What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here and today, I want to talk about a fundamental issue in Rainbow Six Siege.
It is an issue that I am sure many of you have also experienced at some point or other
and in fact, just over two months ago, Ubisoft publicly acknowledged that they also see it
as a huge problem by initiating the "AUDIO BUG HUNT INITIATIVE”.
This initiative is basically an invitation to the community to act as unpaid testers
and the two opinion polls I put out showed very clearly that most of the R6 player base
was sceptical of the program as well.
As you can see, most respondents by far answered that they were not participating at all and
only a tiny percentage actually managed to find ways in which to replicate any of the audio bugs.
So, let’s talk audio!
And we shall start off by rewinding time, all the way back to the beginning of Y5S4:
Operation Neon Dawn; basically six months ago.
I was young, carefree and optimistic back then and I had just made the resolution to
myself to really get stuck into Rainbow Six Siege again; not just analysing changes or
behind the scenes mechanics but really getting back into playing the game again both on stream and off stream.
And then I had two off stream playing sessions back to back, on two consecutive days, where
it felt like 8 or even 9 out of 10 deaths were due to me not being able to hear opponents
that I felt I should have definitely heard.
Let me show you a few example clips that I captured during those two sessions.
Clip number one is me crouch-walking up to the objective from Restaurant on Skyscraper
and it’s not so much about missing sound but more… weird and confusing sound.
Let’s take a listen.
So what I heard there was a sort of shuffling-of-fabric sound
and to me that suggests a slow moving, maybe even proning opponent.
I’m crouch-walking up to him, so I assume that he cannot hear me and will not know exactly
where I am or when I am approaching.
And then suddenly he comes flying out of the doorway at a default speed sidestep and I
don’t actually hear any footsteps until he’s already appearing through the doorway.
He caught me completely by surprise and I was really lucky to win that gunfight.
If he had used a jiggle peek or if he had pre-fired, I would have lost that fight for sure.
But he decided to wide swing and luckily for me, he was only on one shot health.
I went into a custom match and tried to recreate this scenario for myself and as you will be
able to hear once I shut up for two seconds, the footsteps of the enemy player should have
been audible long before he came into view.
Next up, I am upstairs on defence and I can hear the enemy moving around the corner but
the volume of the sound suggested to me that the player was still on the stairs somewhere…
until he came flying around the corner…
And here a comparison of what that should have sounded like.
You will be able to hear the enemy player from all the way downstairs, gradually getting
louder, until he comes into view.
Same staircase, same match and here I know that there are two players on the balcony
outside but they sound as if they are underwater.
And for once, it didn’t really matter, Ash is just doing Ash things and runs in without
any kind of info; score: one – nil for me.
BUT, the story doesn’t end here because as I am reloading, I can hear the second player
moving and, judging by the sound, I assume that he’s around about at the door now.
All I need to do is pop up and use peeker’s advantage to claim my second kill here, right?
Yeah wrong dickhead, get absolutely bamboozled because he’s already moved up so that he’s
only a few feet away; he’s expecting the peek, I’m not expecting him to be that close
and all he has to do is shoot me.
And once again, here the duplicate scenario but this time the sound decides to work.
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Now we’re on Bank and it’s a two v. one; my teammate goes down, so I know where the
attack is going to be coming from and I can even hear him… but once again, the sound
I’m receiving suggests to me that he’s still out in the hallway and I make the choice
to move up to the deployable shield.
If he goes for a plant on the other site, I have a chance of hearing it and intervening,
if he decides to push, I can use the shield to my advantage…
But of course my ears were totally trolling me and he was already pushed up behind the
shield with virtually no sound on my end and only the unfortunate placement of the pre-fire
is what saves me.
Final clip is a relatively straightforward one.
The round has only just started and I can hear a shield moving from over towards blue hallway.
I assume that the enemy is still near the stairs and decide to move up to the corner,
so that I can pin the player down from long range…
But “surprise mother fucker” he’s already sprinted all the way up to me and in that
split second, I completely forget that meleing shields is now a very viable defence and I
go down to an actual Blitz rush.
Custom game sound for comparison and I’m going to start this clip with Blitz all the
way up on the ground floor, before he even gets to the stairs.
And you know, these were only the few clips I decided to save from back then.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, it genuinely felt as if 8 out of 10 deaths were because
the sound was completely bamboozling me.
In all of my recreations of the scenarios, I tried out different movement speeds and
sure, sometimes moving really slowly was quite stealthy (as it is meant to be) but reviewing
the clips makes it quite clear that the enemies at the time just weren’t slow walking or
slow-crouch-walking or they would never have been able to make it as close to me as they did.
At the end of those two days of playing Rainbow Six Siege at the beginning of Neon Dawn, all
of my motivation to really get stuck into playing Siege again had completely evaporated
and apart from running tests, I have barely touched the game since then.
How can we take a game seriously (a game that bills itself as a competitive esport of all
things), when one of the most fundamental features, being able to consistently hear
your opponents, just doesn’t work and seems to get worse almost from season to season.
New operators, completely revamped maps, bug fixes, new gadgets and fundamental reworks
of core mechanics are great and all… but as long as I still have that doubt in the
back of my head that my playing experience could be completely undermined by broken sound
at any point, I really struggle to gather up the motivation to want to grind the game again.
And it’s the inconsistency of the sound that is the real killer here.
Being able to move quietly is not necessarily a bad thing.
Look at Valorant for example, where moving slowly makes almost no noise.
It’s a deliberate feature of the game and that is perfectly fine; as long as it is consistent
and players know about it.
With Rainbow Six, it’s not consistent because often times it works and then suddenly, you’ll
have a round where an enemy can silent rappel or silent drop or is just sprinting 3m away,
just around a corner and makes hardly any sound.
When it comes to the Bug Hunt Initiative that Ubisoft has launched, I am kind of split…
On the one hand, it’s great that we finally have a public acknowledgement that Ubisoft
are aware of sound issues in Rainbow Six Siege and it’s not just all in our heads.
At the same time though, it’s kind of concerning that they were not able to identify for themselves
what is causing the issues and that they had to resort to trying to rope the player base
into a gigantic testing program.
We’ve not heard anything back since the program started and all we can hope for, is
that sound will (at some point this year) become more reliable again.
What has your experience with sound in Rainbow Six been for these past few seasons?
Are you still enjoying the game like you used to and if not, what is the main problem for you?
Let me know in the comments section below and while you’re there, feel free to leave
a like (or dislike, depending on your star sign).