Rainbow Six Siege is more popular and better than ever. That's one point for 'make something actually unique and stick with it,' zero points for 'give up and lay everyone off'

Rainbow Six Siege is having a moment. The tactical FPS is one week into a major update that introduced a new name (Siege X), a wild 6v6 mode, modernized maps, and most consequential of all, a new price point: After holding out for 10 years, Siege is finally free-to-play.

Siege X is now more popular than ever, sustaining the kind of top-five Steam numbers that it used to only reach during free weekends. That boggles my mind, because to me, Siege has always felt like a game that's just a handful of disasters away from collapse.

When I burnt out in 2020, those disasters were around every corner: forgettable operators, terrible battle passes, unpopular balance choices, and disruptive bugs introduced faster than Ubi could fix them. I can think of no other game that, even in its darkest moments, was forced to repeatedly disable entire characters because of game-breaking exploits. I remember players wondering at the time if Valorant, with its Siege-inspired abilities, would deal a fatal blow.

But Siege persisted. It's a testament to its uniqueness that folks stuck around—Siege's secret sauce is that there is no "other" Siege to match its combination of competitive lethality, operator counterplay, and granular destruction. I believe that uniqueness can also explain some of its big missteps over the years.

When I think about how different Siege was back in 2016, and how differently we played it, it's clear to me that Ubisoft and the community were figuring out what this game was together. Ubisoft's funky premise of asymmetrical teams of attackers with grapple hooks and defenders who aren't supposed to go outside spawned a dictionary's worth of techniques that only exist in Siege: runouts, vertical play, murder holes, rotation holes, bandit tricking, hard breaching, soft breaching, intel denial, droning.

Above: In Dual Front, defenders aren't spotted for going outside, a fact some players are still getting used to.

It took time, experience, multiple leadership regimes, and a lot of mistakes for Siege to become the best (so far) version of itself. The big vibe shift came a few years ago, when Ubi officially slowed down on new maps and operators and instead focused on reworking existing systems, an initiative that has resulted in my favorite changes to Siege since launch, like attacker repick, attachments 2.0, operator reworks, a shooting range, match replay, and the secondary hard breach gadget.

Siege X is the culmination of Ubisoft slowly learning how to care for Siege. It's a mature update, targeting fundamental features and improvements that have been a long time coming:

• Rebuilt audio: Sound now travels realistically down hallways and through walls with believable reverb. It sounds better, but it's also more accurate and consistent.
• Modernized maps: Five popular maps got a graphical pass with new 4K assets, moody new lighting, and "destructible ingredients" that change how they're played. Gas pipes can explode to kill players or deny areas. Fire extinguishers create smoke clouds.
• Communication wheel: Better late than never, Siege finally has Apex-style contextual pings, so I can now point at a wall and ask teammates to reinforce it, or ping a hallway and declare it "all clear."
• Clash rework: The latest of a series of reworks that are so substantial that this is basically a new operator. Clash can now place her shield on the ground, creating a piece of cover for herself that also slows enemies with a shock.
• Advanced rappel: Now you "sprint" on a wall and steer around corners while rappelling, a small movement change that saves so much time.
• Pick & Ban 2.0: Instead of banning four operators at the start of the match, teams now ban one each round, speeding things along and encouraging teams to ban reactively based on the previous round. So, so much better.
• Enemy outlines: Long ago, Siege made all its maps bright and flat-looking so players couldn't hide in dark corners. Now that the good lighting is back, enemies now have the slightest red outline so they stand out in darkness. Sounds blasphemous for Siege, but it's inoffensive so far.
• First-person shadows: See your shadow? So can the enemy team!

There was a time when I would read a list of changes like that and think, "OK, but where are the two new operators and one new map that we used to get every three months?" But now I'm a bit older, busier, and aware that Siege has more than enough stuff. Maybe 73 operators' worth of gadget interactions is as much as my brain can hold, and 27 multi-story complexes is more map than I'll ever hope to master.

I like to think we're entering Siege's best years—seasoned gunplay, strong maps, impactful operators, less obtrusive (but still present) bugs, and a confidence in its identity so strong that it can take major swings like a 6v6 mode.