Rainbow Six Siege is one of the better games this gen.

I actually had a critical thread in mind, but I'm trying a new thing called positive champ. Now again, we all know that Champ hates everything, especially video games, so consider this the twilight zone. A What If Champ liked video games thread. A Positive Champ.

Positive Champ likes himself some Rainbow Six Siege. In fact dare I say, it might actually be the best a tactical shooter has been since Rainbow Six actually was a fucking tactical shooter. You see the PC cats always had a level of reasoning to why they didn't care for games like Rainbow Six Vegas, it was a dumbed down game in comparison to what Rainbow Six used to be.

It had less forgiving shooter gameplay, it had a planning phase in single player instead of look at this cover based shooter we made. Don't get me wrong the Vegas games were certainly better than wank like Black Arrow, but in an attempt to to solidify the series to the console audience it made too many adjustments to make it more like Halo.

The thing is there always was a way to streamline a tactical game to make it work on a pad, no one really made the effort to do it. I mean things like Socom were rad, I'm actually a big fan of Socom 2 on the PS2, but even that was a bit too simplistic for its own good. For all its tactical aspirations in marketing, it was an arcadey shooter.

But Siege is a different beast, and I would argue the PC cats that were dismissive of Siege for not being a plan and attack game are missing the beauty of how Ubisoft basically dumb locked into a bitchin mp formula.

How they got about it is simple, they made it a class based game. But not like Ubermensch class based stuff of Battlefield or Call of Duty, more so it's about what Team Fortress or Overwatch do, but with less absurdity. They are characters, the guns aren't necessarily the thing that make the mp go, it's their kits. It's their tools, it's how they compliment each other in handling obstacles.

Siege takes a lot of basic set ups of mp games, the save hostages, or disarm bombs thing or what have you. You have a team on defense, and then you have an offense team. The planning phase is the offensive side going out and sending drones/rc cars usually to scout the area for potential enemies, where the objective is on the map, barricades, etc.

Defense team? Actually bunker up and set up your traps.

The game has a destruction engine where just about anything can be shoot through. But you can die very fast in this game, not necessarily one shot, one kill stuff for body shots, but a quick time to kill, and headshots are what they are. Clean ass one shot, one kill. The game actually has a reason for lean and peak, because you want to position yourself to be hidden as much as possible, as opposed to exposing so much of your body. That's where the destruction comes in, you can actually morph your space to not only give you cover, but also create some new line of sights to take advantage of. Thing is they can shoot you through shit, so it's a catch 22.

There are characters who in Reinhardt fashion should be holding up a shield and be the front line for their squad, because it's 5 v 5 and everyone dies so fast a level of coordination with the team is required. Lone wolfs need not apply.

The kits allow defensive players to set up booby traps, help revive from a distance, give teammates more armor to work with, eliminated detonators. Why? Because offensively you have stuff like detonaters to breach barred up corridors and what have you. Or like EMPs that negate the thing that negates breaches.

It's all one weird counter after the other, and makes the game both methodical and takes advantage of the emergent nature of multiplayer games where a lot of on the fly thinking is made. You dying is huge in Rainbow Six, because losing the guy who needs to take care of barricades walls can swing the match entirely, and because it's no respawns the stakes are sky high. It's not like Overwatch and TF2, where eh, I'm sure our Sniper learned his lesson and will come back and not make the same mistake twice. In tight matches you can't make that mistake once.

Yeah Ubisoft's bullshit is definitely there. Microtransactions, it took forever for the netcode to be where it is, everytime they throw in a new character they basically ruin the balance of the game (Blackbeard phase anyone?), but the fucking core mechanics are excellent.

It's how you properly streamline a game for a "mass" audience or whatever. You find a way to take the "thrill" of the action sequence, and now put in systems that would reward the players who want to think and be strategic. And as a result Rainbow Six isn't a twitch game like CoD, or a I saw you first the video game like Rainbow Six. You have to coordinate with your team, you have to be willing to be patient, you have to place your shots instead of spray and pray, you have to actually do your job based on what class you built.

And you have to do this in a tight space that is highly destructible, in a time limit, while having to deal with an objective and not Team Deathmatch.

And for me it hasn't even been a result of me playing the game a lot on my PC, and I own the game. My love for the game grew by constantly being at a friends and shooting the shit with him while we played Siege on his PS4.

So look at all the things it overcame

• It's a multiplatform FPS built with gamepads in mind
• It's a modern day game presenting itself as "tactical"
• Ubisoft made it
• It had like 356 terrible betas

And it ended up being a bitchin game. The game played life on hard mode, and proceeded to kick life's ass.

