Legendary Shooter Rainbow 6 May Meet the End of Its Life

[squirrel]

The new, supposingly upcoming Rainbow 6: Patriots has its preorders cancelled by Gamestop.

http://asia.gamespot.com/news/rainbo...tabase-6408526

It was previously announced for all 3 platforms of PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Since UBI expressed wish to release the game on next-gen, if they cancel preorders for versions on Xbox and Playstation, that make good sense. If I only current gen consoles, preorder this title, only to learn that it will in stead be available on next-gen, I would get cross even my credit card is not debited yet. But now I checked, Gamestop completely removed the title from its catalog, PC version included.

Sigh. I start playing online shooter with Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. This is a very brilliant shooter, both for its campaign and competitive multiplayer. How can I forget the excitement of planning for the tactics for each mission? For the mission in which my team is to storm a Russian nuclear warhead storage to arrest the colonel in command, I love to have two guys standing guard on the guard towers at the entrance. Once the colonel's armored vehicle tried to rush through the gate, the two guys waiting will always kill the driver, left the colonel to abandon the car, waiting for me to apprehend him.

Oh, how many nights I put myself with my friends: both allies and enemies, in that map with bunkers, battling to the last man?

For me it's way ahead of other military sim shooter like Counter-Strike. Yet I don't deny that this series doesn't age well.

[DaftPunk]

One of my favorite franchises,but to be honest i rather see the series shut down instead of ubisoft's butchering.

[JimDigritz]

One of my favorite franchises,but to be honest i rather see the series shut down instead of ubisoft's butchering.

This.

I have fond memories of the early Rainbow Six games, the last few seemed to be Deathmatch FPS with plasticuffs.

I have exactly ZERO expectations that a major publisher could resurrect this format, let alone UBI.

[Xercies]

It was another one of those games that was an interesting genre and made interesting games and because of the horrible game industry with blown out prices and stagnant ideas it turned into another shooter game.

[arccos]

Is that the feeling on the Vegas and Vegas 2 games? I was considering picking them up, but if they're really that low in strategy and planning, it probably isn't worth it.

Bring back SWAT!

[gundato]

The Vegas games are to the R6s as Conviction was to Splinter Cell. It captures the essence of the series while focusing on only the most action-filled and tense parts.

A "true" R6 game will involve lots of planning followed by hoping that your plan works (for the record, I always preferred SWAT 3) with a few moments of tense shootouts. Vegas handles the "In what order should I navigate this map" for you and lets you focus on "how should I approach this shootout".

It isn't for everbody, but I enjoyed them in a different way than I enjoyed the proper R6s.

[neema_t]

Yeah, Vegas (although there are two, they are so similar they might as well just be one and a (pretty comprehensive) expansion pack) was quite fun but for completely different reasons to, say, Rainbow Six 3. The former was a linear and fairly mindless campaign with very little in the way of tactical thought beyond throwing a smoke grenade at a door, putting on thermal goggles then opening the door...

Online Terrorist Hunts were great fun, particularly with the 16 player mod, especially when there were fewer than 16 people playing; four or five players against something like 96 terrorists was great, except for when it was possible to spawn trap them. Which happened a lot. Oh yeah, in a tactical shooter there was a mode where enemies would spawn as you played. Think about that. You'd clear a room, move on to the next room and get shot in the back by a freshly spawned enemy - super tactial style. It was annoying until you worked out what it was doing and how it worked, but even then it was a little unpredictable and that's why it was fun. Sometimes all you'd need to do to draw out the last couple of AI in a TH was fire your gun a few times, but sometimes that just wouldn't work and you'd have to search for them which often resulted in deaths. Another thing I could've sworn was happening was enemies were drawn to the sound of you reloading which made for some terrifying confrontations.

Rainbow Six 3 was fun for better reasons than those, of course, but there was still fun to be had in Vegas. Patriots could've been great (though I doubt it) but with Doorkickers, Takedown and that other tactical shooter whose name I can never remember which involves all sorts of gadgets (RPS has covered it) on the way I'm not feeling a great sense of loss.