It’s no secret that I love Rainbow Six Siege. It is, hands down, the best shooter that came out in 2015, and I’ll stand by that statement all day long. There is no first-person shooter out there that will get you cooperating, planning, hoping, worrying, celebrating, or cussing like this game does. It’s been a very long time since my heart got racing from a video game. When it comes to gameplay Ubisoft really did find the perfect formula. 5 vs. 5 multiplayer is just big enough to make things chaotic when attackers start breaching, but small enough that everyone can work together and talk without things getting too confusing. Setting up the perfect defense and planning the perfect attack are both immensely satisfying and the firefights, once you get used to the pacing and stop trying to 360 no-scope everyone, really get your adrenaline pumping.
So far so good, right? It only gets better from there. Ubisoft, a publisher with a reputation for greed and notorious for turning a deaf ear to its customers, set up public forums throughout the beta and pre-launch phases, actively engaging with testers and responding really positively to all of the feedback and criticism. The cherry on top? All of the DLC for Siege can be collected for free. New maps will be available for all, and new operators can be unlocked with the renown that you earn in-game. This gives a huge measure of security to the community. It’s annoying in Call of Duty , for example, when DLC packs are released and, if you don’t want to shell out $20 every time this happens, your friends have to decide to either play without you or grudgingly stick with you while the rest of your clan runs with the updated matchmaking that includes newer maps.
So how is Ubisoft ruining a game with so much promise? How could a game so intense, so fun, and so rewarding to its community be destroyed when the player-base is so crazy about it? One word: servers. Ubisoft’s servers are absolute garbage, and it’s making this incredible game damn near impossible to play, especially if you want to play with your friends. I seriously challenge you to find someone you know who plays Siege and ask them what they really think of it. I guarantee you’ll get some version of the following: “The game is so good. It would be absolutely perfect if the servers weren’t so messed up.” This is the general consensus, and it’s a wretched pity.
We all knew the servers needed work out of the gate. The first few days after the game released everyone online spoke very gently, almost jovially, about the bugs and disconnections; we all assumed that a week-one patch would be rolling out any day. We’d swap stories about the closing moments of the final round in a match when we’d get booted and laugh; we’d restart the game and re-form squads multiple times in a row with patience; we’d glitch behind cover, unable to move, and get mowed down with grins on our faces because we knew; we knew Ubisoft was fixing it.
Ubisoft hasn’t fixed it. The game has been out for over a month now, and it’s still a miraculous rarity to play more than one game with an entire squad without one or more of you getting disconnected and thrown out of a game, sometimes mid-round at the worst possible moment. Ubisoft has been dancing around the issue for weeks and we even received a sizable patch, but things have only gotten worse. A recent update on their forums state that they’re aware of what they’re calling “online holidays degradation,” stating that the server issues are due to the enormous increase of new players after Christmas.
Frankly, this is BS. The server issues have been consistent in kind and frequency since the game came out, and I think it very likely that Ubisoft issued this statement so that all of the new players would assume, like we all did at the beginning, that a fix was imminent. Are we supposed to believe that they weren’t prepared for this? They hyped Siege as their biggest AAA shooter of the year, they had a free-to-play weekend on the PC, and they produced expensive commercials to publicize it. So now we’re to feel sorry for Ubisoft that Christmas came and went and a lot of people bought and are playing the game? Get your shit together, Ubisoft! You have an incredible game on your hands. The developers who worked hard on this masterpiece and the fans who are dying to play it deserve a proper patch and capable servers. The Ubisoft Twitter accounts and support forums are packed with furious customers who feel betrayed and fed up. We’d love to play your game, but whenever we try it ends up wasting more time than is justifiable. Please, please don’t drop the ball; please don’t ruin what could be the best FPS we’ve played in a decade.