Ubisoft has opened the doors to another Rainbow Six Siege beta and if you’ve been fortunate to get a hold of one of the keys the publisher has been throwing around then you’ve access from now until 28 September.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK.
Those plans you had for the weekend, cancel them.
Siege is a multiplayer-focused Rainbow Sixgame; so far we’ve seen nothing of a single player mode, only a competitive team deathmatch mode and a cooperative terrorist hunt game. The big sell of Siege is that the environments allow for a huge amount of destruction, such as being able to shoot holes in walls and blast your way through the floor with satchel charges. As one team is defending against the other, it means that campers can expect to have the room around them destroyed by the attackers.
Last week, I was able to have an afternoon playing some of the levels included in this weekend’s beta and I was completely sold on the shooter. I’m a huge fan of the Rainbow Six games and the constant rumours and cancellations of games since Vegas 2 was starting to cut deep — no other game was offering the same tactical shootery as the Rainbow games. Thankfully what I’ve played has made up for the wait.
The first mode I played was the 5 v 5 deathmatch. The level Ubisoft loaded up was Hereford, a map that sees you fighting in a four-story building, filled with tight corners, staircases, and hiding spots. The attackers had to track down a chemical bomb and stand near it for 10 seconds to defuse it, the defenders had to stop them. You could also win by wiping out the enemy team.
Before each game there’s a brief prologue where the defenders can block up windows, board up doors, and lay down defences — everything from barbed wire and bombs to deployable, armour-plated cover. While the defenders are playing house, the attackers can scout out the level with remote control drones. The opening section ensures that each round plays differently. Defenders can hide in different rooms inside the building, setting the bomb up in different locations, and different windows, corridors, and doors will be boarded over by the defenders each game.
Going into each game you get to select from different equipment loadouts. As an attacker, for instance, I could take in a ballistic shield which, when crouched, gave me almost complete cover when advancing on the enemy, or I could opt a special breaching charge that I could set on a wall in a room next to the defenders, when I activated it it would drill grenades through the wall and into the defender’s room. You can also select different sorts or armour, opting for light armour that lets you run quickly or heavy armour that slows you down but actually keeps you alive in a gunfight.
The defenders get equally good equipment. One loadout lets you use a heartbeat sensor, which means you can see enemies through walls. Another lets you electrify barbed wire and the structs you use to bolster walls.
Once the game begins proper you’ll quickly find out how cautiously you need to play, even with heavy armour a few well-aimed shots will kill you. You need to clear rooms carefully and work as a team to keep each other covered from ambushes.
When firefights start the destructible environments come into their own. You can shoot enemies through walls, blast a chunk out of a blocked up window and then throw a grenade through the hole, or simply use the angle of the bullet holes appearing around you to work out where the enemy is hiding. It’s a wonderful system that fits so well into a Rainbow Six game.
The mode I was most excited to play wasn’t the (excellent) deathmatch mode but the new Terrorist Hunt game. I’ve played Terrorist Hunt with my flatmates for years without getting bored of it so we’re all eagerly looking forward to a new iteration. The old version of Terrorist Hunt would plop you into a map with 50 enemies and you had to go from room to room killing them all. The new version is similar, but with one major change, there are now objectives.
So, the game I played saw five of us assaulting a consulate where we had to defuse two bombs hidden somewhere in the building. We were free to go after bombs in whatever order we wanted; we could enter the building how we liked, and none of it was scripted. It’s a great mode, encouraging you to tackle the challenges of the space and the AI as a team.
The first time we tried the map we climbed up the outside of the building and then tried to rappel in as a team through the skylight on the top. The AI immediately swarmed the stairwell we were descending into. We had to lower ourselves down three floors, being shot at the whole time, before we could safely detach from our ropes. That mistake cost us two teammates.
The three of us still alive started clearing our way through the house taking out the AI hiding in each room. As we searched the building we discovered another addition in Siege: traps. The AI had hidden remote C4 that, if you don’t recognise the telltale bleep, they will explode underfoot, killing you instantly. We lost another teammate that way.
Down to two players we found one of the bombs and, as one of us started to defuse it, began to be swarmed by AI. They came through both doors into the basement room, and, if more of us were alive, we’d have been able to hold off the assault. But, with just two we were slaughtered.
Siege’s AI is not smart but they’re good shots and they outnumber you hugely. Any mistake you make will be painful. Our second (and last) attempt ended faster than the first.
If you’re in the beta this weekend Ubisoft wants to make clear that the main aim of it is to “test the online infrastructure & matchmaking with the largest number of players we’ve had in the game to date.” They also warned: “Please keep in mind that while we are seeing positive results from the technical test from the last few days, you will, at times, experience some connectivity and matchmaking problems. This is expected, and you’re helping us test these things so we know what we needs to be fixed to provide the best possible experience when the game launches.”
Here are the main issues you may encounter related to connectivity and matchmaking. Thank you for your help in helping us identify and correct these before launch:
- You have about a 60% chance to start a match successfully. Average awaiting time is 60 seconds.
If you’re not able to join a game under 90 seconds, we recommend you to quit the lobby and try again until you succeed.
- Once you have played a full match, you will be automatically re-queued to join another match. When this occurs, matchmaking success rate is 10% to 20% lower.
If you’re re-queued and you don’t find a game in under 60 seconds, go back to game menu and start matchmaking again.
- When trying to join a match as a full party, the percentage of success rate is lower than when joining a match as a single individual.
- You might be faced with different error messages (error 50 being a recurrent one). We are currently investigating the nature and how to fix these errors.
When facing these errors, we ask you to restart the game.
Comments
31 responses to “Rainbow Six Siege Is Brutal, Challenging, And Fun”
Hope they fix the matchmaking for launch. A game like this lives and dies on quick and effective matches.
Evolve for example, excellent game but for the last few months the matchmaking has been broken. Have never managed to get more than one game an hour.
Say what you like about Destiny, but it takes 20 seconds at most to match you up in the Crucible or Strikes.
The problem with Evolve could be that the player based is pretty dead. For any matchmaking I’d like what Titanfall eventually did whereby they showed you how many players are playing a certain game type in your region.
showing how many players are online, and even by region/gamemode is nothing new. but i think it should be on all games
This is true, and I know some older CoD games did it, but I could only think of titanfall at the time of writing 😛
Yip, give us options to see how populated the servers are. Rocket League shows the number of players and you can change your region. All good options. Evolve gave me nothing apart from 50 minute waits for a match.
I Recommend if you have a microphone, use it. This is definitely a game that requires communication
It’s still a bit weird whenever I hear about this game, and remember it was once an entirely different product.
Had it still been Rainbow Six: Patriots I probably would have been interested. Oh well.
I am not really digging this game so far, I spend 80% of my times in menus and waiting. 10% playing 10% spectating because I am dead. Also 230 ping on Aussie servers, gg
Now as much as I don’t want to say it because I despise Ubisoft. This game does actually have a lot of potential and I kinda hope it does well. BUT, the time you spend in menus just waiting around it is just ridiculous. I was ready to fall asleep by my 4th game. If they can change the whole menu system so it speeds it up, that would be great. Australia needs better servers and why the fuck would they bind voice chat to “U”…U! AYE?
On the plus side, it was fun (when I wasn’t dead or in a menu). The tension from when the round starts and hearing the enemy footsteps all around you. You never know where they will come from because there are so many different ways to enter. The ability to shoot through walls and give yourself a little hole to shoot through while still remaining semi hidden is pretty neat. The guns sounds are actually decent, they sound powerful, not like little BB-guns.
This.
I got sick of waiting after joining games midway. When I did eventually get into lobbies, I’d get dropped out of the game because my connection speed.
They only full game I managed to play I had one enemy left which I never found and the game eventually crashed anyway.
I know it’s beta but it isn’t Australia friendly at the moment.
Its perfectly fine, I am in the middle of lower NT and still get like 150 ping (on ADSL 2), so chances are that it is just your net.
I sit between 300-400ms and always seem to connect to American clients.
I don’t think my net is the issue: I’m on 100mbit. Netcode is likely to blame.
As i said, I am on like 2mb down adsl 2 and get 200 ping at max to the p2p servers… so chances are your isp is not routing correctly
I’ve got the beta on ps4 and pc.
Seem to be getting games faster on ps4 than PC, but the ps4 runs terribly and feels like you’re running through syrup, where as on the PC it’s smooth and fluid.
Maybe a framerate thing?
Is it 30fps on console?
I can’t find anything about it recently, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I suppose it will be more cinematic if they locked it at 30.
Read somewhere its 60fps on everything, 1080p on PS4 and 900p on XB1
PC will fluctuate between 900 and 1080 apparently
Sigh…already struggling to keep 1080p 60FPS
The title to this article is pretty much the opposite experience to what I’ve been having.
Matchmaking issues aside (but seriously, if you’re running a multiplayer beta to entice sales, you might want to get that right), the game feels like it is running on what the best of last-gen had to offer (and I’m not talking ‘The Last of Us‘ quality either).
There might be an entirely different experience playing with people you know, but for matchmaking, I constantly ended up with some friendly fire to the back of my head or people would go in guns blazing and try to get the most kills.
I think I’m one or the few people on the Internet who like Ubisoft, but they’ve completely misjudged what online gamers are like. Rocket League – what should be the ultimate team sport – shows just how human nature shatters the dream. Team-based survival multiplayer can be done right – again, using TLOU as an example.
As a R6 purest, I’d like to think Tom Clancy would be turning in his grave to think about what they’ve done to the franchise, but – let’s be honest – the man never gave a toss about Ding et. al. except for when they bought him a nice big fat juicy cheque.
Happily cancelled pre-order this morning.
It’s a “Beta”
The point of a “Beta” is to test out the game online with intense traffic. So they can identify these types of issues and other issues to correct them before launch.
A “Demo” is an attempt to entice sales.
You ever heard of a playable preview single player campaign be released and dub as a “Beta”. No! Its called a “Demo”, mainly online multiplayer games are called “Betas”.
That way gamers like you can be happy with the final product that they (game companies) spend millions of dollars to make.
Rubbish. It’s now an issue of semantics. A ‘beta’ is a demo these days, period. If it was a beta, it wouldn’t be released to us common folk.
Can’t trust Ubisoft imo.
Played this at a conference earlier this month, in a 5v5 game. So much fun!! I have the BETA downloaded and ready to go (once my fiancé gets off Minecraft…)
I’ve been enjoying it. Definitely wouldn’t pay full price for it.
Aww, damn, was it only until the 28th? I played a few games yesterday, but didn’t get my teeth into it thinking I had heaps of time. Apparently not! 🙁
What I briefly played seemed fun, in an “easy to play, hard to master” kind of way, but I literally only played about 4 rounds.
Lol I only received my beta code this morning – Then found out it is extended till the 1st October! Get a few nights in!
Oh awesome,t hat’s much better!
tried this over the weekend… on ps4 i should add… thought it felt horrible… shooting a gun should not feel like that… then again maybe i’ve been spoilt with destiny lately which has superb gunplay… oh well
Hahaha the beta is till the 28th and I just got the beta key this morning at 9am. Looks like I wouldn’t be playing the beta.
Argh, missed out on the beta as I was busy all weekend. Would have been better if it ran for another few days.
Glad they extended it!! One day to play is a bloody joke, and can’t imagine that they’d get much in the way of results from only a day of testing