With Call of Duty still generating huge amounts of money while doing little to innovate in any meaningful way, more and more games, specifically first person shooters, are trying to ape the popular first person shooter. Ubisoft’s latest tactical shooter was thought to be lacking in tactics due to in game mechanics being tweaked so much that they felt “mainstream”.
Typically, a tactical shooter feels decidedly non-mainstream because it’s a niche market that demands realism and punishing gameplay. Players reported that the game felt more like Call of Duty in places. One thing that was change, was the heartbeat sensor, a device for locating other people through walls. At first, the device could detect another being at a distance of 20 meters, which is quite unreasonable. This was nerfed a little bit to a range of 15 meters. Still rather far, but better than 20 meters.
Rainbow Six: Siege features the typical hit markers and team mate highlights that are common in modern games swhich once again remove a fair degree of tactical thinking from the game. These features will be removed if the player wants to play in custom matches. Speaking about this Game Director Simon Lauroche has said, “We already embraced a more realistic approach in our game mechanics. By default, we don’t have aim assist, nor health regen and friendly fire is ON. For those interested in disabling HUD elements, it will eventually be possible to disable them locally for yourself (no matter which mode you are playing) through the options. It is in our current plans to also allow custom session hosts to disable HUD elements for everyone participating in the match.”
Furthermore ammo is being tweaked too, players won’t be deployed with tons of ammo for their weapons, that means no more High AP Spread Shotguns with 75 extra cartridges. I’m looking at you, Battlefield. Game Designer Andrew Witts says “We need to balance the amount of rounds to give to players to compensate for the fact that we have no ammo or weapon pick-up. We have already reduced the ammo count in order to have the same amount as the ones in Raven Shield, but that tweak will not be in the upcoming Closed Alpha build. We do intend to start things off by giving to players more ammo than what we plan on giving them in the final game, in order to see what is and isn’t being consumed, so that we can establish the average amount of ammo used per player. Our final intention is to provide the player with an ammo count that is sufficient, while being limited.”
Other game mechanics, Down But Not Out, Barricades, weapon damage, bullet penetration etc, are all features that are being actively worked on to help improve the game and hopefully make it a more dedicated and successful tactical shooter, worthy of the Rainbow Six name.
