What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here and if you have been paying close attention to some of
the details in my gun test videos over the last few seasons, you may have noticed something a little curious.
Let’s take my last video for example, where I compare and contrast Sam’s MP7 and SC3000K.
Here is the end result of the recoil tests that I ran for the MP7 in that video and of
course, all of the patterns look a little different because of the various muzzle attachments
used but if you look closely, you will recognise that the underlying patterns are in fact not
just similar… but 100% identical.
In fact, we can look at the test footage burst by burst and you will see that the recoil
parameters for every single bullet are the exact same (with, of course, the effect of
each muzzle attachment layered over the top).
Feel free to pause the video and play “spot the difference” if you like and you will
see that bullet for bullet, burst for burst, the underlying recoil is the same.
If we skip forward in the Sam Fisher video to my tests with the SC3000K, we can observer
the exact same phenomenon, every burst comes out the exact same way!
But let’s make things even clearer by using the same attachments.
Here for instance are two separate patterns I shot with the SMG-11.
Placed side by side, it is already clear that burst for burst, the recoil is exactly identical.
We can even layer the two clips over the top of each other to prove beyond a shadow of
a doubt that each bullet is experiencing the exact same recoil.
If we aim somewhere completely different, the comparison becomes a little tougher because
of the different distance and surfaces but still, I think it’s absolutely clear that
the recoil remains identical!
And we can run this experiment again and again with literally any weapon in the game and
the results become 100% predictable.
There’s no doubt about this anymore: recoil in Rainbow Six Siege is not random!
That’s huge!
But how long has this been going on for and how has nobody ever noticed this?!
I have been suspicious of the recoil for several seasons now; the only problem was that I just
couldn’t quite understand the mechanism behind it and it has taken me several seasons
of coming back to this topic again and again to finally understand how on earth non-random
recoil has gone unnoticed for so long.
Let me show you how it all works.
As you may already know, recoil in Rainbow Six Siege has always been made up of two components.
If you already know about all of this, you may choose to use the timeline of the video
to skip forward to the next part but if this is new to you, in a nutshell: Each gun in
Rainbow Six has a fixed vertical recoil component and a randomising recoil diamond.
The strength of the vertical component dictates the muzzle rise that each gun experiences
from shot to shot and the shape of the recoil diamond will make the bullets fall randomly
above or below, left of right with most guns having a bias to one side.
That’s how it’s always been and for the first two and a half years of the game’s
life, this recoil was calculated on the fly, each time you pulled the trigger.
But, if you’ve been around for a while, you will remember that back then, we used
to experience an issue with the recoil of the weapons desynchronising from the recoil of the sight reticle.
This meant that if you fired longer bursts, your shots would start to deviate from your
point of aim, rather than remaining precisely on it.
The initial proposal by the devs to fix this, was to add a handful of fixed recoil patterns
into the game, much like CS:GO has.
This would have made the recoil of each gun perfectly predictable from burst to burst
but that idea ended up being ditched over fears that players would able to use simple
macros to perfectly counter these patterns and also the fact that the patterns that were
initially chosen looked just a touch ridiculous.
Instead, several seasons later, with the launch of Operation Grim Sky, the devs rebuilt the
recoil system from the ground up by manually recreating the recoil for each and every gun
and that is when I believe the quasi randomisation that I have now finally uncovered and understood,
was added into the game.
All in all, the team and I must have fired hundreds of burst patterns with a variety
of weapons to determine which factors influence the recoil patterns of the guns and finally
being able to replicate the same recoil burst for burst was surprisingly hard to find out.
You see, as I demonstrated before, when you conduct quite clinical trials (standing in
the same position, firing at the same wall) it’s quite easy to achieve the same patterns.
But that doesn’t always work; sometimes the patterns will be different and it took
us a surprising amount of time to realise that it’s all down to which bullets starts out the burst.
Let’s take the AK-12 as an example here.
The gun has 241 bullets available in total for each round of a PvP match and if we fire
off a full burst starting with bullet number one, it will always look exactly like this
(at least with my personal setup of the gun, which is angled grip + compensator).
And we can repeat this experiment an infinite number of times with either Ace or Fuze and
the result will always be 100% identical.
Now, if we start the burst with bullet number two though, the burst will look like this.
And again, this can be replicated an infinite amount of times, as long as we start the burst
off with bullet number two.
If we compare the patterns from bullet number one and two a bit more closely, it might at
first seem as if maybe the recoil is hard-coded from bullet to bullet and that if we align
bullet number two from the first trial with bullet number two (i.e. the first shot) from
the second trial, then the rest of the burst will align but that theory doesn’t hold up.
The fact is that even though the first few shots looks similar, the rest of the bursts
are different and therefore they must be completely unique.
We can confirm this by starting a burst off from bullet number three and if we overlap
this burst with either of the two others, you can see that there is no similarity whatsoever.
So, it seems that the way it works, is that every gun has a set of fixed burst patterns
that are selected by the game, based on which bullet you start out with.
That perfectly explains how my full recoil tests, where I empty the entire magazine for
every burst, end up with exactly the same patterns, because each bursts starts out at
the same bullet number.
First number one, then 32, then 63, 94 etc. (at least that is the case for guns that have
a capacity of 30+1 bullets).
But then we tried to confirm this theory with a test firing burst for burst and suddenly
getting exact matches was a lot harder.
Only every now and then would we manage to match maybe one of the patterns from one trial
to another… and as much as that was super frustrating to deal with at the time, it does
provide us with another very useful piece of information.
Clearly, each gun’s finite number of fixed recoil patterns are somehow further randomised.
As we saw earlier, compass heading doesn’t matter and neither does the in-game timer
(we tested for that several times).
But our single burst trials resulted in different patterns and so I went ahead and tested the
theory that maybe your character’s position on the map is used to randomise the recoil
your gun experiences.
If we run the same trials with the SMG-11 as before but stand in a different position,
we again end up with two identical patterns but crucially, this pattern is different to
the one we shot earlier while standing further to the left.
One more quick test of standing in the position of the first trial and then moving just slightly
to the right proves it: sadly map location is in fact a secondary factor that will affect
which one of the fixed recoil patterns is chosen for any given burst and even being
off position by just a tiny bit, will result in the selection of a different pattern by the game.
That explains how this mechanism has been in the game for literally years now without being noticed.
Even though the game uses a fixed set of burst patterns for each gun, they are randomised
in such a way that unless you stand in exactly the same spot and start the burst from exactly
the same bullet; you will end up with a random and unpredictable recoil pattern and that
sadly also severely limits the practical applications of this discovery.
I was quite excited when I started noticing the exact same patterns in some of my tests
and even when I found out about the randomisation according to the bullet that starts out the
burst, I was still quite enthusiastic about how this could be used to predict the recoil
of each gun and maybe make them more controllable for really dedicated players.
But the fact that location on the map is used to randomise the patterns as well, means that
using this knowledge to predict patterns and get some kind of gameplay advantage in Siege
becomes almost impossible.
In theory, you could find certain common angles on a map and learn the recoil but you have
to be exactly in the right spot each time and we all know that standing still in Siege
is usually not the play.
So there we have it!
The final conclusion is that this discovery is not nearly as ground-breaking as I had
initially hoped it would be but I guess it’s still interesting enough in terms of a little
technical insight into what makes the game tick.
I hope you found the video interesting nonetheless, thank you for watching and I will see you
in the next episode!