The Strange Life and Death of Rainbow 6 Patriots

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Before Siege, there was Patriots.

By Mitch Dyer

This article is an excerpt of House of Dreams: The Ubisoft Montreal Story, which further chronicles the history of Rainbow Six at Ubisoft Montreal, including the troubled development of Rainbow 6 Patriots and the eventual birth of Rainbow Six Siege described below.

After a brief period of darkness following Rainbow Six Vegas 2, the series re-emerged with Rainbow 6: Patriots, a tactical-shooter that put a different spin on things. And not just because it ditched the word “Six.”
Its goals were, like Vegas, different than the series’ tradition. It aimed for spectacular scripted events, emotional resonance — both in the heat of battle and in its home-grown-terrorism plot — and thunderous action.
It started stranger, a developer told me. Early on, Ubisoft Montreal allegedly prototyped the next Rainbow Six as a turn-based tactics game. Later, the plot apparently hinged on robots, of all things, with enemies hacking into machines that fought Rainbow operatives. The goal with Patriots, eventually, was to make Rainbow feel more personal, more like Clancy’s original novel, where a very real threat affects very human characters.
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Following Ubisoft’s debut of Rainbow 6: Patriots in November 2011, its promotion went suspiciously silent. Its 2013 release date seemed increasingly uncertain. This is, according to an anonymous developer, largely due to troubles with the Anvil Engine, which had never been used for a first-person shooter. In an effort to cut the costs of using middleware development tools, Ubisoft started using its own proprietary technology to power its games.
The tech behind Assassin’s Creed pushed back on the Rainbow 6: Patriots developers, wasting much of the team’s time. The frame rate instability was nearly unsalvageable. The team of 120 couldn’t create their game quickly enough, and thus spent the majority of development time creating the original proof of concept demo we saw, and a follow-up E3 demo we didn’t.
The level designs were done and the story was written, but Patriots, broken, wasn’t going anywhere.

Eventually, Patriots was so heavily delayed that it moved to next-gen platforms — the game it had become was at odds with where the industry was going.
Another anonymous developer says Patriots is on (at least) its fifth creative director, with the project repeatedly failing to progress and its staff moving onto other projects.
The team working on Rainbow following that drama was, according to the developer, almost entirely different than it was in 2011. Ubisoft Montreal refused to talk about Rainbow 6: Patriots for a long time — perhaps because the game that it was no longer existed.
Yannis Mallat would only say that the series “has a place in the studio,” and Ubisoft’s Tony Key told IGN that “We’re absolutely making another Rainbow 6.”
Whether it took the same risks as Vegas or Patriots, or is even the same game, remained a mystery until the official reveal of Rainbow Six Siege — a “multiplayer first” game for the new generation of consoles — in 2014.
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Where Patriots relied on cutscenes, quick-time events, and explosive set-pieces, Rainbow Six Siege leans more on its online innovation to fuel its story.
“We were tired of single-player, scripted military missions where things appear triggered by player presence,” Ubisoft Montreal creative VP Lionel Raynaud told IGN. “We want to refresh that. We want the same level of intensity and surprise scripted scenes used to have, but within a multiplayer game.”
Now, a team of 150 — some experienced on Rainbow 6 Patriots, others new to the brand — are working on something different than everything that came before it. It’s too bad we never got to see Rainbow 6 Patriots, but it’s exciting to see a refreshing shooter rise from its ashes.

Mitch Dyer is an associate editor at IGN. He’s trying to read 50 books in 2014. These are the 50. Talk to Mitch about books and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch.