If you tuned in to the Rainbow Six Siege Osaka majors this weekend, you’ll have noticed that a long-sidelined operator took center stage — Doc. As 20 teams duked it out in front of a screaming crowd, competing to earn $200,000 in prize money, the trophy they were coveting was shaped in the likeness of the healer-focused operator. As palpable tension rippled through the packed ATC hall, moments before the tournament’s final, we soon discovered why.
A pre-Finals panel revealed that in Season 4, the largely forgotten healing character will be getting a huge revamp. Instead of shooting direct stim pistol darts from afar, Doc will now be armed with a brand new gadget — the E-HEAL Monitor system. Using the E-HEAL, Doc will be able to remotely heal and — even revive — teammates from across the map (including through walls).
It turns out, it’s a good time to be a support player, because the Doc isn’t the only healer-focused update coming next season. Operator Thunderbird is also coming back in a big way, with her Kóna Stations receiving a significant buff. Her number of Kóna Stations will be increased from 3 to 4 for broader site coverage, and if that wasn’t enough to make you consider her, she’ll receive a new weapon too: the MBZ-19. Thunderbirds really are go.
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Alongside these intriguing operator remasters, an FPS legend is joining the fray — the Doom Slayer. In this surprise collaboration with Doom, the iconic anti-hero will become a part of Siege on December 22 in skin form — and you can read more about that here.
A drastic UI overhaul
The beloved map Bank has also had an update that seeks to level the playing field between attackers and defenders. Adding a new access point and exterior cover around the entry point, Ubisoft Montreal says they’re aiming to rebalance a map that’s currently weighted too heavily in the defenders’ favour. A new temporary testing ground will also allow the community to weigh in on a potential new secondary gadget which allows defenders to reinforce just part of a wall, leaving the rest open for lines of sight.
Yet for hardcore fans, some of the most welcome changes will be the least exciting on paper. For year 11 and season 4, Rainbow Six Siege‘s UI has undergone a drastic overhaul, and with it, new types of matchmaking have been introduced.
The Ranked ecosystem is getting an overhaul, splitting the competitive mode into dedicated Ranked Solo/Duo and Ranked Flex playlists. The aim is to keep individual and duo players from clashing with larger, coordinated squads, hopefully saving some frustration and heartache for solo players. This will work in conjunction with Cross-Queue Matchmaking, in a bid to keep those match queue times fast. Additionally, the level requirement to unlock Ranked will be dropping from 50 to 30, helping newer players to jump in sooner.
Ranked playlist alterations are finally here
“The solo/duo ranked playlist is something that we’ve been trying to do for years,” beams Rainbow Six Siege Game Director Chris Budgens, “We’ve always gotten cold feet, so we started looking at how we actually pull off a solo queue within Siege, while respecting healthy queue times and so on. Every time we tried to do it, we would get scared by the data — this might be a bit more destructive than we’re ready to deal with at the moment because we had other known quantities such as Rank 3.0 we wanted to work on.”
“We had so much data support in terms of our analysts and simulations and matchmaking queue times, and finally cracked it,” he adds. “We’re really happy to be able to bring that to players because they’ve been asking for years to have a solo queue playlist.”
Alongside new ranking queues, playing with your friends promises to be markedly less of a pain in the backside. An all-new Social Hub consolidates Ubisoft Connect and first-party platform friends into a single list, aiming to offer cleaner and less intrusive notifications. Players will now be able to invite friends to games via a single code, letting you generate a squad code to share on social media, negating the need to search for them on Ubisoft Connect.
Yet more welcome changes
Alongside the new invite system, the store’s been overhauled, aiming to provide clearer — and easier — browsing. Celebration packs will be making a return via the Winter Daily Rewards. Out of every 20 Winter Daily Rewards, five will be celebration packs. There’s now also finally a way to open multiple packs at once, letting players tear into multiple Alpha/Event packs at once to quickly clear out their pack log. While not a reveal that will get fans pumping the air in excitement, it all adds up to a smoother play experience, which is a welcome change in our book.
All in all, Season 4 looks to add a series of welcome — but not groundbreaking — improvements to Rainbow Six Siege. Yet while Season 4 so far may lack the excitement of a Solid Snake announcement, it points to a wider confidence in Siege — careful iteration rather than a table-up ending, solidifying the game’s foundations before any potentially misguided attempts at innovation.
“One of the core vision steps we’re looking at is protecting and focusing on excellence across the game in a lot of different ways — improving all the different things we do,” reflects Creative Director Jonathan Mills on Season 4 and Ubisoft Montreal’s vision for continuing to shape Siege, “Whether that be anti-cheat, serviceability, or all sorts of things like this, we want to hone it and perfect it because 10 years in, Siege knows what it is, and it’s important to listen to it and drive that forward.”
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rob.dwiar@futurenet.com (Rob Dwiar)
