Rainbow Six Siege turns nine years old in 2024, but it’s more like 90 years old in terms of live service. When Ubisoft’s 5v5 FPS first came out in 2015, Overwatch was still months away, PUBG didn’t exist, and Fortnite was a zombie game we thought of. can never come out. Siege has been a live service game for longer than it has been a part of our vernacular.
This makes Siege one of the oldest games to receive regular content updates. Ubisoft still plans to support Siege for Year 9 and beyond, but the game’s multiple versions and the increasing age of its engine have long led players to ask the reasonable question of late: Does Siege need a sequel?
According to Siege’s creative director Alexander Karpazis, the answer is a resounding no.
“I can definitely say that we probably have one of the best engines in the world when it comes to live PvP shooters,” Karpazis said in a group interview at the Siege Invitational 2024 in Brazil. “The team is incredible and we have a huge engine pipeline team that is incrementally improving every month so that we can deliver faster, more robust, more stable and as much content as possible.”
Siege’s engine, Ubisoft Anvil, is often the target of derision when the game has problems. As new seasons introduce new sets of bugs, many players like to blame old technology, describing Siege as a creaky old building held together by duct tape and stubbornness. The truth is that Siege has been buggy for as long as I’ve been playing it, and in my experience it’s more stable now than it was in its early days. Still, Siege is showing its age in other ways, like its functional but underwhelming graphics.
According to Karpazis, who joined the Siege team as presentation director in 2018 before being promoted to the lead role in 2022, the idea of Ubisoft investing in a Siege sequel with a new engine is not only unnecessary, but potentially a huge mistake.
“The idea of changing engines to something that can be off-the-shelf doesn’t meet the needs of a really competitive and demanding game like Siege,” he said. “I won’t name names, but you see plays that go on and you just drop the ball completely because they have to recreate everything they did in the first game.”
Karpazis compares the experience to losing homework and then having to redo it, except “never [make it] in the same way as the original”.
“It can be really frustrating, it’s really expensive, and ultimately it doesn’t even give you anything that benefits you. If you know where to start and you build it, that’s where we see success. And that’s where we know we can take Siege into the future.” is the place.
While the engine swap may bring a few obvious improvements, modern graphics for one, Ubisoft hasn’t stood still for nine years. The studio has shown an impressive willingness to improve or reinvent key aspects of Siege.
Changing engines to something that could be out of the box doesn’t meet the needs of a truly competitive and demanding game like Siege.
Alexander Karpazis
Over the course of nine years, Ubisoft has overhauled everything from Siege’s weapons, operators, and maps to its rules, modes, and user interface. Siege weapons don’t behave the same in 2024 as they did in 2015. Almost every map launched with the game has been replaced with redesigned layouts that reflect the feedback of millions of players. Modern Siege features match replay, in-game reporting, 50 more operators, powerful shooting range, arcade mode, cross-play, cross-progression, Apex-inspired ping system, reworked tutorial, AI bot training – features that could be. designed to continue during a more traditional development period.
Maybe Siege is tied to an engine improve, presumably to a newer version of the Anvil engine that also powers modern Assassin’s Creed games, but even that has potential downsides. Extraction shooter Hunt: Showdown plans to upgrade to a newer version of CryEngine, and when it does, it will end its bi-platform support.
For some games, it’s worth sacrificing a clean break with new technology. I’m not sure Siege is one of those games. Karpazis doesn’t think so.
“We truly know that this is a game that can last forever with the people, talent and tools we have today.”