Here's What's Next For Rainbow Six: Siege

I still can't believe that Rainbow Six: Siege is still as popular as it is. It had such a poor start in 2015, launching just outside the holiday sales surge and competing with mega-blockbusters like Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, I just knew the game was going to stumble and fall flat on its face out of the box. However, much to my surprise (and the surprise of everyone else), Ubisoft managed to knock it out of the park with Rainbow Six: Siege and they've been steam-rolling through the market ever since. This includes constantly pumping out new content, and they aren't done with the game yet.

Over on the official Ubisoft blog they announced that they have a 2017 developmental roadmap for Rainbow Six: Siege, they're calling it Operation Health.

This roadmap breaks down their plans for how they want to further develop, fix, innovate and invigorate the Rainbow Six community. The first three months involved two new operators, new weapons, and a new map. The majority of this content rolled out earlier this year, in February.

The next phase of Operation Health begins this month, and will carry through to July. Ubisoft is breaking down the roadmap into four seasons, so this would make this current leg development season 2.

All from May through to July the team will focus solely on Operation Health, an initiative to improve the performance and stability of Rainbow Six: Siege. This includes improved one-step matchmaking, new dedicated server systems such as voice and party facilitation, faster servers, an improved workflow to get new technical features through the pipeline faster, and an on/off switch for easy rollbacks when patches or updates don't work as intended.

The last phase of Operation Health will include bug fixes and feedback from the community before the team deep-dives back into rolling out new operators and content for Rainbow Six: Siege.

After the three month infrastructure-sabbatical to rest up and heal the backend, the team will begin rolling out new content at the start of August, which includes three new operators, including two SDU units from the Hong Kong special operations division. They will also include one operator from the Polish GROM special forces.

The second Polish operator will release at the start of season 4 in November alongside the 707th SMB forces from South Korea. The reason for the scattered launch of the Polish units is because they were originally supposed to launch during season 2, but Operation Health was necessary, so they delayed the Polish to season 3 and season 4.

This means that you won't see a new map for Rainbow Six: Siege appear until the start of August. The next new map will appear at the start of November.

Each of the seasonal outings will also contain brand new weapons for players to utilize as well.

As I mentioned at the top of the article, it's impressive how dedicated Ubisoft is to Rainbow Six: Siege, and the fact that the community actually grew over the course of 2016 is a testament to the quality of the game's design. You can continue to look for the new technical upgrades and changes to take place over the next three months leading up to the new content being released in August.