Ahead of the launch of the new season of Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft is hosting a free weekend for the competitive shooter. Across consoles and PC, from Thursday March 5 - Monday March 9 you'll be able to play Siege for free. On top of that, the game will also be heavily discounted, with some versions being as much as 70% off.
The free weekend is paving the way for Operation Void Edge, the new season of Rainbow Six Siege that's due to launch later in the month. Void Edge is bringing two new characters to Siege, the human bulldozer Oryx and the hologram-projecting Iana.
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Oryx is sure to be a firm favourite of Siege players who delight in the simpler things. He doesn't mess around with fancy gadgets, his special ability is being able to charge through brick walls. The Jordanian defender is built to roam around the map, surprising attackers and breaking their carefully planned assaults by bursting through walls into the thick of the action.
Also coming in Void Edge is a new attacker, Iana. She's a much more subtle character than Oryx (though, considering his battering ram attributes that's not much of a challenge). Her ability is to project a hologram of herself that you're able to control and move around the map, like a human-sized drone. The hologram is an exact double of Iana, so any defenders who spot her won't be able to tell the difference.
Read lots more about the new operators in our Void Edge impressions.
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Void Edge is just the first season of Rainbow Six Siege's Year 5 content. While it's keeping the names and details of the other seasons under wraps, we know that season 2 will bring two new operators and a redesign of the House map. Seasons 3 and 4 see a shift to a plan to renovate Siege. On top of a new operator and a redesign of an old map, each season will see significant updates to the Siege's core gameplay. One example Ubisoft has given is an overhaul of the ping system players use to share intel with their team.
As well as maps and the core game systems, Ubisoft is redesigning older operators to make them more competitive in the modern game. The first to be nipped and tucked is the beloved Tachanka. Ubisoft is replacing his static turret with a wall-shredding machine gun and giving him an incendiary-tossing grenade launcher as a secondary weapon. We spoke with the Siege dev team recently about why they wanted to change Tachanka so drastically.
Each season of Year 5 will also have a special event, like last year's Halloween Doktor's Curse mode - which turned the game into a gothic monsters vs hunters stand-off. Alongside these events that radically change Siege, Ubisoft is launching an arcade playlist that adds new limited-time modes to the game each season. The first of these will be Golden Gun, a game type that gives every player a pistol that can kill in a single shot but has to be reloaded each time you fire, making for a gamepad-snappingly tense time.
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With Siege set to change so much in Year 5 and the new Void Edge operators shaking up the status quo, now is the perfect time to get some practice in before the launch of the new season. You can take part in the free weekend from March 5 on Xbox One, PS4, and PC (through uPlay, Steam, and the Epic Games Store) and if you buy a copy of the game during the event, then your progress will carry straight into the game.
Featured Image Credit: UbisoftTopics: video games, GAMING