Hands-On: Rainbow Six Siege - Splintered Cells In a New Chalet
Post by Joaby @ 10:39pm 01/09/20 | Comments
Joaby "insert rando name here" Gilroy is an expert at right angles or, "corners" as the kids are calling it these days. Here's his most recent run in with people who don't like car holes...
I've had a lot of good times on Rainbow Six Siege's Chalet. It was always a very exciting map. It was very spread out, with loads of areas you rarely visited. The second garage, for example, was a bit of a dead zone thanks to the absence of any objectives, but I still have fond memories of hiding in the corner near the garage door as Caveira for a quick 3K and an interrogation. My opponents were not happy about that one.
There's that one corner in Archives — just behind the shelving near the ledge window — where the Fuze grenades never seemed to get to, so you'd have three defenders clambering on top of each other all ready to spring out when the cluster finally finished. Peeking Attackers from the benchtop in Kitchen was always a dog move, but one of those things you had to do to help bambinos learn the ropes.
With Shadow Legacy, that is all poised to change — but not necessarily in a bad way. Year Five Season Three of Rainbow Six Siege brings with it a completely revamped version of Chalet, one of the first maps showcased when the game launched back in 2015. This video was taken from a preview session back before Siege was even out.
The new Chalet is very similar to the old, but all of the lessons the Rainbow Six Siege team has learned since 2015 have been implemented here. To me it feels like Outback (from last year's Burnt Horizon) marked a huge turning point in the team's map design IQ — it's the culmination of everything they learnt and have started implementing in the likes of Clubhouse, House and now Chalet.
The biggest change, the one most people will notice, is the way the basement works. The wine cellar/garage site in the original Chalet was most people's favourite to defend — primarily because it was defensible. If you reinforced the walls in the Wine Cellar and held the main stairs (above the second garage) Wine Cellar became a bit of a nightmare, and the garage itself was difficult to infiltrate if Kaid/Bandit were doing their job.
In the new Chalet, basement is still a very strong site for defenders. There's a new hallway connecting the garage and wine cellar on the outside, linking stairs and main stairs while allowing players to avoid actually going on site — which means rotating is a little easier for defenders and attackers aren't channelled into either breaching the site or heading upstairs.
The new reinforcement pool system — wherein a team draws reinforcements from a pool of 10, instead of having two apiece — simplifies reinforcing walls and hatches, especially for anchors, so you can still do a lot of the same things you used to. But Attackers need to be a bit more careful, as a new window over the garage entrance creates a great runout opportunity for defenders — if it comes to that.
At the very least, it means Attackers won't be hiding behind the parked snowmobile outside any more.
The ground floor is now more formally split between its two halves. On one side you've got the Bar site, which features a brand new hallway to streamline rotations, and on the other you've got the Kitchen site.
The Kitchen is where I really got an understanding of the newest Attacker being added in Shadow Legacy, Zero. You probably know him as Sam Fisher, the protagonist of the Splinter Cell series. Here, though, for whatever reason, they call him Zero.
You see Fisher can bring with him an MP7 or a SC3000K (the AR from Splinter Cell), two fantastic primary weapons — the only drawback being the small magazine size on the SC3000K (25 rounds isn't much). But what makes him really shine is his special ability, the Argus Launcher, which he can use to fire a camera onto any surface.
And if you're trying to take the new Kitchen site in Chalet, with its wooden ceilings and open upstairs area, that provides you with a significant opportunity. Once you've cleared out the top floor, a few well-placed Argus Cameras can set you up with the chance to pull off some completely blind floorbangs.
Usually when I get a floorbang, it's not really a floorbang. You know the deal — you're on Border, you blast open the roof in the Server room and then you hang out upstairs in the Armory to watch hapless Attackers walk through.
With Fisher, though, that's not the case. Because his Argus cameras can go through reinforced and penetrable walls — and floors, and ceilings — you can bust into a room above an area you need to assault, punch a few cameras through the floor, get your teammates to drop some pings and then blindfire floorbang to your heart's content. It's rad as hell.
And while you're floorbanging, you can take a look at the fourth and final site in the new Chalet — the master bedroom. The nightmarish balcony outside the bedroom has now been replaced with a hall all of its own. A set of stairs into this landing area provides defenders with a safer way to rotate upstairs — although it's not completely safe.
