We recently had a chat with the developer of Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft, about the overwhelming success of the game and the things to come.
SegmentNext: Did developers at any point felt overwhelmed with the high growth of Rainbow Six: Siege? Is there any plan in motion to appease the growing community, such as even more content, more servers, more in-game goodies, etc? How far do you expect Siege to go?
Ubisoft: The player investment in Rainbow Six Siege has gone beyond our expectations. The community has embraced the game, brought along their friends, and really pushed our understanding of what’s possible with what we’ve created.
Longevity was always very important to us. Since we started building the game, we kept thinking about how it would evolve over time with our support and the community. We’re committed to supporting and sustaining the game for as long as the community keeps enjoying it. In the future, Players can definitely expect new Operators, pushing the meta even further, new maps and even rework of some existing maps.
In terms of support, it is key for us to always focus on solidifying the game’s foundations and overall health. This is why we recently introduced a new matchmaking system, more powerful servers and a new deployment philosophy pushing all new content through the technical test servers (TTS) first. We also recently released Alpha Packs which rewards all of our players who continue to invest their time in the game.
SegmentNext: Considering eSports, and Viewer’s perspective, are there any changes in the pipeline that make watching Rainbow Six: Siege streams/videos much more entertaining for a casual player? For example, a casual FPS fan who may stumble upon a PRO Rainbow Six: Siege stream!
Ubisoft: With Siege’s growing community, delivering a solid viewer experience for Siege fans or first-time viewers is something important for us. Our players are hungry to watch Siege and the core team is well aware of that: They are currently thinking of ways to improve the viewer’s experience for the years to come.
SegmentNext: Are there any plans for more servers to accommodate players in South Asia and South Africa? Our understanding is that they have to play in European servers at a severe cost of latency. Is there a future plan where you are willing to expand more servers into different countries?
Ubisoft: There are a few regions where cloud coverage, in general, is too light like North and South Africa, Middle East and East Europe where players, unfortunately, need to play in Europe datacenters at this time
We are always looking to increase our coverage as new datacenter become available with our MSFT Azure partner.
SegmentNext: From the creative aspect, how you keep maps balanced? I mean it is such a consuming task making a map that is fair to both ATK and DEF. Any insight into this creative process? Any criteria for each room?
Ubisoft: From a level design point of view, as a starting point, we have our little formula in Siege on how to design our objective rooms. It gives us a basic setup, then we play it and iterate multiple times to converge on a satisfying final setup. There is a lot of variables that can influence the balance of an objective room. We can’t look at it only by the room itself we have to also look at what surrounds it and where it is located.
While we always aim for perfect balance, It’s a challenge to achieve in a game where new operators (or operator buffs) can always come out and change the balance of an objective or a map. That’s why we rather want to have a balance within a good range between both sides.
Also, every map goes through an extensive internal testing phase. With the development of our Pro League, we’ve also added a layer of testing with the help of our professional players. Ever since Operation Dust Line, we’ve progressively added more checkpoints with them, incorporating them in our production plan for some on-site and online playtest and feedback sessions. Being Live gives us the opportunity to track our player’s raw data, as gather their feedback and react when needed with balance fixes.
As announced recently, the team is also thinking of doing map reworks of already released maps in the future.
