Rainbow Six Siege is getting a new operator

I realize "Rainbow Six Siege is getting a new operator" is at a "Malibu Stacy is getting a new hat" level of predictability at this point, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening or that I'm not going to tell you about it. Rainbow Six Siege is getting a new operator, her codename is Ram, and she's from Korea.

Ram joins Siege as part of Year 8 Season 3, and is unlockable with the premium battle pass or by spending Renown or R6 Credits if you wait a couple of weeks. She's got a gadget called the BU-GI Auto-Breacher, which is "an armored drone that tears apart destructible floors, busts through barricades, and wrecks Defender traps as it rolls autonomously forward on its path", as Ubisoft's announcement puts it.

Her drone is all about destruction rather than stealth, with buzzsaw blades on the front and explosive charges on the underside. It's more Mad Max than Sam Fisher, and can destroy deployable shields and Castle barricades while ignoring electrified barbed wire. Though bulletproof, it can be stopped with an impact grenade or C4, or by targeting the red canister on its back that probably shouldn't have been painted in the universal videogame color for explosives and weak spots.

Ram's loadout also includes an MG-E light machine gun and an R4-C assault rifle, with an MK1 9mm pistol and an ITA12S shotgun as secondary options. The ITA12S is one of the weapons to benefit from a buff to shotguns coming as part of this season, which Ubisoft calls "a host of tweaks to aspects like spread, damage, range, and headshot modifier, all aimed to make them more consistent and reliable." The tweaks won't affect slug shotguns, however.

This season, Operation Heavy Mettle, is also updating existing operators Grim, Fuze, and Frost, modifying the way their gadgets work. It's also adding a Weapon Roulette mode to the Arcade in which every player starts with the same randomly selected weapon, and a series of new tutorials are coming too, which will have to be completed by fresh players before they can join multiplayer matches.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.