If you check out that clip, you'll see how Fisher's Argus Camera provides oodles of information for the attacking team — and then the Ping 2.0 system kicks in to save the window breacher from a Frost Trap.
Ping 2.0 has been a long time coming, but now that it's here it's been worth the wait. The ability to use the ping system to wordlessly communicate with your team is a huge deal. I'm a big advocate for muting every single person on your team at the start of any Casual game of Rainbow Six Siege — my positive experiences with team chat are outweighed by the negatives a thousand-to-one — so the idea that I can still give and receive information from the peanut gallery is huge to me.
And the office room on the second floor has been greatly expanded to give defenders an opportunity to hide while still on-site — the small office that existed before was a bit of a deathzone.
It's interesting that in their rejigging of Chalet, they didn't really do anything to rectify the dangling areas of the old map. The Archives on the second floor are still a great location for a firefight — with little reason to visit. And that second garage now has a much more appropriate vehicle parked inside it, but it's still utterly pointless as a location.
It actually reflects how I feel about the idea of redoing Chalet in the first place, to be honest. If you'd asked me to list the maps that needed reworking, the mountainous locale wouldn't have even made my top five. It was always a decent map — not particularly competitive, but thematically well made and fun to play on regardless. I think the changes they've made are good for the health of the game, but I hope it doesn't rob one of my favourite maps of its soul.
That said, Shadow Legacy is overall a fantastic update for Rainbow Six Siege. Ping 2.0 is phenomenal, the reinforcement pool is a great addition — and a long time coming. And Sam Fisher's going to be a highly sought-after Attacker for a long, long time.
You can play Shadow Legacy on the Rainbow Six Siege Technical Test Server now, if you are so inclined, or if you wait a few weeks you'll see the changes reflected in the main game. Season Pass owners will be able to check out "Zero" the moment Shadow Legacy goes live, and he'll be available for purchase for everyone else a week later.
There's that one corner in Archives — just behind the shelving near the ledge window — where the Fuze grenades never seemed to get to, so you'd have three defenders clambering on top of each other all ready to spring out when the cluster finally finished. Peeking Attackers from the benchtop in Kitchen was always a dog move, but one of those things you had to do to help bambinos learn the ropes.
"There's that one corner in Archives — just behind the shelving near the ledge window — where the Fuze grenades never seemed to get to, so you'd have three defenders clambering on top of each other all ready to spring out..."
With Shadow Legacy, that is all poised to change — but not necessarily in a bad way. Year Five Season Three of Rainbow Six Siege brings with it a completely revamped version of Chalet, one of the first maps showcased when the game launched back in 2015. This video was taken from a preview session back before Siege was even out.
The new Chalet is very similar to the old, but all of the lessons the Rainbow Six Siege team has learned since 2015 have been implemented here. To me it feels like Outback (from last year's Burnt Horizon) marked a huge turning point in the team's map design IQ — it's the culmination of everything they learnt and have started implementing in the likes of Clubhouse, House and now Chalet.
The biggest change, the one most people will notice, is the way the basement works. The wine cellar/garage site in the original Chalet was most people's favourite to defend — primarily because it was defensible. If you reinforced the walls in the Wine Cellar and held the main stairs (above the second garage) Wine Cellar became a bit of a nightmare, and the garage itself was difficult to infiltrate if Kaid/Bandit were doing their job.
In the new Chalet, basement is still a very strong site for defenders. There's a new hallway connecting the garage and wine cellar on the outside, linking stairs and main stairs while allowing players to avoid actually going on site — which means rotating is a little easier for defenders and attackers aren't channelled into either breaching the site or heading upstairs.
The new reinforcement pool system — wherein a team draws reinforcements from a pool of 10, instead of having two apiece — simplifies reinforcing walls and hatches, especially for anchors, so you can still do a lot of the same things you used to. But Attackers need to be a bit more careful, as a new window over the garage entrance creates a great runout opportunity for defenders — if it comes to that.
<script></script>I got my hands on @rainbow6game #ShadowLegacy ahead of time and while I mostly played like garbage, I did have one good round. pic.twitter.com/6G7rDnQkJS
— High GI Joab (@Joabyjojo) August 16, 2020
At the very least, it means Attackers won't be hiding behind the parked snowmobile outside any more.
