Earlier this month, Ubisoft Montreal published a blog post called “Behind The Wall Series — Tools of Attack,” which detailed how some of the gameplay mechanics for the attacking team would work in their upcoming first-person shooter title, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.
Montreal has now released the latest blog post in the Behind The Wall Series, with it shifting the attention on the equipment that the defensive team has at their disposal. Rainbow Six Siege’s pre-alpha demo from Ubisoft’s E3 2014 press conference demonstrated how defenders can barricade doors and windows in the building, while the blog post elaborated on how the ability to seal off these access points is unlimited in supplies, although it “will make you vulnerable as it takes about 2.5 seconds to set up.”
Reinforced walls, on the other hand, are a limited piece of equipment for the defending team, but this feature ties in with Siege’s “RealBlast destruction engine” by stopping the opposing members from breaching though any access point they want. Montreal, however, said that there are repercussions for using reinforced walls in the building, as neither member from the attacking or defending teams can remove them once they’re up.
“The contraption [reinforced walls] itself is something of our own creation and we spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this in a functional but realistic way,” the developers said. “We arrived at the idea of having interlocking metal components that are spring loaded at the base. You activate the wall and once it’s reached full length, pistons attached to it will shoot through the wall and expand, locking it in place. At this point the wall cannot be removed, by you or anyone else. Think about these carefully to set up permanent chokepoints because attackers will have no choice but to re-route around them.”
Reinforced walls going up in Rainbow Six Siege’s pre-alpha demo.
Just as the attacking team receives a ballistic shield for members to utilise, defenders will receive a deployable shield that has similar perks and benefits to use, but players can also plant it as a decoy in order to gain a better vantage point against the opposing team. Meanwhile, “good old-fashioned barbed wire” is also available for each player on the defending team (a maximum of two pieces per person), with Montreal stating that there are multiple uses for the equipment, including its ability to hurt the enemy, making noise once they walk through it or, more importantly, using it as a means to block off certain routes and luring people towards a trap.
Although the defenders’ primary purpose is to defend their objective — yes, exactly as it implies in their name — Montreal has revealed that they will have attacking-based equipment at their disposal.
Nitro cell is the defending team’s equivalent to C4, meaning there are positives in the form of creating traps and blasting new routes open within the building, although Montreal did say in the latter point that “they aren’t controlled blasts” and they “will not blow out clean holes in walls.” The Six Siege developers added that nitro cell can allow players to find “creative ways” in using the explosive, including the opportunity of “opening a small hole in a wall with gunfire and tossing the nitro cell through it to land on another wall.”
With the positives being said, nitro cell comes with some unfortunate side effects for the defending team, as the explosive is connected to a cell phone and, as a result, means that opposing team will sense its presence due to its static interference with their own equipment.
The final piece of equipment available for defenders to use is none other than surveillance cameras, allowing them to track the movements of the enemy team on the map. However, the cameras on the buildings are restricted for one player to use at a time and they have a limited viewing range, while the attacking team has the ability to “use a bullet or two to take them out while commencing the siege.”
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege’s realism is a factor that the company has continued to reiterate in previous blog posts, including the feedback they used from the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN), a real-world French-based special ops unit, and adding a “No Respawn rule” during rounds in multiplayer matches.
Running at 60fps on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is scheduled to launch in 2015.
