Rainbow Six Siege's Operation Burnt Horizon deploying this week

After two weeks on the Technical Test Server, Rainbow Six Siege Operation Burnt Horizon is officially releasing Wednesday March 6. As always, new operators Mozzie and Gridlock will only be available to Year 4 pass holders for the first week. Outback, Siege’s excellent new map, will be available to all.

Ubisoft aggregated the weeks of testing in an addendum to the original Burnt Horizon patch notes.

Dokkaebi

  • Auto-hang up timer of Dokkaebi calls reduced to 12 seconds (down from 18).

Ubi is intensifying the original nerf introduced to the Logic Bomb at the beginning of the test server. In my experience, 18 seconds was still long enough that I always felt the need to stop and hang up the call myself. Bumping it down to 12 sounds like a good middle ground where you can easily let it ring without much annoyance.

Capitão

  • Back to Wind Bastion version.

Ubi is completely reversing the changes to Capitão’s fire bolts. The new bolts did feel a bit overpowered. The effective radius was march larger and had huge potential for denying areas from defenders. The devs are going to “take a look at and evaluate the data and feedback we've gathered.” For now, we’re back to the wimpy fire bolts of old.

Gameplay tweaks

Some small, previously unlisted changes were noticed early on by players on the test server, but Ubi took this opportunity to make them official.

  • Minimum Clearance Level for Ranked Playlist increased from 20 to 30.
  • Reduction in HP after being revived from a DBNO state: PvP = 20 (down from 50), Terrorist Hunt = 15.
  • Holosight color is now determined by the base skin of the weapon it is equipped on.

Most notably, “resetting” (in which you intentionally shoot a near-death teammate into the DBNO state and revive them back to 50 health) is effectively going away. Instead of being revived back up to 50 health, you’re now revived to 20. With so much less health after a revive, resetting will almost never be worth the risk.

Despite its inherent ridiculousness as a mechanic, resetting has always been treated as a normal part of Siege’s meta. It was always treated as a sort of workaround to the fact that attackers have no reliable way to regain health. Finka can save a life in a pinch, but her healing is temporary. A proper medic on attack could help fill the hole left by resetting, but I’m not holding my breath.

Ubi has also fixed an issue with head alignment following the lean spam fixes coming to Burnt Horizon. “Previous camera placement at a full lean allowed players to fire without being completely exposed. As part of our fix to counteract lean spamming, we are shifting the camera to the center of the head instead of the far side of the head, even when at a ‘full lean,’” the post reads.

The devs are also using this patch to consolidate the file size of Siege from its whopping 81GB (!) to a more reasonable, yet unspecified size. Unfortunately, that also means the Burnt Horizon patch will be larger than usual. A whole grip of general bug fixes are also on the way. You can check out all of those here.

Morgan Park
Staff Writer

Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.

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