Ubisoft overhauls optics, provides players more choice

Five years and three seasons later, Rainbow Six Siege is still going strong. In a new dev blog from Ubisoft, they announced a ton of new tweaks concerning weapon sights and optics in the upcoming Operation Shadow Legacy Update.

While not as flashy as the new Operator “Zero” (AKA Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell), under the hood updates are essential to any game’s longevity. It’s these types of things that usually go unnoticed unless something goes wrong.

Weapons sights are among the most important things to get right in any first-person-shooter, not just Rainbow Six Siege. Nobody likes it when their aim is off, even less when it’s not even their fault. In a game like Siege, where firefights are intense and over in seconds, there can be no margin for error when it comes to aiming-down-sights (ADS) mechanics.

If you’ve ever played Siege, you’d know that most fights happen within throwing distance, and even then, that's on the rarer side. Usually, players shoot each other from opposite corners of the same, or from one room to another. These firefights take place inside houses, which aren’t exactly conducive to long-range sniping like you’d find in Battlefield or Warzone.

This is why Ubisoft changed zoom levels for most scopes across the board. Now, ACOG scopes only magnify 2.5x instead of 3.0x. According to Ubisoft, Siege focuses on short-range kills. A 3.0x sight is redundant for most weapons in a game that takes place mostly indoors. However, Operators who use designated-marksman-rifles (DMRs) still get access to 3.0x scopes thanks to their very specialized role.

Operation Shadow Legacy also adds four brand-new weapon optics to round out the variety – something Ubisoft themselves said was lacking. According to the blog post, players “only had one choice when it came to scopes: either the weapon gets an ACOG or not.”

For a game that’s all about building unique playstyles across dozens of Operators, it seems obvious to give players more choice when customizing weapons. This freedom to choose is Ubisoft’s motivation behind the optics overhaul.

“The main driver of making the changes to Siege's optics was to provide more choices for you, our players,” read the blog post. “While not every weapon has access to every optic, we wanted to have a wider variety with more options to choose from.”

Five years is a long time to support a single game – especially when compared to other AAA shooters like Call of Duty. Since 2015, there have been eight separate Call of Duty releases, not including Warzone. In that same period, there has only been one Rainbow Six title – Siege.

They say humans are reluctant to embrace change, but that's not true for everyone. If that were the case, Ubisoft wouldn't bother staying faithful to the community they've built around Rainbow Six Siege. Changes, “bring a breath of fresh air to our gameplay,” according to Ubisoft, “creating new experiences for all our players.”

Rainbow Six Siege is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows. Operation Shadow Legacy officially launches in September, but you can try it out now on the Test Servers.