Rainbow Six Siege ditches Starter edition and slashes unlock prices
The Lunar Year of the Frag
As much as people (rightfully) mocked the convoluted Anthem launch graphs, Ubisoft remain the king of overly complicated multiple editions of games. Fortunately, they're simplifying things a bit for Rainbow Six Siege today - the tactical team shooter now no longer has a 'starter' edition, with anyone owning that getting a free upgrade to the regular edition. The Regular edition has dropped in price, and the Ultimate edition now contains every character unlocked up to the end of year 3. It's on sale until February 25th, with a free weekend running from February 14th to 17th.
Those who previously bought the Starter edition of the game had a rough grind ahead of them, with greatly increased requirements to unlock each new character. Fortunately, that restriction is now lifted. Ubisoft detail all the changes here (including some daft charts), but the key thing is that most things either cost less real money or time investment to unlock now. Operators in the base game should now cost less Renown - in-game currency - to unlock, and there are plans to reduce the time needed to unlock DLC characters, though the details on that haven't been announced yet.
It's still a little messy, and there's still a lot of grind to be done if you want to unlock DLC characters the hard way, but I think they've done a decent job at smoothing out the wrinkles here. It's nice that Ubisoft are at least offering a 'buy everything in the game now' edition, even if its non-sale price is prohibitively high. Fortunately they also put the game on sale several times a year, so that's a sting to the wallet that only the most impatient will feel.
The game is currently on sale until February 25th on the Ubisoft store. The Regular edition is currently down to £8.49/€9,99/$9.99. The Ultimate edition (instantly unlocking all operators from the first three years, plus a season pass giving early access to the year four crew) is a not-unreasonable £46.19/€54.99/$54.99. The game is also free to try starting this Thursday, running until the following Monday - see details here.