The ground floor is now more formally split between its two halves. On one side you've got the Bar site, which features a brand new hallway to streamline rotations, and on the other you've got the Kitchen site.
The Kitchen is where I really got an understanding of the newest Attacker being added in Shadow Legacy, Zero. You probably know him as Sam Fisher, the protagonist of the Splinter Cell series. Here, though, for whatever reason, they call him Zero.
You see Fisher can bring with him an MP7 or a SC3000K (the AR from Splinter Cell), two fantastic primary weapons — the only drawback being the small magazine size on the SC3000K (25 rounds isn't much). But what makes him really shine is his special ability, the Argus Launcher, which he can use to fire a camera onto any surface.
And if you're trying to take the new Kitchen site in Chalet, with its wooden ceilings and open upstairs area, that provides you with a significant opportunity. Once you've cleared out the top floor, a few well-placed Argus Cameras can set you up with the chance to pull off some completely blind floorbangs.
Usually when I get a floorbang, it's not really a floorbang. You know the deal — you're on Border, you blast open the roof in the Server room and then you hang out upstairs in the Armory to watch hapless Attackers walk through.
With Fisher, though, that's not the case. Because his Argus cameras can go through reinforced and penetrable walls — and floors, and ceilings — you can bust into a room above an area you need to assault, punch a few cameras through the floor, get your teammates to drop some pings and then blindfire floorbang to your heart's content. It's rad as hell.
And while you're floorbanging, you can take a look at the fourth and final site in the new Chalet — the master bedroom. The nightmarish balcony outside the bedroom has now been replaced with a hall all of its own. A set of stairs into this landing area provides defenders with a safer way to rotate upstairs — although it's not completely safe.
<script></script>Also this clip is pretty killer for showing off the two huge new things in the update. Sam Fisher's Argus Camera provides huge call-out potential, and Ping 2.0 (watch the Frost trap ping) is gonna revolutionise solo queuing. pic.twitter.com/IXkNTWc3lD
— High GI Joab (@Joabyjojo) August 16, 2020
If you check out that clip, you'll see how Fisher's Argus Camera provides oodles of information for the attacking team — and then the Ping 2.0 system kicks in to save the window breacher from a Frost Trap.
Ping 2.0 has been a long time coming, but now that it's here it's been worth the wait. The ability to use the ping system to wordlessly communicate with your team is a huge deal. I'm a big advocate for muting every single person on your team at the start of any Casual game of Rainbow Six Siege — my positive experiences with team chat are outweighed by the negatives a thousand-to-one — so the idea that I can still give and receive information from the peanut gallery is huge to me.
And the office room on the second floor has been greatly expanded to give defenders an opportunity to hide while still on-site — the small office that existed before was a bit of a deathzone.
It's interesting that in their rejigging of Chalet, they didn't really do anything to rectify the dangling areas of the old map. The Archives on the second floor are still a great location for a firefight — with little reason to visit. And that second garage now has a much more appropriate vehicle parked inside it, but it's still utterly pointless as a location.
It actually reflects how I feel about the idea of redoing Chalet in the first place, to be honest. If you'd asked me to list the maps that needed reworking, the mountainous locale wouldn't have even made my top five. It was always a decent map — not particularly competitive, but thematically well made and fun to play on regardless. I think the changes they've made are good for the health of the game, but I hope it doesn't rob one of my favourite maps of its soul.
"Shadow Legacy is overall a fantastic update for Rainbow Six Siege. Ping 2.0 is phenomenal, the reinforcement pool is a great addition — and a long time coming..."
That said, Shadow Legacy is overall a fantastic update for Rainbow Six Siege. Ping 2.0 is phenomenal, the reinforcement pool is a great addition — and a long time coming. And Sam Fisher's going to be a highly sought-after Attacker for a long, long time.
You can play Shadow Legacy on the Rainbow Six Siege Technical Test Server now, if you are so inclined, or if you wait a few weeks you'll see the changes reflected in the main game. Season Pass owners will be able to check out "Zero" the moment Shadow Legacy goes live, and he'll be available for purchase for everyone else a week later.
Read more about Rainbow Six Siege on the game page - we've got the latest news, screenshots, videos, and more!
Latest Comments
Follow Us
Advertisement
Log In
