This interview has been edited for clarity.
A decade may be a mere fraction of long-standing legacies spanning multiple generations, but it’s a long time in the world of live-service and shooter titles. It’s all too often that ambitious pursuits in the scene have gone up in smoke, with the oversaturation leaving only the best masters of the craft behind, including Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege, which continues to enjoy strong momentum after 10 years.
In celebration of this milestone, the franchise received its biggest update to date back in June in the form of Rainbow Six Siege X, carrying a slew of major graphical and audio improvements, alongside revamped modes and key features in tow. Four months after launch, the partially free-to-play tactical shooter – limited to Standard, Quick Play, and Dual Front modes – has won fans over for the second time by paying attention to details that supplement its core identity.
Speaking to Geek Culture during gamescom asia X Thailand Game Show 2025, creative director Alexander Karpazis shares how the nitty-gritty plays a role in establishing thematic relevance, from adding destructible ingredients like fire extinguishers and gas pipes to lighting changes to the various maps. The former, for example, “fits with the theme of destruction” across the series, while the latter doles out a nice balance between the fresh and the familiar.
“It felt very good to hear feedback from players, saying, like, ‘Ah, this feels like a mix of old and new Siege, the initial launch of the game and the best blends of the last 10 years,” highlights the Rainbow Six veteran.
The other major tweak would be audio engineering, enhanced to better signal the location of enemies at different parts of the map. Leveraging on reworked propagation and reverberation, players will be able to tell footsteps apart in carpeted environments or gunfire from a distance away in finer detail, shaking up their understanding of and approach to the game.
Karpazis explains, “With sound, it can be very tricky, especially after 10 years of learning how to listen for certain cues and learning the game in a specific way. Changing the audio engine within the game means you’ll have to relearn all of that again, and we know it’s difficult, but the overall sentiment is that it was a good change.”
It’s not only the players who have to adapt, however. Despite the wealth of expertise to tap into, operator balance remains an ongoing learning process for the team as opposed to full mastery, especially with a roster of 76 playable characters. Then, there’s also the new ban system to consider – instead of banning two Attackers and Defenders at the beginning of the match, which are then fixed for the rest of the game, Rainbow Six Siege X lets each team ban a character from their opponent’s operator pool at the start of each round, after which the teams would switch and the bans will reset.
The change allows for more dynamic gameplay and higher pick rates for underutilised operators, but there’s no denying that the ban favours some more than others. According to official stats for the previous Season 3.2 update, Mira and Ace have the highest ban rates in their respective Defender and Attacker categories, coming in at 85 percent / 72 percent (console versus PC), and 83 percent / 79 percent – way higher than their second-placed counterpart. To even out the playing field, the beginning of Season 4 will be centred on “lifting operators more than just dragging others down in the balance”, an approach that considers player feedback, while still maintaining the fun factor.
“We’re going through a bit of a philosophy change now that comes from what our players have been asking about. Specifically, when it comes to Ace and how he’s being really favoured, rather than just nerfing him outright, we want to lift the other hard breachers as well,” he shares, referring to Thermite, Hibana, and Maverick.
The first new operator of Rainbow Six Siege X, Denari, wasn’t quite as lucky. Following his recent debut in Season 3, nerfs were made to his kit, comprising his signature Glaive-12 shotgun and T.R.I.P. Connector, an area-denial device, among others, only for some of the old parameters to return in Season 3.3, which was released on 14 October.
Interestingly enough, the development process for Denari was much quicker than other characters in the past, despite his technical-heavy nature. Unlike Skopós and Azami, who are of the same ilk but required the longest time to flesh out, the dots connected “really quickly” for the latest Defender after the act of placing down one gadget and another to trigger a laser beam – the core functionality of the T.R.I.P. Connector – sparked the team’s imagination.
“There are usually two ways to go about creating a new operator – first, if there’s a specific need in the game, such as if we need to counter a current meta, we’ll have a mission for the team to come up with an idea that fits,” elaborates Karpazis.
“Other times, it’s all about opportunity, imagination, and whatever the team comes up with, and Denari was very much about imagination and creativity coming up with that gadget, and how it builds up. It [also] did fit the counter-meta of shield operators, so that was ideal.”
Moving forward, the Rainbow Six Siege X team has plenty lined up to enhance the player experience, both in casual and competitive play. For the latter, the priority is to improve the speed of deploying iterative changes, so that “cheat makers never have any time to catch up”, joining other plans like ranked updates and, as mentioned earlier, operator balances.
If the opportunity arises, perhaps a potential collaboration with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell games could become a reality down the road, too.
“It’s always fun with the games that are within the Tom Clancy verse,” expresses the creative director. “Between Ghost Recon: Splinter Cell and the cameos of Rainbow [Six] operators in The Division, I would love to see even more done with Splinter Cell.”
And with Netflix’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch animated series reviving interest in the series, there’s no better time to work something out – more so now that it has been renewed for a second season.
Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth’s theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia’s greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
Joey Leong
