After a brief period of darkness, the series re-emerged with Rainbow 6: Patriots, which 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.
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. 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 right now is, according to the developer, almost entirely different than it was in 2011. Ubisoft Montreal refuses to talk about Rainbow 6: Patriots -- perhaps because the game that it was no longer exists.
Yannis Mallat will only say that it “has a place in the studio,” and Ubisoft’s Tony Key recently told IGN that “We’re absolutely making another Rainbow 6.” Whether it’s taking the same risks as Vegas or Patriots, or is even the same game, is a mystery for now.
