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Pengu retires from Rainbow Six Siege esports

Niclas 'Pengu' Mouritzen has announced his retirement from competitive Rainbow Six Siege after five years competing at the highest level in the esport. The former PENTA Sports and G2 Esports player has had an award-studded career, winning the Six Invitational with both teams in 2018 and 2019 respectively.

Pengu announced his departure from the scene with a video on the G2 Esports channel as well as talking about his decision on his own Twitch stream. He says that he was planning to step down after last year's European League finals but changed his plans after it was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Dane went on to win actually win that tournament with G2 earlier this year.

He also says he is gutted he won't be bowing out on a third Six Invitational victory. Pengu played in the charity Rainbow Six Memevitational tournament that replaced the Six Invitational this year, unfortunately losing in the semi-finals but helping raise over $10,000 for Direct Relief for COVID-19.

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Rainbow Six Siege might get "an attacker-sided meta for a while"

The Rainbow Six Siege meta is getting a change-up in Year 6 Season 1, and it's possible the multiplayer game will switch to favour the attacker-side more, says Ubisoft Montreal.

Speaking to us on how the meta's set to evolve, Jean-Baptiste Hallé, Rainbow Six Siege's director, says first and foremost, altering the 20 second meta is a priority. "We want to break the 20-second meta, that's for sure - people are bored with it and for good reason," he says. "Our objective is not to go too far, but it may end up being that."

Finding a meta that suits everyone is basically impossible, but Hallé is conscious of the need to iterate for an FPS game like Siege to evolve. Sometimes, that might mean taking what works apart and taking a leap of faith. "I don't think it's possible to reach a state where the meta is perfect and infinitely varied, but I think we will need to keep breaking things to make things move forward," he tells us. "We need to take risks and to maybe have an attacker-sided meta for a while, but I think things need to evolve, so this is the right thing to do."

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Rainbow Six Siege's Border rework is boring, and that's a good thing

It's no secret that Rainbow Six Siege is a ludicrously difficult game to learn, and while learning nearly 60 playable operators doesn't make onboarding easy, map knowledge is by far the biggest barrier to entry for newcomers. To stand much of a chance in a ranked match you need to know each map from top to bottom, inside and out - every destructible area of flooring, the layout of every room, and even which pieces of furniture can be shot through.

Rooms filled with destructible clutter like plant pots, paperwork, and computer monitors make maps feel more realistic, but they create messy, irregular lines of sight. Having to second guess every object in a room made sense back when Siege was first released as a tactical shooter, but now it adds an element of randomness that feels at odds with the game's newfound identity as a tier one esport.

Client-side calculations, like the way objects collapse when destroyed, exacerbate this, sometimes resulting in opposing players having slightly different views of one another. In an FPS game where a single headshot is lethal and rounds are won and lost on razor-thin margins, dying because your line of sight was obscured by a desk fan that didn't exist for your killer is downright frustrating.

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Rainbow Six Siege devs want to "find ways to encourage players to use the test server"

Hopping into the Rainbow Six Siege test server lets you play new content early, but that's pretty much the only benefit - and even then, it only really matters shortly before the launch of a new season. Ubisoft says that participation in the test server is good, but it could be better, and to that end, the team has been looking at the sort of rewards prospective test server players have been asking about for ages.

"It's true that we're going to need good participation on the test servers," game director Jean-Baptiste Hallé tells us. "From what we have seen recently, we have pretty good participation with the launch of the test server. I don't know the details about what is planned to encourage players to participate in the test server, but it is definitely something that we need to be aware of and looking at, so we'll see. I'm pretty sure that we're going to find some ways to encourage players to use the test servers."

We have had some test server rewards in the past with weapon charms, which Hallé says have had "a bit" of an effect encouraging players to jump in.

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Cross-progression and crossplay are in the works for Rainbow Six Siege

Back when Ubisoft switched from Uplay to its shiny new Ubisoft Connect client last year, the publisher promised that future games would feature cross-saving and cross-platform play as much as possible. At the time, that promise didn't include Rainbow Six Siege, which was disappointing for players who hoped to combine their operator and skin collections across every platform. Rejoice: It sounds like we're going to get our wish, eventually...
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