Rarely do we see live service games last long in the gaming industry. Many have tried and failed to launch a live service game, promising years worth of content, only for it to fail. But that doesn’t mean that there are no successful live service games. Fortnite, Overwatch 2 (technically should just be called Overwatch), Destiny 2, Apex Legends, World of Warcraft, Sea of Thieves, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Warframe, and more.
Among those games is none other than Rainbow Six Siege, a game that came out in 2015 and ascended to being a professional and competitive Esport game later on. Millions of players every year on both PC and consoles. While it did have a ton of issues when it first launched in 2015, the team behind the game didn’t give up and worked on fixing the game until it became the game it is now.
Just recently in an interview at the Six Invitational event, Alexander Karpazis, the director of the game, was asked if the team behind Rainbow Six Siege and Ubisoft have plans to release a sequel to the game, seeing as how the game is 9 years old at this point and the engine may become obsolete soon due to the rise of other engines like Unreal Engine 5 looking graphically impressive. Alex responded with a firm no before saying the following:
“I can confidently say that we have probably one of the best engines in the world when it comes to live PvP shooters. 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.”
While it may be a disappointment for Rainbow Six Siege fans, there is wisdom behind his words. A sequel will most likely destroy everything they have ever built and will cause more problems in the future if they make a new game with a different engine. While seeing a new game with a different engine would be nice, the team would have to adapt to the brand new engine in order to get things working, compared to them staying with Ubisoft Anvil (the engine for Rainbow Six Siege).
It is a situation that we have seen before with Overwatch 2 and Destiny 2, both games that were sequels to their first iteration. Alexander Karpazis even talks about it as well:
“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.”
Karpazis goes on to say that they can do more with the engine that they have now, as they have essentially mastered the engine and know how to work it.
“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 yeah, we’re not going to be seeing a sequel to Rainbow Six Siege game in a while. But that doesn’t mean we won’t get a new Rainbow Six game. After all, we can still have the competitive shooter alongside a brand new, triple AAA Rainbow Six game that’s more in line with previous games like Rainbow Six Vegas 2. Ubisoft just needs to assemble a team to develop that one while Karpazis and his dev team continue to work on Siege.
