Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Seige is going into its fifth year as a hit multiplayer shooter, and now it's clear that the game won't be slowing down anytime soon. On the contrary: Ubisoft announced its current plan to have the game available to play for both highly-anticipated next-gen consoles at the time of their launch.
That means Ubisoft is aiming to have versions of Rainbow Six Siege ready for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 by the holiday season in 2020, which is the projected release window for both next-gen consoles. Because it plans on bringing Rainbow Six Siege into the next generation of consoles, Ubisoft also has plans to update existing versions of the game in preparation.
In an interview with Windows Central, Rainbow Six Siege game director Leroy Athanassoff confirmed Ubisoft's intentions to make the game available to new consoles at day one. More than that, Athanassoff also announced that there will be cross-generation multiplayer support for the game: this means that Xbox Series X and Xbox One owners will be able to play together, and the same for PS4 and PS5 players.
Ubisoft is currently looking into cross-platform gameplay between PS4 and Xbox One players as well, but ultimately, the decision to make that option available lies in the hands of Sony and Microsoft. According to Athanassoff, "We would love to be fully cross-play– have Xbox players matchmaking against the PlayStation players. ...And hopefully, this will happen because as I said, it's a general move in the industry, and there is nothing that can prevent that. It's just a matter of time before it happens."
Presumably, many more currently existing games will be made available for next-gen platforms at launch, since it has already been confirmed by both Sony and Microsoft that the consoles will support PS4 and Xbox One games. Even better for Xbox Series X owners, the new console will support Xbox 360 and original Xbox games; whether the same is true for the PS5 has not yet been confirmed or denied by Sony.
On the subject of Rainbow Six Siege, in particular, Ubisoft has decided that it won't release a sequel for next-gen consoles. Instead, Ubisoft plans to continue supporting the game for both generations and create 100 more operators over the course of the next decade. Announced the most recently, a long-requested rework of the operator Tachanka is coming to Rainbow Six Siege soon.
Although there's no sequel, there is another Rainbow Six game in development; Rainbow Six: Quarantine is currently in development for next and current-gen consoles. Combined with the future updates to keep Rainbow Six Siege new and interesting, fans of the franchise are looking into a bright future.
Rainbow Six Siege is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Source: Windows Central
