The latest Rainbow Six Siege reveal confirms all the additions coming to Year 8 Season 3 of the Ubisoft FPS game, which include a new operator, Ram, a huge transformation to quick match, and the addition of a new player commendation system. The latest update for Rainbow Six Siege, Heavy Mettle, also gets a confirmed release date and introduces balance changes for some of the best Rainbow Six Siege operators.
Let’s start with Ram, the new South Korean operator who’s set to become the foil to breachers everywhere. Ram is a single-speed, three-health operator equipped with a robotic gadget called the BU-GI.
This little remote-controlled nightmare is driven across walls and floors to create new holes and vantage points through which you can shoot the enemy. If you reckon someone is trying to work their way up from the floor below, deploy BU-GI, rapidly tear up the woodwork, and eliminate them from above.
Ram uses either the R4C or LMG-E as a primary weapon, and MK1 or ITA12S as her secondary. She arrives alongside the second part of the balancing changes for Grim, and ahead of a rework for Frost, who will be tweaked and tuned later in Rainbow Six Year 8 Season 3.
Quick match is also being significantly overhauled. Round timers have been reduced, objective locations are automatically revealed, and bomb sites now come with reinforcements already set up, allowing defenders to focus their attention elsewhere.
Similarly, attackers now get a ten-second invulnerability window at the start of each action phase to prevent spawn peeking. The idea, it seems, is to make quick match more streamlined, allowing for more play and less fuss.
Unranked is now renamed to standard mode and arcade introduces a setting called weapons roulette, whereby all players begin the match with the same gun, but are given new, random guns after a set period of time. Tutorials are added to make getting into Siege a little easier (a blessing if you’re trying to convince friends to join the game) and you can now remove the HUD during replays to capture even better screens.
Finally, the new commendation system allows you to rate fellow players based on a variety of characteristics and behaviors. Players who are consistently commended will receive in-game rewards and Ubisoft says it will continually monitor the new system to ensure that it is used fairly. All of these changes will arrive with the Rainbow Six Siege Year 8 Season 3 release date on Tuesday, August 29.
In the meantime, check out some of the other best multiplayer games, or perhaps the best co-op games available on PC.