New Hereford Base and fresh operators — Rainbow Six Siege Grim Sky preview

Rainbow Six Siege is a fantastic comeback story.  The game came out on December 1st of 2015 and admittedly, it didn’t exactly capture the hearts and minds of shooter fans for a myriad of reasons including map design, stability, and variety.  Fast forward coming up on three years later and this game has had some revolutionary improvements. If you’ve not paid much attention to Rainbow Six Siege, the upcoming Grim Sky update may be the reason you need to jump back in.

For returning players, the Grim Sky update brings a lot of new updates to a familiar map — Hereford Base.  This update reskins every single floor, allowing some visual differences to allow players to make more accurate callouts.  The team also raised the destructibility of the environment, improving the floor surface area’s vulnerable space. They also opened up stairwell that had previously been a chokepoint, adding a second path.

Beyond the cosmetics and design updates of Hereford Base, there are also two new operators joining the team.  First up is a new defender named Clash. Clash is a 3 armor / 1 speed with a massive ballistic police shield equipped with a stun capability.  This low lethality shocker can slow down incoming enemies, sapping their health over time, but damn if that shield wasn’t the real problem in practice.  Clash is able to get in and get intel as the CCE ballistic shield is completely invulnerable, though its handler is not. Splash damage or melee attacks causes Clash to reel back a bit, opening up her legs and arm momentarily for damage, but the best counter for her is certainly a grenade or having two people flanking her position.

The second operator, Maverick, is the 3rd hard breacher in the game.  Maverick is a 3 speed / 1 armor operator sporting a new AR15.50 and an M4, as well as a 1911 TACOPs pistol, smoke grenades, and a claymore.  He also has a small hand torch as a special item. This torch is able to cut through nearly any surface in the game, creating a nice peep hole, or with sustained burns, a space large enough to sneak through.  This torch is very quiet, but it does require that Maverick be right next to the surface he’s cutting for an extended period of time, leaving him vulnerable to any weapon with wall penetrating power. Unlike a player using thermite, or Hibana’s X-KAIROS pellets, this allows Maverick to create a lot of tiny pinholes in the walls — more than any team could conceivably plug.

The Hereford Base got a revamp, but the fan-favorite Consulate map has also seen some improvements.  There is now a fourth potential spot for the explosives to spawn for defense, either in the server room, or in the teller office.  There are also several new entry points for attackers to breach the building, creating some new opportunities.

While the team was tweaking and tuning, they’ve also reworked hatches and how Hibana and other multi-pellet explosives interact with them. If you can destroy some of those pellets, it may damage but not destroy the hatch, meaning you open up a new sightline, but not an access path.  Similarly, they’ve also reworked a long-standing sight misalignment issue that ensures that bullet placement happens precisely at the center of the weapon reticle. Rounding things out, they also are providing an option to mute individuals in chat independently, and are now requiring a mandatory 2-factor authentication for any ranked play on PC.

I’m incredibly rusty, but if you’d like to see some of these improvements in action, jump in on the video above and see it for yourself.

Rainbow Six Siege’s Grim Sky update will hit Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on September 4th, 2018.

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