Rainbow Six Siege

Let me guess: you were holding forth over voice chat about how it’s a “broken buggy mess” before they TK’ed you?

-Tom

I hit level 50 and I haven’t seen any kind of purposeful team killing. Dudes walking into outgoing fire by accident? Sure. But not asshole behavior, aside from quitters.

Hate games that punish vengeance TK. How are you supposed to get rid of the scum if they can kill you with impunity but you can not take revenge.

Haven’t used voice in this, recently moved and haven’t found my headset in the boxes and boxes of stuff.

The Black Ice DLC is delayed from Jan 12th to Feb 2nd for season pass holders. Non-season pass buyers get most of the content for free later.

I saw an image of a boat stuck in ice which is rumored to be a new map. That sounds like it could be fun.

Not much buzz for this game around. Ars dives into what may be going on.

Launched just before Christmas in the kind of primetime slot that with hindsight so often looks like a graveyard, Ubisoft anticipated that Siege would achieve lifetime sales of over seven million copies. For many reasons, however, Siege has thus far failed to make a commercial impact. The tragedy is that Siege offers something new and unique in the stalest of genres, the mainstream FPS. At one point it even looked like it might usurp the greats of the competitive shooter world. What’s stopped it? Ubisoft.

Siege is riddled with evidence of top-down game design edicts. Prime among them is that the game is sold at a premium price (a rapidly-falling £50/$60), but at the same time includes a layer of microtransactions based around XP boosters—which will help players unlock stuff faster—as well as cosmetic weapon skins and a season pass for future DLC content. That might sound heinous, but it’s to the credit of the development team at Ubisoft Montreal that it doesn’t encroach too much on the core experience. These microtransactions, however, haven’t had a good impact on the game’s image, and much like Evolve, Ubisoft is in danger of losing players before they’ve even given the game a try.

Ubisoft’s hasty “free weekend,” launched shortly after release, as well as falling retail prices haven’t helped. Some looked at this, and the layer of microtransactions that already existed in-game, and reached the understandable conclusion that Siege would soon enough be a fully free-to-play game, making people even less likely to try it out. It’s hard to think of how Ubisoft could have botched it more completely.

It really does feel like a free to play game. Campaign is a joke.

I’m interested in the core gameplay, but not to the point of being willing to put up with Ubisoft’s online infrastructure (among other, more trivial issues). If they’d finally burn Uplay, then I’d be more willing to take a serious look.

It really is a fantastic game, but terrorist hunt is empty. You usually have to wait 2-3 minutes before it can find 5 players. It’s really a shame.

That was my fear. $60 for an MP only game with uncertainty about how long the playerbase would stick with it. I enjoyed my time in the Beta, and I like the design principles of the game, but the cost to content ratio just didn’t make sense to me. I’ve since seen the game at $30 multiple times, but still hesitate to pull the trigger. I think I said earlier in this thread that I am pretty fatigued with full-price MP-only games with tons of DLC (even if “optional”).

-Todd

He also mentioned Evolve as example of online game that he liked by then the publisher’s actions sent the game to die.

I think both in Evolve’s case and in Rainbow Six’s case, there is another common factor: they are online games that are more geared towards playing with friends/established teams. What it’s usually called the “public experience” suffers in comparison. And before someone mentions it, I’m not talking of online games being more fun if they are played with friends, that’s the case of every game, I mean in comparison with other online games which imo adapt better to public play like CoD or Battlefield, or even moba games like Smite.

Yes, there’s that too. A well-coordinated, communicating team will smoke the Hell out of a random pubbie team. That’s the case with all shooters, but these small-focus games really emphasize the difference. You can jump into Blops3 team DM as a lone wolf and still get kills and XP. It’s not unheard of for one player to essentially dominate a match regardless of the team makeup. In contrast, Evolve and RSS (especially RSS with it’s high lethality and one-life rounds) is all about teamwork.

When it comes together, it’s the best kind of MP experience. When it doesn’t, it’s just a frustrating slog.

I’m not even talking of chance of winning, It’s just the fun factor. R:Siege beta imo alone wasn’t very fun to play, you had to play it with friends.

No single player campaign = no sale.

Not sure when those publisher will learn that this applies to everything they want to sell for full price.
Even Battlefront will be hurt by this in the longer run.

With an estimated 12 million unit sales since launch, I don’t think they care.

Black Ice DLC is out today.

In the Baffin Bay, a luxury yacht has crashed into an iceberg breaching the hull. Rainbow has been sent to secure the stranded vessel as an unidentified submarine has docked near the vessel.

The new Yacht map is available for free to all players.

Two new operators as well, but only Season Pass owners get them now. Everyone else has to wait a week.

Hmmm. Ubisoft is no longer reporting straight sales numbers to their investors. Instead, they’re concentrating on “player engagement” which includes daily and monthly active users.

“Looking beyond our sales figures for the quarter, which have led us to update our full-year targets, our strategy of focusing on player engagement is paying off. For example, Rainbow Six Siege achieved record engagement levels during the period thanks to the success of its exceptional multiplayer mode. These advances are a decisive step in our business development and demonstrate the strong execution of our strategy, which will ultimately translate into regular revenue streams and enhanced profitability. The upcoming releases of Far Cry Primal and The Division should confirm these trends. The Division - whose recent closed beta exceeded all of our expectations - is set to be one of the largest launches of a new brand in the history of the video game industry.”

It should be noted that “engagement” is a metric that is regularly used by F2P publishers because unit sales are nothing compared to regular in-app/DLC purchases.

Please play this on PC.

14.99 “Starter Edition”

Grind like a beast or buy boosters with real money to grind R6 Credits faster.

240 hours of grinding to get all of the original operators assuming you use the 600 credits to buy two more right at the start. That sounds like a recipe for success if I’ve ever heard one.

Oh, and 240 more hours for the season pass operators. Double sold.