You people: Champ can I get a too long didn't read?

Champ: The title literally is the too long didn't read, you fucking idiot

You People: This isn't system wars material.

Right. Congratulations consolites, you got your first good tactical shooter since your existence, oh except it plays better on PC anyway so it's not much of an achievement : (

There, happy?

Do you like spicy food?

Are you a wings on the bone or boneless person?

Favorite candy?

Did you know that I can't believe it's not butter is actually margarine?

Whenever a game is described as tactical I can never help, but get 'Nam flashbacks to games that had clunky radial dials, turn-based elements, tactical screens and other ways of stripping me from having direct 1:1 button -> awesome gameplay.

All the while, none of the tactical/team-based games I've ever played have ever come close to the amount of strategy and skill needed in CS:GO, which is a game that doesn't muddle itself up with any bullfuck.

But you say it's like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch, which while both are casual, imbalanced messes, are pretty fluid team games worth playing for a laugh or three, and they don't cover themselves in shitty tactical screens or radial dials to trick casuals into thinking that they're thinking.

How can I know you are to be trusted though? I like boneless chicken tenders, but if I'm eating buffalo wings I like them on the bone. If you're the same, then maybe I'll take your opinion seriously.

The only thing I don't like (assuming this hasn't changed, haven't played the game in quite a while) is that every gun kills with a single headshot, even if your class has some crazy bullet-proof head gear. So you end up dying a lot to people spraying a fully automatic weapon through a wall because one of the bullets found its way into your head.

Or, someone would be aiming at your chest but the recoil would send a random bullet into your head. I think if you could absorb another bullet or two it would help the various gadgets and destructible environments shine since it would eliminate a lot of unlucky BS deaths.

But yea overall, I found it very refreshing and had a blast playing it with friends last year, a very nice surprise how well it turned out

Tried the free weekend a few weeks back and really enjoyed it, fantastic tactical shooter.

The tiny bit I played on the One seemed like a true breath of fresh air that joyfully reminded me of OG Counter-Strike.

I'll pick it up on the PS4 during a sale most likely, though ideally I'd love to sink my teeth into the PC version despite not having good enough hardware to do so.

It's a lot better about what counts as a headshot and what doesn't. It's not ideal however, so there is that. Might be a coding issue for Ubisoft? I mean it is Ubisoft, the game being good in the first place is the biggest shocker of all time.

I prefer boneless chicken in general, but like you if I want wings, I want wings. Boneless "wings" are glorified nuggets, that aren't as good as nuggets.

Well Bunnyhop argues that the game has CS:GO principles, to the point of being a more dumbed down version of that game. And even he still thinks it's rad, so there's that. Having only done the quick play stuff of GO, never comp, I can't say otherwise. But given all the 1.6 and Source I've played, it's not nearly the same ballistics driven experience Counterstrike is. Counter-strike's team play is a bit more organic, where is Siege is a product of how the game is structured. Counter-Strike's game has a huge element of separating the better shots from the mediocre ones. Siege that's there, but not to the same extent. You can offset being a poor shot in other ways (not perks), but using your space to your advantage.

So there is your trust

As for distrust? I love me some Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch.

I have been a huge Clancy fan since like 2002, but have been very leary about buying a UBI game, considering how they optimize their games like garbage. I was pleasantly surprised. Great game, and it runs very well on top.

I should reinstall it and give it another try, I remember when I stopped (which was around 6 or 7 moths ago) it seemed like 4/5 deaths were from head shots and I was getting pretty frustrated. Generous hitboxes on the heads didn't help so even if they tighten that up it'd be an improvement.

It just feels like an issue that undermines and invalidates certain tactics, like if you bash a hole in a wall to create a new sight line as a defender, as an attacker you can just spray some bullets into the area around the hole and most likely get a kill. I'm ok with insta-kill headshots in other tactical games like Insurgency or RO2 but given the lack of hard cover, amount of close-quarters fighting and prevalence of full auto weapons its not a design decision I agree with.

I really like this game, anytime I want a multiplayer fix, this is what I come back to.

I wish headshots weren't instant kills. It's super annoying to get killed half way across the map by a guy just hip spraying his pistol.

What do you mean CS:GO isn't the same ballistics driven experience? I will say CS:GO has had it's odd spots after some patches have come out, but as far as gun realism I think I'd put it at the top of the bunch. I always thought Source was a bit off, but CS 1.6 was great. CS:GO to me today feels like how I remember CS 1.6, but with better graphics, and all the awesome modern features like 5v5 competitive play, ranks, etc.

