The hardware could not handle the ideas of the team

Jun 18, 2014 14:43 GMT  ·  By

One of the big surprises of E3 2014 was the announcement coming from Ubisoft that the next game in the Rainbow Six series would be called Siege and that the previously revealed Patriots would no longer be developed by the company in any way.

Speaking to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Oliver Couture, who is a technical artist at the company, says that the biggest issue that the company faced was linked to the transition from current-gen consoles to the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony.

He states, “I worked on Patriots – on Rainbow Six for three-and-a-half years – and Patriots was old-gen. Xbox 360 and PS3. Next-gen consoles were just around the corner, and we were like, ‘OK, we want to also have a next-gen experience. What can we do for that?’”

It seems that Ubisoft did not give the team working on Rainbow Six access to hardware prototypes, which meant that it was not immediately clear to them what the limits of the coming platforms were.

He adds, “We were trying stuff out with destruction technology, and we realized destruction really changes the game. We tried to see how it could fit with old-gen, but it just didn’t work out. So for us it was just a better solution to clean the slate, reset, and make what’s best for the players.”

Rainbow Six: Siege is a fast-paced title that takes place in small spaces and places an emphasis on tension and on precise execution of a solid plan, with minimal loss of life.

Gamers need to carefully choose how to approach a situation and the game engine is designed to allow full destruction of the world around the player, which means that each shot needs to hit an enemy in order to count.

The scenario taken from Rainbow Six: Siege presented at E3 2014 shows a hostage taking and suggests that the experience will deliver a lot of realism and an emphasis on team play.

Patriots was supposed to be a more cinematic experience with a focus on the power of a home grown terrorist group that threatened the United States. The game would have highlighted the sacrifices that a small elite number of operatives were asked to make in order to stop the enemies from carrying out their most destructive attack.

Rainbow Six: Siege will be launched at some point in 2015 on the PC, the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Xbox One from Microsoft.