Rainbow 6 Siege makes an appearance at RTX 2015 with live gameplay demo

On Day Two of RTX 2015, Ubisoft had a live gameplay demo of Rainbow 6 Siege, featuring Gus Sorola of Rooster Teeth. The hour long session showed off the PvE Terrorist Hunt mode and the differences between the three difficulties. The demo took place at a French consulate on the Ivory Coast, and the GIGN (France’s counter-terrorism unit) was tasked to defuse the bombs planted by the White Masks, the terrorist organization featured in Siege.

The game starts off with the GIGN team selecting their classes and spawning area. It should be noted though, that there can only be one player per class, and the spawning area is determined by a vote. Therefore, you cannot have a team full of riot shield users, nor can parts of the counter-terrorist team spawn on opposite sides of the map. As is typical with Rainbow 6 games, friendly fire can result in the deaths of your teammates.

The first game was on normal difficulty and had a pro team assigned to Gus by Ubisoft. As expected, the team had little difficulty in defusing the two bombs placed in the Consulate. As is the case with most other modern day shooters, the White Mask terrorists were armed mostly with the standard arsenal of small arms and wasn’t capable of mounting effective counterattacks.

The second round of games had a team from Extra Life accompany Gus, and this time the difficulty was set to Hard. Naturally, the AI did more damage and was more aggressive. Their increased aggression was attributed to the AI system, described to be similar to Left 4 Dead’s Director AI, where the AI will react differently every time based on what the players do.

However, there are some gameplay elements that are exclusive to the harder difficulties. For instance, explosive traps are planted all around the Consulate by the terrorist forces, and ammo crates located in the map only have a limited number of uses that is shared by the whole team. Furthermore, suicide bombers will make an appearance, though they can be detected by their Darth Vader-like breathing.

The notably increased difficulty resulted in the deaths of every member of Gus’ team, with one of the explosive traps claiming Gus’ life. The last round of games was set to Realistic difficulty, more or less the same as the Hard difficulty, albeit with a stricter time limit of 10 minutes.

Once again, Gus and the Extra Life team are wiped out. The increased difficulty, combined with the shorter time limit, put too much pressure on the team as they had to advance slowly for fear of traps. This time, not a single bomb was defused compared to the singular bomb defused on Hard mode, a fairly good indicator of how much the difficulties scale.