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Ubisoft deliberately releases overpowered Siege operators - this is why
It’s been apparent since Operation Chimera, but Ubisoft Montreal has fessed up to pushing out OP Rainbow Six Siege DLC operators. We find out why.
You can’t spell ‘operator’ without ‘OP’. And Ubisoft Montreal seemingly takes that literality to heart when it comes to launching new operators in Rainbow Six Siege. You don’t need to look too far back to see evidence of this, either.
Operation Chimera didn’t just mark the first batch of DLC that didn’t include at least one attacker or defender, it also was the first time an operator felt truly OP before they were even part of the meta. I’m talking about Lion, of course. His tracking ability stops defenders in their tracks, lest they risk being spotted for easy wall-banging from attackers.
We'd rather make an operator that’s too sexy at the beginning – so a bit OP, and then nerf it down, rather than the opposite
The main reason people weren’t crying as loudly about Finka’s OPness was because of how strong Lion was. But Finka’s ability to globally buff or even revive DBNO attackers is powerful in its own right. It doesn’t help that defenders have yet to receive any global-ability operators of their own.
This pattern was repeated in the recently released Operation Grim Sky, too, with Maverick an out-of-the-gate overpowered attacker (with no hard counters) and Clash, a strong entry for the first shield-wielding defender.
Recently, at the Paris Major, I sat down with Brand Director Alexandre Remy to talk about the philosophy behind launching strong operators and he admitted that Ubisoft Montreal errs on the side of OP over under-powered.
“You’re right about that stance. When we develop an operator, we tend to revisit, even when our perception is, ‘Hey, it’s already a bit OP,’" explained Remy. “We’d rather launch it like that and then nerf it as time goes, thanks to telemetry. In order for that operator to have enough metrics and data behind it, it needs to be picked as much as possible.
"We'd rather make an operator that’s too sexy at the beginning – so a bit OP, and then nerf it down, rather than the opposite – that could make an operator too under-picked, [resulting in] not enough data, especially for balancing. We look a lot at the high ranking MMR and you can imagine, the higher we are, the smaller the population, so we need to have high pick rates at the beginning to have enough data and metrics, samples, that we can use.”
There are some pros and cons within Remy’s statement. Ubisoft Montreal has a history of defying community cries for balancing if it’s not backed up by telemetry data. This isn’t a bad thing, given developers really shouldn’t be balancing their games backed on the loudest complaints but on the hardest data. But this philosophy of launching OP operators arguably goes right back to launch, before Tachanka ascended to “Lord Chanka” meme status.
“Our goal is that we want to achieve 100 operators, and we want each of them to have a context where they are relevant,” said Game Director Leroy Athanassoff at the Six Invitational. “Right now we know this is not the case. Especially because these operators we are making [are in the design phase], so when we hit live, we were like, ‘Okay, the game is actually being played this way.’
“When we were releasing the game, Tachanka, actually, was kind of OP for us. ‘Maybe he’s too OP. Maybe we shouldn’t ship it. Maybe it will be too strong,’ and stuff like that. You hit live and you see people playing your game and you’re like, ‘Okay, everybody is moving super-fast, actually.’ At that time, we were not playing this [super-fast] game. We will have to go back to the original operators.”
Athanassoff pledged to revisit Tachanka specifically. But Tachanka also highlights a problem of an under-picked operator: limited picks equate to limited data. As Remy identified, in order to collect that data, enough players need to use a new operator. If an operator launches in an under-powered state, players will likely still use them to try out the new operator on the block, but they’ll quickly be discarded for the tried-and-proven choices if they’re too shabby.
Lion - one of the two new attackers in Rainbow Six Siege Year 3's first DLC
© Ubisoft
The problem of an OP operator is more obvious: they have the potential to break or even smash the meta, especially given there’s usually a weeks-long wait between DLC launch and Mid-Season Reinforcements patch. The implications of this are more significant for the Pro League.
For a time, the meta swung evenly in terms of attacking and defending. Since Operation Chimera, defenders have been hard done by. The response to a lack of hard counter for Maverick seems to be ‘watch this space’; reading between the lines, there’ll likely be a defender who launches as a hard counter.
Expect to see that sooner rather than later, especially because Clash’s release seems to have been pushed forward in an attempt to curb the pre-Paris Major expectation that Mira would be near universally banned. This was proven true at the Paris Major. There’s nothing wrong with Ubisoft Montreal actively upsetting the meta at least four times a year; in fact, it’s a big part of the appeal of Siege.
“What is important for us is to find a new gameplay experience, a new way to approach the game, and then we just focus on the issue that when you make it live, we will have parameters to then adapt to the real balance of the players on the meta,” said Athanassoff.
Despite this, the challenges come when the scales tip too far in favour of attackers or defenders. There’s no quick cure for that, either. Shifting sliders to rejig the effectiveness of a newly launched operator, especially ones like Maverick without a hard counter, feels like a band-aid stopgap when stitches are required.
The real fix then is the introduction of new operators – defenders, specifically – and the reworking of existing (and under-picked) operators. Both of these options take time and have bigger implications for the meta.
Clash is the first defender to have a portable shield.
© Ubisoft
On a long enough time line, the meta has a better chance of evening out, but only if Ubisoft Montreal is willing to advance or delay an internal roster of unreleased (or yet-to-be-updated) operators to preserve the overall balance of defensive and offensive options.
The Rainbow Six Pro League Season 8 APAC Finals kick off October 13, with eight of the best teams from the region duking it out for a chance to represent APAC at the Global Pro League Finals in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Watch it on twitch - we will be.
