In spite of being nearly a decade old and having suffered quite a horrid start upon its launch all those years ago, Rainbow Six Siege has, over time, turned into one of the successful and widely played live service games out there.
Given its age, however, many might be wondering when Ubisoft will choose to put out a new mainline Rainbow Six game- though its developers seem to have no intention of making an actual follow-up to Siege, nor do they plan on implementing a major technical overhaul by moving the game to a different engine.
Speaking during a recent group interview at the recent Siege Invitational 2024 event in Brazil, Alexander Karpazis – who’s been creative director on Rainbow Six Siege since 2022 – spoke about the same. Interestingly enough, the thing he touched on first was the multiplayer shooter’s engine, which has been subject to criticism from many in the playerbase who have deemed it to be too aged.
According to Karpazis, however, the Avil Engine – the toolset that Siege is built on – is best-in-class for a PvP shooter, and the development team currently has no intention of shifting the game to a different engine. He went on to refer to games (that he refused to explicitly name) that have attempted to switch engines, only for things to not work out as intended.
“I can confidently say that we have probably one of the best engines in the world when it comes to live PvP shooters,” he said (via PC Gamer). “The team is incredible, and we have a huge engine pipeline team that every single month incrementally improves the way that we can deliver content faster, more robust, more stable, hopefully as much as possible.
“The idea of switching engines to something that can be off-the-shelf ready simply doesn’t answer the needs of a really competitive and demanding game like Siege. I’m not going to name names, but you see games that did go through sequels and just completely drop the ball because they have to remake every single thing that they did in that first game.”
He added: “It can be really frustrating, really costly, and in the end, it doesn’t even give you anything that was a benefit. If you know what you have to begin with, and you build it up, that is where we see success. And that is where we know we can take Siege into the future.”
So how long can Ubisoft keep Rainbow Siege Siege going without having to resort to an engine swap or a full-fledged sequel? Well, as far as Karpazis is concerned, the multiplayer shooter can keep going indefinitely.
“We really do know that this is a game that can last forever with the people and the talent and the tools that we have today,” he said.
Members of Rainbow Six Siege’s development team have expressed on numerous occasions that the game is going to stick around for some time to come. In 2021, then-creative director creative director Leroy Athanassof said that a sequel to the game was unnecessary, and that incremental updates and changes made to the existing framework would be a better approach for a game like Siege. Prior to that, in 2019, Alexandre Remy – who was brand director of Rainbow Six at the time – said that there were no plans to work on a sequel.
Rainbow Six Siege is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. As of February 2022, it had crossed 80 million players across all platforms.
