Ubisoft Montreal has detailed in a new blog post that the company had consulted with a real-world special operations unit for the upcoming first-person shooter title Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.
The National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN), a French-based special ops unit that has conducted military operations in Somalia and Bosnia, were invited to Montreal’s HQ to try out the eagerly awaited title and offered feedback on real-life situations, including the priority and protection they would offer to the hostage over their fellow GIGN comrades.
The development team took the advice on board and integrated it into the Hostage Rescue mode, claiming that testers “would rally” for the hostage’s safety during each round.
“You have to be careful when trying to breach into the area where the hostage is,” said Chris Lee, game designer on Rainbow Six Siege. “You can’t just throw a frag or any explosives near the hostage without a second thought. You have to be very careful where you aim your weapon as well. It greatly increases the tension around the hostage, which differentiates it from other types of objectives.”
Ubisoft, however, clarified some criticism received during a livesteam where players neglected the hostage and rounds acted like a Team Deathmatch, with Lee suggesting, “A round ending in TDM isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
“The hostage (or any objective) is there to provide areas of interest for firefights to happen,” he added. “Players naturally gravitate towards the objective because of the incentive/threat. As soon as they close in on him or her, the tensions rise and everyone acts more carefully. The fact that the hostage isn’t being extracted all the time isn’t really an issue for us.”
Rainbow Six Siege features a “No Respawn rule” that Ubisoft discussed in-depth on their blog last week, as the development team believed that restricting players to one life per round emphasises “teamwork, tactics, and tension.”
Running at 60fps on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is scheduled to launch in 2015.