A new Ubisoft Dev Diary #3 shares some of the future projects the developers will be working on for Rainbow Six Siege. During an Ubisoft earnings call held last week, company CEO Yves Guillemot mentioned the following regarding the state of Rainbow Six Siege:
"Rainbow Six Siege daily active user reached new record high during the last quarter. As a matter of fact, there is no better place than eSports confirm Rainbow Six Siege great momentum.
"Season one of year two is indeed seeing an amazing 500% increase in number of views. And the great strides we made in eSports were among the main factors driving five-fold year-on-year growth in our total hours watched on Twitch in 2016. Finally, along the way, our infrastructure absorbed a stunning three-fold increase in peak concurrent players over the past two years."
A three-fold increase in peak concurrent players, while clearly a positive sign of growth, also became a point of concern. Namely, players have suffered consistent errors and issues with matchmaking and connectivity. Massive Ubisoft-wide server outages that affect Siege, Wildlands, and For Honor are not uncommon, particularly during weekends that follow a major DLC release.
To tackle these issues, along with other gameplay bugs in Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft announced a new project earlier this month titled Operation Health, which tasks its team of devs to look for ways to improve Siege via three "pillars:"
Upcoming tech improvements include one-step matchmaking, 100 percent server-based features (as opposed to the current unreliable peer-to-peer setup) and faster servers. In addition, a new deployment process for patch updates will hopefully ensure better quality control. In the event that a patch still causes more issues than its worth, then an on/off switch feature will be applied to revert the game back to its state before a poor patch.
"Today, the main thing we need to do is about investing, capitalizing on that game to ensure that we're going to be here for the next years to come," said Siege brand director Alexandre Remy in Ubisoft's latest Dev Diary on Sunday.
The announcement of the Rainbow Six Siege Operation Health, while good and necessary, does cause the unwanted side effect of pushing back other scheduled DLCs. The Rainbow Six Siege Year 2 Season 2 Hong Kong DLC was intended to arrive in May, but Operation Health will push Hong Kong to an August release date as part of Season 3. Meanwhile, South Korea will shift to Season Four in November while Poland will unfortunately no longer have a dedicated season. Instead, Poland will lose its map while the Polish GROM operators are expected to release at the start of Season Three and Four.
"Even though moving content saddens me," said Siege creative director Xavier Marquis, "it is important to face health head on."
Check out the Rainbow Six Siege Operation Health Dev Diary video below:
