When Rainbow Six Siege morphed into the free-to-play Rainbow Six Siege X back in June, it wasn't the brave new beginning some had hoped for. Players didn't like how currency gain slowed to a crawl (that has since been fixed) and server woes were widely reported. But one of the enduring complaints about Siege X is that the shift to free-to-play has triggered a huge uptick in cheating.
I caught up with Siege creative director Alexander Karpazis at Gamescom Asia x Thailand Games Show last week. I asked if the team at Ubisoft Montreal expected cheating to surge to the extent that it did in June.
"We knew having free access that it could be a vector that is exploited," he said, "and we were ramping up our R6 ShieldGuard. In a lot of ways it really did help, but we need to be faster when it comes to making sure that we stay one step ahead of cheat makers, too."
Eliminating cheating entirely is impossible, I acknowledged, and Karpazis agreed. "Absolutely. That's a message that we keep on having to share with our community. It's not something where we'll receive zero percent cheating.
"But there is a goal for us to make sure that, again, if we stay ahead of cheating and we address it faster and faster, and we make it more expensive for cheat makers so that more and more of them drop out of the cheat making scene… These are the wins, and these are ways of making the game a lot more competitive and a lot more fair."
In some ways it makes sense that Siege attracts so many cheaters: it's a famously complicated tactical shooter where wins are hard fought. Its players tend to be very serious as well, which probably makes toying with them all the more fun for cheaters.
But why does Karpazis think cheaters gravitate towards Siege? "When somebody can do something to get a competitive edge, they'll do it," he said, "and it can sometimes come at immense cost to them, but they get the satisfaction of winning. There is immense psychological gymnastics that goes on behind all this, and for different reasons, but it's just something that's part and parcel with a popular competitive game like Siege".
At launch in 2015, Siege had a fairly decent—but quite skeletal—PvE mode called Terrorist Hunt. The mode, which has since been removed from the game, kinda served as a tutorial, but it also held the promise of what a good PvE Rainbow Six game could look like in the future. Siege has gravitated further and further away from this vision since launch—though we always have the zombies-themed Rainbow Six Extraction, I guess—but I wanted to know if the team had any desire to revisit PvE.
"There are aspects of Siege that we're looking at that lends itself to that, especially when it comes to onboarding," Karpazis said. "We want to further develop our AI bots so they can be team mates with you, so that you don't have the pressure of playing with others as you learn the game. And that can extend to things like the events we're developing.
"But also, training tools," he went on. "We've slowly been building up our AI bots so that we are getting closer and closer to what we had with Terrorist Hunt before. So I think Season 4 will actually have something that mimics it really closely, and helps you warm up, learn the maps and learn the game [he's referring to the training / onboarding features listed here]. So those are areas that are really important for Siege. But again, when it comes to Siege, our bread and butter is PvP, so we want to make sure we can support core Siege."
Finally, I wanted to know if Karpazis had played Ready or Not—a brilliant PvE tactical shooter—and what he thought of it. It turns out he's a fan.
"Absolutely love it," he said. "They're doing something that's really great. It is a really good game."
