The new Rainbow Six Siege season is about to kick off this week, titled Demon Veil, and it introduces a brand new operator to one of the best multiplayer games on PC. Azami is a Japanese bodyguard whose gadget, Kiba Barrier, acts a lot like the hidden blades in Assassin’s Creed series – and that’s not entirely coincidental.
Fans don’t have long to wait until the latest Rainbow Six Siege season arrives in Ubisoft’s popular FPS game, and the Year 7 roadmap contains new maps, gameplay changes, and a lot more content dropping this year. The big deal for release, however, is new operator Azami, whose Kiba Barrier gadget can actually repair breaches.
The way the Kiba gadget deploys is via a knife that Azami extends from her sleeve and then throws, but the animation seems partly inspired by the iconic hidden blade from Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed games. We spoke with Siege’s creative director Alex Karpazis and asked whether this was an intentional reference.
“Originally, we didn’t know that the character would be from Japan,” Karpazis explains, “and so a previous iteration actually had the device being more like a butterfly knife – and they would just kind of interact with it in a unique way. And then when they flipped it out and threw it, it would deploy much like the Kiba thing right now.”
However, this changed to a slender Japanese kunai-type blade when Azami was created. “We wanted to make sure that the device kind of fit the aesthetic of the character and their origins”, the director tells us.
As for the Assassin’s Creed connection, the team didn’t deliberately set out to make the Kiba look like a hidden blade, but developers behind the iconic weapon are now working on the game. “We actually had a couple of developers from Assassin’s Creed on Siege,” Karpazis says. “We had one of the original riggers who rigged the hidden blade in Assassin’s Creed. So, we already had the knowledge there.”
“It was actually a lot of fun to kind of bring that to the Siege world,” Karpazis adds.
For more on our interview with Siege’s creative director, Azami was originally a green goo-flinging operator called Flubber, and Karpazis also told us that he feels “sorry for any game that tries our recipe now”.
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