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Rainbow Six Siege's new operator is an Irish defender with stabby grenades

Thorn arrived today alongside the new season, High Calibre

Rainbow Six Siege's new Irish weapons expert defender Thorn.
Image credit: Ubisoft

Ubisoft's tactical FPS Rainbow Six Siege ushered in Year 6 Season 4 today. Named High Calibre, it introduces new defensive operator Thorn, who's special gadget is a sticky grenade that explodes into razors when it detects an enemy. Ouch. The other big change with this season is a rework of the Outback map, which cleans up a lot of junk to improve sightlines, and help attackers strategise.

First up, Thorn. She's an Irish technical weapons expert whose unique gadget is the Razorbloom Shell, which sounds a lot like a grenade full of blades. Very technical. She can stick it to surfaces, and when it detects enemies it explodes launching little stabbers in all directions. This gadget can kill a player outright, so those'll be fun for attackers to look out for.

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Next up is the Outback rework. The devs have moved the bombsites, added a handful of new locations to sneak through, made the office larger, and split the restaurant into two rooms. Ubisoft say their changes should "allow attackers to create and execute more effective strategies" and "provide better lines of sight and balance." These are all good things to have in a first-person shooter, lovely stuff.

Another interesting change with this season is that the devs have changed the team colours. Since launch, your team is always in blue, while enemies were always orange. They've changed enemies to red now to help newbies understand who's who, and make the UI more consistent. An odd decision this far into the game's life, but I'm down with it. Orange always struck me as a strange choice for the opposing team.

On top of all that, there are tweaks to the Test Server, a bunch of operators going down in price, and lots of balancing and improvements. Do check out the Year 6 Season 4 patch notes if you want to know more, and this patch notes addendum for the rest of the details.

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