The upcoming Rainbow Six spin-off, Rainbow Six Tactics, will feature permadeath. Gamers will have to plan carefully and strategize in order to make the most of their campaigns in the new Rainbow Six game.
Rainbow Six Tactics was announced just a short time ago at Gamescom Opening Night Live. The next entry in the franchise will be a deviation from the usual formula, as this entry will be turn-based and single-player. Players will be able to use just 15 of the Operators from Rainbow Six Siege‘s massive roster, and the limited options will make permadeath all the more difficult.
Rainbow Six Tactics Brings Permadeath to the Formula
In a chat between Martial Potron, Rainbow Six Tactics game director, and IGN, the director took the opportunity to talk about the game’s permadeath. Calling it a “must-have” for fans of the tactical game genre, he explained that Rainbow Six Tactics does include permadeath, but the feature is optional. Permadeath will be available across all difficulty levels, and the feature will mean planning carefully when sending out squads. If the feature is enabled and a Rainbow Six Operator is too injured during the campaign, they’ll be permanently unavailable for the remainder of it, leaving players to work with whoever they have left. Since each Operator is unique, losing a valuable member early on could make further outings much more difficult.
Balance the critic averages
Balance the critic averages
Easy (6)Medium (8)Hard (10)
Potron went into further detail regarding the game as a whole, particularly with the pivot from shooter to tactics game. Potron explained that since the Rainbow series is already a “Smart Shooter” game that requires strategy and thinking before acting for the best outcome, which translates well to a tactics game. The team also took inspiration from the original Rainbow Six when developing how the Breach works. Players can choose in advance how they want to try and enter a location, including methods used, like explosives, to synchronizing Operators’ actions for maximum efficiency. As with other Rainbow Six games, destruction of the environment will still play an important role.
From the sound of it, one of the most challenging angles of development was maintaining the uncertainty in a standard Rainbow Six Siege match in a turn-based game. Rainbow Six Tactics is implementing a dynamic fog-of-war system that requires players to utilize scouting, drones, and everything else at their disposal to figure out how to best proceed. Potron described the game’s hidden threats as remaining “dangerous without becoming frustrating,” in an effort to maintain fairness while still preserving tension.
For now, Rainbow Six Siege fans will have to wait and see if the new game can live up to the hype. Rainbow Six Tactics currently has a release window of 2027, so it may be a year or more before players can actually try it out. In the meantime, regular updates for Rainbow Six Siege are still arriving well into its 11th year, with a major update arriving on September 1. That update will introduce Operation Split Fire and new Operative Noor, plus a new Legend Division in Ranked mode, and a new 3v3 arcade mode.
- Released
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December 1, 2015
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood, Drug Reference, Strong Language, Violence