100 operators. It’s a number Rainbow Six brand director Alexandre Remy tossed around a couple of years ago that the dev team would like to see. Today, the operator count stands at 50. But the team is always thinking about new operators. And chances are, they’ve already thought of everything we can come up with.
Ubisoft’s Alexander Krapazis sat down with Wired’s Tech Support to answer fan questions about Rainbow Six Siege. Operators came up in two separate questions. First, a fan asked about a dual-wielding pistol operator.
Krapazis says it’s an operator the team has considered, “but when you start thinking about dual pistols, you now have to introduce this entirely new way to play the game.” Krapazis added, “we have thought about a character dual-wielding. We have never prototyped it yet, though. Not yet.”
This complexity theme is something Krapazis touches on in another question about map interaction. Siege is already a tough game to learn. There’s 20 maps, 50 operators, and all the interplay between them. While Krapazis cheers the idea as “kick-ass,” he says the team has no plans for opening doors or shooting interactable objects “right now.”
The second operator question asked about a K-9 unit operator. It’s an operator idea that comes up all the time, according to Krapazis. The game’s creative director “always talks about a K-9 unit,” but Krapazis pours water on the idea by proposing another question – “are you okay with shooting a dog?” Yep, we’re cool with shooting people all day – but we would all turn into Doc the second a dog hit Frost’s trap.
Rainbow Six Siege is already one of the most popular shooters out there, but the devs are always considering how changes to the game will influence new players checking it out. That means everything from the type of guns new operators use to small changes to the map are carefully considered before being implemented.
It’s a neat behind-the-scenes nugget of info showing how what we might consider small changes can have huge ramifications.
While we won’t be seeing these two operators any time soon, if at all, Siege still has one more season to go before Year 4 wraps up. Details on this year’s last two operators are slim, but we do know their countries – India and Kenya.
Check out Wired’s video as Krapazis spends ten minutes answering plenty more fan questions.