Rainbow Six Siege Operation Blood Orchid Release Date and Info Announced

Rainbow Six fans, rejoice! Ubisoft has finally announced the Rainbow Six Siege Blood Orchid release date and it’s due next week, on September 5! 

While we already posted gameplay, and a few details regarding the expansion, NeoGAF’s Nirolak summed it up quite nicely in bulletpoint form.

  • 3 new operators (one attack, two defense)
  • A new theme park map set in Hong Kong.
  • New cosmetics.
  • Their new servers are deployed, which they say should dramatically improve performance, stability, and network conditions. They’re also redoing the physics system to help with this at a later date.
  • They redid how lighting works through holes in the wall/floor/ceiling so that you can clearly see stuff on the other side (images below).
  • They upgraded the skies to look better.
  • They upgraded the reflection model to look better.
  • They’re redoing the memory budget for all the maps to make them run better, starting with Kafe. In practice, this means they changed a bunch of textures (images below).
  • The Operators all got a pass to have a consistent memory budget. They tried to downgrade memory usage on Operators who were too high without decreasing quality, while upgrading the models on some of the older (images below).
  • They redid the facial animation rigging on all Operators to make sure they matched the face model of the Operator’s face better (images below).
  • Hibana’s gadget will be less broken.
  • There will be more improvements to the netcode, especially around hit registrations, released throughout season 3.
  • There’s now a map rotation for competitive featuring nine maps, and two of the maps are being removed from casual to be reworked and readded to the game. They stated they’re intending to remove some maps permanently from the game due to technical issues, but after community reaction, assured everyone they will be discussing this issue internally and potentially backing out of the idea.
  • You can no longer vote for which map you want to play on in casual, though they intend to bring that feature back at some point in a reworked version.
  • There’s a bunch of balance changes and mechanics changes. A few changes are that your crosshair no longer turning red when you’re over an enemy, and that debris is synchronized so it doesn’t block one person’s view and not the other’s. There’s too many to list here, so hit the link for those.
  • There’s a non-exhaustive list of over 1000 bug fixes in the patch notes.
  • Oh, and they completely switched the game’s data model, which should shrink the gam’s total size while improving load time, visual quality on PC, and future patch size, but also means you’re going to be downloading the entire game again. Consoles will load about 10% faster, while YMMV on PC. The download size is 15 GBs on consoles, 26 GBs for standard PC version, and 42 GBs for the high resolution textures PC version.

You can read up and check screenshots and other stuff about Blood Orchid on Ubisoft’s official site. Or better yet, go check out this Rainbow Six Siege Blood Orchid info dump made as a Twitter Moment.

Source: Ubisoft via NeoGAF

Top Games and Upcoming Releases