By GARRETT BABB
Staff Writer
Released initially back in November of 2015, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege was an almost instant success on all platforms and quickly saw a large new player base being formed around the 5v5 tactical shooter game by the time its third season had dropped in August the next year. The game has had an incredibly impressive amount of longevity compared to many other games of the same genre (Is even relevant now almost seven years later). But due to its longevity, there were many new game modes and features in Rainbow Six that were added briefly to spice up the game during times when the player base was declining, the most notable of which was when it dropped an entirely new and completely unique game mode called “Outbreak”. Coming out during the Operation Chimera expansion in 2018, it was quite unlike anything we had seen in the game prior to this and a far shot away from the base games 5v5 tactical shooter gameplay, Outbreak had players working together to fight off an “infection” that had infected humans across New Mexico and was turning them into powerful zombie-like creatures. Despite being a very unexpected and out-of-the-box addition to the game it was actually fairly well received by the community, I myself remember having a pretty good time playing it with friends while it was available as a game like that hadn’t come out in a long time. Fast forward to E3 2019 and Ubisoft (the developers behind the Rainbow six series) announced a brand new game called “Rainbow Six: Extraction” which featured what was basically the Outbreak game mode that was released the year prior turned into a fully-fledged independent game. Set to come out on January 20th of 2022, the game was initially met with a lot of skepticism from the community. Many thought that although the limited event was cool and everything they didn’t believe it was worth making a whole game out of it and could maybe have instead just been an optional DLC for Rainbow Six Siege and many more thought that the game’s overall concept was just unappealing in general. On top of this many believed the fact that the same operators who were from Rainbow Six Siege are in this game seemed lazy and were hoping for some new operators unique to the game. Despite this criticism, many content creators who were able to play the game early actually commended the game for its intense gameplay and difficulty variations, while also stating that despite the fact that the operators were the same from Rainbow Six Siege they actually had different functions and abilities in the new game. So will the game be worth it on release? Personally, I doubt this game is going to perform very well at all for a few reasons, the first being that this game’s only audience are people who played it for a limited time on a game that is entirely different from it with most of the community being completely uninterested in the game (including myself). Secondly, the timing for this game to come out really couldn’t be worst, this genre has been in dire need of a fresh new game to come out and revitalize it and this game could have easily been the one if it weren’t for the fact that Back 4 Blood just recently came out and is basically doing all the things this game has to offer but better and with a larger community. For these reasons, I doubt the game will have any real longevity to it, but regardless it will be interesting to see how the game performs in the coming months.