I can't believe it finally happened.
On a dusty day in May 2016, just a few months into Rainbow Six Siege's redemption campaign following its disastrous launch, a Navy Seal named Blackbeard joined the team. He was only the second attacker added after launch, and with his defending counterpart Valkyrie raised Siege's total roster size to 24. Blackbeard's unique gadget, a rifle-mounted ballistic shield that negated headshots from the front, was immediately controversial. Headshots are king in Rainbow Six Siege—it's one of the only games where they're a guaranteed one-shot-kill—so you can imagine how an operator who gets to ignore that risk with few downsides became everyone's favorite to complain about.
Despite Blackbeard being the target of so many calls for nerfs, bans, or straight-up deletion, he has remained on the roster relatively unchanged eight years and 50(!) operators later. The Blackbeard of 2024 can still block headshots for free and win fights he doesn't deserve to win—but that all ends soon. Ubisoft unveiled its long-awaited Blackbeard rework this past weekend:
By "rework," what Ubisoft apparently meant is that Blackbeard is a completely different operator now. Sure, he uses the same rifles he used to, but his rifle shield has been replaced with a full-size riot shield. That officially makes Blackbeard a shield operator just like Blitz, Clash, and Montagne. Of course, his shield is special: the top of it can retract, allowing Blackbeard to use his primary guns while still protected from the torso down, and the shield can also soft breach through walls (a first for Siege). It's a pretty neat trick, and after playing a few rounds with Ubisoft last week, I'm convinced new Blackbeard is fun.
Screw fun
Fun isn't the problem—what rubs me the wrong way is that this Blackbeard might as well not even be Blackbeard anymore. This feels very different from when Ubi reworked Tachanka by making his machinegun a primary and giving him a grenade launcher. In that case, I think Ubi did a decent job of making Tachanka viable while still maintaining his identity as a suppressive presence. What's happened to Blackbeard is more like a top-to-bottom replacement in all but name.
His role has dramatically shifted from "guy who holds angles and wins direct gunfights" to a "bullet sponge who risks getting headshot every time he slowly brings his gun to the ready." It's sort of like if Overwatch 2's Tracer became a tank overnight, or if Valve remembered Team Fortress 2 exists long enough to replace the Heavy's minigun with a flamethrower. Ignoring the jarring mechanical shift, the pairing looks aesthetically ugly—Blackbeard himself is still decked out in his iconic desert camo, but his all-black shield with goofy skull insignia looks unrelated and tacky. This Blackbeard is a botched whiteout job. He just looks incorrect.
The worst part is that, eight years later, no serious person really cares about Blackbeard anymore. He is not particularly popular, players don't care enough to ban him in Ranked, and he isn't taking up any space. He's still frustrating to fight against sometimes, but I never said he was all that good. Players have gotten better at reacting to his presence by aggressively calling out his location, surprising him with flanks, and simply aiming for his gut instead of his shield. Blackbeard 2.0 will probably be better, and is certainly a cleaner fit in modern Siege, but this feels like a bad trade.
After working with (and around) the same rifled-shielded beard bro for most of my adult life, my brain still barely accepts that the Blackbeard I know is bound for the same live service limbo as pre-nerf Mercy and the entirety of CS:GO. Blackbeard's identity—and a significant symbol of Rainbow Six Siege's early years—will soon be gone. It sucks that long-running games have gotten comfortable with literally deleting their history in the name of present balance.
It sucks even more that, the more vestiges of old Siege Ubi chips away, the more content it has to resell to us in the form of a "Siege OG" style throwback—a fleeting form of preservation that dangles nostalgia like a carrot on a stick. This isn't how live service games should get old.
