large and extremely dedicated fanbase thanks to a near constant stream of updates, and a public desire from Ubisoft Montreal to keep adding content until the game has 100 playable characters. It’s been around for so long and got so much better, we even re-reviewed it.

So with this long term success in mind, what to do with the next generation of consoles becomes a very interesting challenge for Ubisoft Montreal. And thanks to an interview from the Daily Star, we now know a little more about their plans.

“We don’t want a sequel whatsoever,” said Rainbow Six Brand Director, Alexandre Remy at a recent pro tournament. Adding,  “…we don’t want to segregate our community between the different platforms. In an ideal world tomorrow, we’d love players from every platform to be able to play together. We are approaching next-gen with the same spirit.”

With this desire to keep Siege as a single player base, he went on to say the team were asking, “how can we make the player base of Siege today be able to migrate?” And that both backwards compatibility and a smaller fee for existing players willing to upgrade, were already being talked about.

“The strength of any multiplayer game is the size of its community,” he continued,  “…so I do believe that we have to make every effort possible that when next gen comes in, they are treated as a high-end PC versus another PC.”

Considering that everything points to next generation being dominated by AMD Hardware, just like this one, the “high end PC vs another PC” analogy could be very apt. It indeed looks like next gen players will very much be playing on similar but better versions of their previous consoles. This lead the interviewer to ask how you would ensure actual fairness between players playing different versions of the same game. Remy didn’t have the answer yet, replying,  “I’m not sure exactly how you’d be able to deploy this and we’re just having a conversation the first parties.”

Of course with E3 around the corner there’s no doubt to be a tonne of more announcements from Ubisoft that we’ll have for you right here, as they happen. But if you can’t wait until then, check out the latest Rainbow Six Siege DLC announcement featuring two new operators or the trailer for the new Lesion Elite set.

John is a freelance writer for IGN UK with a love for all things stealthy, ginny and noisy. To set up a game of Spies vs Mercs or hear his less coherent ramblings, get him on Twitter.