Rainbow Six Siege’s Year 3 is upon us, and with it one of the game’s most ambitious updates to date: Operation Chimera, already live on PC and currently going live on PS4 and Xbox One worldwide. Rainbow Six Siege may have stumbled out of the gate when Ubisoft first released it in late 2015, but since then it’s become one of the most impressive turnaround stories in video games this side of Diablo 3. In December the publisher and developer announced that it had reached 25 million players across all platforms, and one imagines it’s grown since then. Today Ubisoft kicks off Season 3 alongside some large-scale additions to the game. You can read the full patch notes here, but here’s what’s in it:
The headline addition here is Outbreak, a limited time, 3-player cooperative mode that pits the Rainbow Six operators against a “mysterious parasite infection” in New Mexico. We’ll have more in the coming days, but I’m always a big fan of PvE modes in traditionally PvP games — they break the rhythm and let you have a different experience without leaving a single game. Outbreak comes with three maps at a Resort, junkyard and Hospital, as well as five types of impressive-looking enemies. What we can see so far looks a lot more extraterrestrial and less zombie, and Ubisoft is promising an intense challenge that calls for all sorts of different tactics against the various enemy types.
Outbreak runs from now until April 3, though one wonders if it won’t make a reappearance in some form in the future.
In addition, we’re getting two new operators, both billed as biohazard specialists designed to counter the infected hordes. Oliver “Lion” Flament is an attacking operator from France that comes with a drone capable of revealing enemy movement in a given area. We also have Lera “Finka” Melnikova, another attacking operator and native Chernobylian. Finka has special nanobots that boost HP and steady aim for herself and her team. Both operators will be available in both the Outbreak event and the main game.
We’re also getting seasonal cosmetics and a new Season 3 pass, as well as some operator balance changes: Ela is getting a nerf, and Blitz’s stats are getting a rewrite. There are also a few bug fixes and quality of life changes, including tweaks to how melee attacks work and the removal of the ability to walk on deployable shields.
