Rainbow Six Siege coming in 2015, features squad-based tactical multiplayer

Rainbow Six Siege is the latest entry in the Rainbow Six franchise of tactical shooters, publisher Ubisoft announced during its E3 2014 press briefing today.

The company showed pre-alpha footage of a multiplayer match between teams named Raven and Rogue, with hostage captors setting up defenses to protect their position inside a house while an invading squad of counterterrorist operatives set up a strategy to breach the home. The multiplayer match's five-on-five action got smaller and smaller as players died (and didn't respawn).

The invaders took out the hostiles guarding the hostage and attempted to extract her. All the walls inside appeared to be destructible, and the soldiers were soon beset by the defenders, who took back control of the hostage. The attackers used a drone to get a glimpse of the bad guys' position; they were using the hostage as a human shield. Eventually, they went a floor above the criminals and breached the ceiling, taking them out. The match eventually got down to one versus one, and appeared to end with the counterterrorist soldiers failing to extract the hostage.

Rainbow Six Siege is in development at Ubisoft Montreal, and is set for release in 2015 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. In a press release, Ubisoft said the studio is using a proprietary engine called Realblast that enables the real-time, unscripted destructibility that you see in the game's environments. The siege setup is the focus of the first-person shooter: Enemies fortify their position using defenses such as mines and barbed wire to guard against the rescuers, who can rappel down buildings and use technology like drones to get the drop on the hostiles.

"As fans of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and tactical shooters in general, we set out to create the game we always wanted to play within the counter-terrorism universe. We asked ourselves 'how could we capture the incredible tension and unique tactics of these confrontations?' We found the answer in the Siege gameplay and procedural destruction," said Xavier Marquis, creative director at Ubisoft.

Rainbow Six Siege replaces Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6: Patriots, which Ubisoft has canceled. For more on Rainbow Six Siege, check out our E3 feature on the game.