Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege News

Thunderbird's voice actress was the inspiration for Rainbow Six Siege's first Nakoda operator

Designing a new Rainbow Six Siege operator takes about nine months to complete, but when Ubisoft started designing Thunderbird, the game's newest operator, her background hadn't been identified. That was until the team decided on her voice actress.

When Sera-Lys McArthur finished her audition, Ubisoft knew she was the right person for the job. But her voice wasn't the only thing that caught Ubisoft's attention - her background as a Nakoda woman did too. "We ended up casting McArthur before deciding on the operator's heritage and identity," Marie Roy, Ubisoft's user research lab coordinator, tells The Loadout. "We based Thunderbird's background on her. We wanted to create an indigenous character that other Nakoda folks could relate to."

Although Thunderbird was based on a Nakoda woman, Ubisoft wanted to make sure that they captured the essence of what it is to be a Nakoda inside a game. Instead of just speaking to McArthur, Ubisoft spent time scouring the web, speaking to game developers, universities, and cultural centers, looking for Nakoda people who'd be able to help them during the design process. After a short while, Roy and her team locked down the people they needed and got to work.

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Rainbow 6 Siege PC will share progress with consoles but not play together

Ubisoft today detailed their plans for cross-platform multiplayer and shared progression in Rainbow Six Siege, and the news for PC players is probably not surprising. While we will get to share progression with all other platforms, we won't be able to play together with people on console. Though, uh, we will get to play with those on Stadia and Luna? Sure, okay.

Rainbow Six Siege is getting crossplay, kind of. Ubisoft went into detail about the game's upcoming crossplay support during its Ubisoft Forward 2021 stream. Curiously, while PS4/5 and Xbox players will be able to play with each other, PC players will be excluded from that pool. PC players will be able to match with Amazon Luna and Google Stadia players, but I can't imagine the cloud versions represent many players...
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Rainbow Six Extraction's first gameplay trailer announces a release date too

Ubisoft today announced a release date of September 16th Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction, the cooperative monster-mashing FPS formerly known as Rainbow Six Quarantine. It will pit familiar R6 Siege operators against a parasitic alien goop that's taking over cities - and people. Check out the first gameplay trailer below.

When Ubisoft announced Rainbow Six Siege was going to halt the production of new content and work on fixing the game way back in June 2017, it divided the community. Some were happy that major problems, like dodgy servers or the matchmaking system, were finally being improved, while others were disappointed that they weren't going to get their hands on new content.

The existence of that season, known as Operation Health, is still a divisive subject, but it doesn't stop people calling for a second iteration of it. Siege is in a much healthier position today than it was this time four years ago, but like most competitive FPS games out there, it still has its issues.

However, the game's development team is now confident it can continue to strike a balance between improving the game and providing new content, and rules out ever having to do a Operation Health again.