Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege is still one of the best multiplayer games on PC and it’s about to hit Year 7 Season 1 – now officially revealed as Demon Veil. It’s also about to get a new operator with a game-changing gadget, but to get to this the team prototyped several operators with unique gadgets – including one with a “pile of green goo” called Flubber.
Earlier this month the Rainbow Six Siege team revealed Demon Veil and the new operator Azami, a Japanese defender with a meta-busting gadget called the Kiba Barrier – which can repair walls and other breaches. Azami’s the first operator that can do this, although Ubisoft informed us of two other cancelled operators that led to Azami – nicknamed Patcher and Flubber.
We spoke with creative director Alex Karpazis and asked him about Azami’s development journey, who told us the operator had “a long and storied past” – primarily “because the idea behind her gadget to repair destruction or patch holes is so integral to Siege”.
Siege has always been about destruction, but the idea to create an operator around repairing breaches “has always been there”, apparently. “I think five years ago,” Karpazis says, “we had a prototype called Patcher, where it was a bit like a ranged Castle, you would essentially shoot Castle barricades at windows and doors, and on the reinforced double walls as well”. The reason Patcher never happened, Karpazis explains, is because “we couldn’t find a great way to make it feel really unique and really stand out versus what Castle was doing before”.
More recently, just over a year ago, the team tried another operator nicknamed Flubber with a gadget that “was essentially Ela’s Grzmot Mines that you would throw, and just kind of explode into a radial pile of green goo. You could stack the flubbers all over the place and that gave us a lot of the organic kind of new direction that we really, really enjoyed”.
While Karpazis didn’t reveal to us a particular reason why Flubber never happened – other than a certain Robin Williams-starring Disney movie – it took longer due to the need to change the game’s sound engine. The team “never anticipated the need to organically block sound, from holes that were destroyed from the floor, from the walls. And so it meant that we had to go back and, and do a lot of homework if we wanted to get it right”.
Shortly after this, the team began working out how to get Azami’s barrier gadget going. “We’re getting kind of the metrics right, we’re getting a lot of the creativity right,” Karpazis explains, “and on the tech side, we’re answering things like blocking audio or blocking sound passing through the barrier as well. So honestly, it’s been an incredible journey for the team. It’s been on-off for a long time.”
For more on Azami and Demon Veil, you can check out the full Year 7 Season 1 roadmap right here.