Rainbow Six Siege No Respawn Rule Detailed by Ubisoft

As part of their latest blog post about Rainbow Six Siege, the development team explained why they decided to bring back the No Respawn rule for their upcoming title, referring to it in-studio as One Life.

Referencing the “lethality and tension” experienced in previous Rainbow Six titles as one of the reasons, they talked about other factors leading to the inclusion of One Life, which gives you just one life per round:

When designing the game, we found that above all else, the No Respawn rule touched the three main pillars of what we want in this game: teamwork, tactics, and tension. Not only are these three pillars at the heart of Tom Clancy’s video game series, but they’re arguably absent from the FPS market today. Even when playing on a team, run and gun titles emphasize twitch reflexes while neglecting other skill sets, and you may feel disconnected from the action and all alone in your plight. With Siege, that’s not the case.

Early on in development, Rainbow Six Siege didn’t feature the No Respawn rule, and as a result, the same players were dominating the leaderboard each game. After introducing the No Respawn rule, things quickly changed, with Game Designer and former SOCOM developer Chris Lee talking about the overall impact:

It was a surprisingly good change and we didn’t think it was going to work. I thought that only the most hard-core players would like it. It turned out that it really opened up the game to many different types of players. The developers who were longtime FPS players initially found it difficult because they were only good at reaction time. They weren’t communicating, playing tactically, or thinking about the consequences. Their K/D ratio was high before, but after introducing One Life, they stopped thinking about K/D ratios and more about how each player could work together for the win. Developers who weren’t as good before played slower, thought carefully about the situation, and ended up doing better on the leaderboard. Because One Life rewards this kind of behavior, it puts well-rounded players at an advantage over pure run and gunners, which is what the Tom Clancy’s franchise is all about. They utilize a complete skill set and the rest of the development team really liked that, since going back to its roots is what we wanted to do and the rule stuck. It wasn’t something we predicted, and we were really happy with how it turned out.

For those who do die in a match, you won’t just be sitting around doing nothing, and instead you’ll enter Support mode. With this, fallen players can use limited visibility tools, like the drone and security cameras, or get a view from above through a helicopter.

Game Designer Andrew Witts described a scenario where being in Support mode can be helpful:

One example is that you might find that the objective is in the master bedroom. As defenders, you have a strategy where you put a guy on each floor to flank and punish attackers sieging the house. As soon as one defender goes down, though, you have to regroup the entire team around the objective. Maybe you’re down 4 vs. 5 and the attackers are coming in through the basement. There are only two stairways up and your dead teammate gives you info on where they’re coming up. You trap one stairway and blow a hole in the other one, rerouting the attackers through a choke point where you can get the drop on them.

Even if you die at the beginning of a match, “you won’t be out of action for more than three minutes at a time,” with matches expected to be “short, precise operations.”

Rainbow Six Siege is planned for release in 2015 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Do you like the idea of bringing back the No Respawn rule?

[Source: Rainbow Six Blog]

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