And it's just an observation, but it does feel that in the first couple years after CS:GO came out it had an equal-sized player base to both CS 1.6 and Source. Each game felt somewhat different, and you just picked a preference. Nowadays, nobody really gives a crap about CS 1.6 or Source, and you find hundreds of thousands of people playing CS:GO at any given time of the day. It feels like everyone's moved up to CS:GO over time as the game has become more true to the old CS games.

I don't know when you last played CS:GO, but I will say I felt put off by it at first, but nowadays it's incredible, so it might be worth checking out again. It's gone through a few reworks over the years. The only problem the game has is that it's competitive play is so good, and requires so much skill and strategy, that it's really only worth playing if you have lots of time to devote to it. Though, from personal experience, enough people in that game couldn't care less about actually getting better, and I hate them.

I also love(d) TF2. Haven't played in a while though, but it was one of my most played games of last generation. Overwatch on the other hand... I had fun with it, but it just had issues in terms of balance, and the gameplay didn't feel all that fluid. I might hop back into it at some point, but another semester of school is starting soon, so it's probably best that I don't. For that matter, I don't play CS:GO either. Too hardcore for me with what limited time I have.

Super Bunnyhop did a review on this several months back. It looked like a blast to play, and I've been looking for a new multiplayer shooter. I just might have to pick this up sometime down the line.

I had very little hope for the game. So much so i didn't even want to buy it myself(girlfriend brought it as a gift)...it ended up being one of my favorite games this gen.

i would like them to do a single player focus rainbow six in the future thou

My thoughts exactly but game was Ghost Recon Online.

I mean Rainbow Six isn't the gunplay driven thing that CS: GO is. CS: GO like any Counter-STrike has a huge learning curve to the guns alone. They all work so differently from each other, where as Rainbow Six is a lot more simplified on that front. The guns, you kind of know how they are going to work if you've played a FPS in the last 5 years. The only similarity to CS there is bullet placement, if you body shot it's a longer time to kill than going for the face, it's pretty basic.

Rainbow Six, while not as egregious as Overwatch is about it, I would argue is similar in that it's not about the shooting execution all the time, as much as your application and understanding of the systems working in the game. Rainbow Six is just on the less extreme side of things.

I won't lie to you, if I ever get a console or PC that can play it, I want to give it a shot. The game looks deeper than your usual FPS, with lots of room for both planning and improvisation. This coming from a guy who thinks TF2 is pretty much the only team based FPS I'll ever need.

Ah, I thought you were comparing the ballistics of CS:GO to previous CS games.

To your point about Rainbow Six/Overwatch, it might be one of the reasons I like Overwatch less than say TF2 or CS:GO. At the very least in TF2, each class had roles, but I would say it required far more skill of the mechanics of each class, and greater precision as far as shooting.

But that's to be expected since Overwatch feels like more of a console game. Characters like Pharah don't have rocket jump, you just press a button to do it. Healers are incredibly passive requiring little aiming at all, and many of the damage dealing characters have AOE mechanics, or auto-aim.

However, Overwatch also just seems to have either janky animations, or poor hitboxes, or something. I don't know. Characters like McCree and Widowmaker were just so much harder to be good at than snipers from any other game, but as an added downside they also don't have good mechanics for team play anyways. When I was playing it always felt like a team was better off with any other damage character outside of a select few situations. With that said, I landed a few triple and quadra kills with Widowmaker, and it did feel really fucking good considering how hard it was to do.

I haven't played Overwatch anywhere near as much as I've played CS or TF2 though, so I could just be bad.

I think this thread just sold me on the game.

@beardmad: The only similarities this game has to a game like overwatch are the way the game handle the players loadouts. You have to choose an "Operator", wich is basically a pre-determined loadout with a special piece of equipment that acts much like a Skillset in games like League of Legends. These operators have a distinct background, like a country of origin, a name and physical appearance. Aside from that it's the basic hostage / bomb scenario of old.

It does seem to make people communicate and plan ahead of a round. I was surprised at first.

I snagged it for a few bucks and have been enjoying it since may. If you can find a deal cheap enough, i recommend you give it a shot. I have, like you, an extensive Counter-Strike background. It's not quite a Rainbow Six game proper, but you might enjoy it.

I wouldn't be opposed to trying it, but I'm not the biggest fan of Ubisoft's games, and it still goes for $50. That's too much of a risk for me. It'd really depend on the discount, or maybe if they have a free weekend sometime.

I heard good things during the free weekend, though I didn't try it myself then just too busy with other stuff.

Anyhow, how does DLC effect matchmaking? Some games handle it bad by kicking me out of matchmaking when the lobby selects DLC maps, does this do that? Or does DLC have separate matchmaking lobbies? Might be worth considering next time it's on sale.

@lamprey263: all maps are free and the extra operators can be unlocked with 25k renown points(in game currency) or purchased for like $5 seperately. It would probably take about 20 hours to unlock one dlc character with Renown points. Season pass gets you all the dlc operators unlocked a week before they're officially launched. There are 6 dlc operators so far on top of the 20 already in the game and I think there is one more pair later this year.

I played a ton of RB6 last gen and loved it, I'm just more into the faster paced stuff this gen. I'll probably give it a whirl at some point.

Agreed OP, great IP that should never leave gaming.

When this arrived on the pc side it was £49.99, with (as mentioned) microtransactions couple with Ubisoft reputation. Watching the footage and listening to the PR blurb about how it was returning to it's roots, while looking absolutely nothing like Rainbow 6 or Rogue Spear.

Opted to support Insurgency instead. Small up-and-coming team, pc built, 1/3 the price, free support with no dlc or microtransactions nonsense. And in general, a fantastic game.

When it's the inevitable free-weekend I'll maybe check it seeing how you keep going on about it.

If the game was a new ip, I think the elitists would have been more open to the things it does on its own merits.

But that obviously wouldn't sell.

This and DOOM are the biggest surprises of this gen.

There has not been good R6 since Raven shield. it doesnot even have single player campaign at all.

Better games of this gen, honestly I'd put it top five from what I've played (which is admittedly not all that much). It's easily the most fun I've had in a multiplayer game since BF:BC. The destruction is a revelation, much like it was in BC, in that you're never going to play two games (even on the same map at the same spawn) the same. Being unable to reinforce every wall adds much needed unpredictability to the games, forcing you to stay on your toes and react to the enemy's play. In this way it's incredibly tense and ridiculously addicting, causing me to lose hours to "just one more match (I really hate using that phrase)," and I'm not even good.

The biggest problem I have with it, I think you've said before, is that it's really dumb that they lock all the operators at the beginning. When I first started out I didn't think it was a big issue because I basically just walked around with a gun like it was CoD, but as I started to see the strategies develop it became a hassle to grind through all the points necessary just to have the same tactical options as everyone else. Learning how important Mute can be to the prep phase after hours of playing is great and all, but grinding 2000 points to get him is real annoying. While it's not a game breaking issue and was inevitable probably as all DLC is free, I wish they could've done it differently.

Other than that though, I don't really have any glaring issues that prevent my enjoyment of the game. Seriously, I encourage everyone interested to give it a shot, especially now that they have that cheaper version on sale for steam (like $15 or something, it's a more basic version but I can't remember exactly what's different). I got into it from champ's passing recommendation, and now I can't put it down.

**** Pulse though. Also boneless>bone-in because I don't have to look like a goddamn savage while I'm around other people eating them.

single player campaigns are for anti-social casuals

Wish it had Popper single player story and I would buy.

I never saw the appeal. Not the first reveal trailer, not any of the gameplay I saw afterwards.

What I did like was the singleplayer Rainbow Siege trailer that never came to form.

As for online FPS, my time this gen was spent on:

Red Orchestra 2, truly one of the most unique shooters.
Insurgency, I never thought I'd like tactical shooters anyway, but this is one of the best FPS set in modern day era.
Killing Floor 2, this keeps getting better and better

and I'm really looking forward to Battlefield 1, Rising Storm 2 and Insurgency: Sandstorm. I know a lot of my gaming time will be spent on these games.

I even think I'll skip out on Titanfall2 and LawBreakers so I can dedicate more time to one online FPS at a time.

I really didnt like this game, CS:GO has better strategy and Vegas 2 is a better R6 game in general. Its not the worst game ive played, but its just not worth my time

@ghosts4ever: To be fair, this is in no way worthy of the name. However , this is as good as it's going to get. I really don't think games like Raven Shield would cater to this generation's 16 years old twitch cyborgs (No offense).

Still, worth checking out if you want something fresh.

I was actually pretty disappointed. It felt like diet counter strike but too camper friendly, repetitive, and busting down doors got pretty old quick

From my understanding the cheaper version actually makes the grind aspect of unlocking people more annoying than the ones us folk who bought the regular edition have to go through. So probably better if they don't go the 15 dollar route. Ubi gonna Ubi.