Rainbow Six Siege Creative Director Reveals Why Siege X Changes Took So Long to Roll Out

Rainbow Six Siege hits an impressive milestone this year with its ten-year anniversary which, for a paid live service title, is no small achievement. So, how do you go about updating and improving a game that already has so much history? Ubisoft's answer is Siege X — a major free update that adjusts, overhauls, and adds a variety of features.

The most notable addition is that of Dual Front, a new 6v6 mode that places attackers and defenders on the same team, which we previously had some hands-on time with. But, speaking to Alex Karpazis, Creative Director of Rainbow Six Siege, it's the smaller updates arriving with Siege X that could prove to be the most impactful to overall gameplay, such as improved audio.

"It's so important," Karpazis said. "There's no other game like it where you get the thuds and the blasts in the distance, and then you get closer and closer to the threat and you can hear it just around the corner. It's really satisfying, especially when you can play off of it and actually capitalize on it."

The upcoming overhaul is a rework of "audio propagation and reverberation," which aims to give players a better sense of where teammates and enemies are, their movements, and their actions. But, much like the visual upgrades and rappel system, why are we only seeing these changes now, ten years down the line? 

"Yeah, that's a great question. There's a lot of great questions," Karpazis said. "Even rappel, updating it now, it makes so much sense to go around the corner of a building. In a lot of cases, we're building on top of a 10-year-old game, and it takes a lot more time to think about it.

We don't want to destroy what we have right now just to fix one thing. We have to do it sustainably. On the audio level, it meant remixing the entire game and that takes a ton of time. The audio team put in a lot of work, as well as on the technical side, to see how we separate these sounds, the reverbs, what you would expect as a player. It takes an immense amount of time."

R6's community has played a bit part in shaping the updates and changes that we've seen with Siege X, so far. In the interest of getting things right, addressing community feedback has seemingly been a part of why these changes have taken a while to roll out. 

"We're always hyper-vigilant," Karpazis continued. "We love to have open dialogue. And we actually have quite a few sessions where we sit down with our content creators, the pros as well. They're great to chat with and they really push everything to the limit. 

On top of just making our audio really reliable and really trustworthy, it's something that's important and players have been giving feedback over the years, this is the moment where we took the time and said, 'Okay, if we're going to do this right, it's not going to be over a three-month period. It's going to be over a couple of years where we can really nail that for the game.'"

Rainbow Six Siege X launches on June 10, 2025 on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC via Ubisoft Connect, Steam, and Epic Games, in free access.