Rainbow Six Siege director says making a sequel after 9 years would be a mistake: 'I'm not going to name names, but you see games go through sequels and just completely drop the ball'

Rainbow Six Siege turns nine years old in 2024, but in live service terms, it's more like 90. When Ubisoft's 5v5 FPS first released in 2015, Overwatch was still months away, PUBG didn't exist, and Fortnite was a zombie game we thought might never come out. Siege has been doing the live service game longer than the term has been a part of our vernacular.

That makes Siege one of the oldest games regularly receiving content updates. Ubisoft still plans to support Siege through Year 9 and beyond, but the game's many revisions and increasing age of its engine has led longtime players to ask a reasonable question as of late: Does Siege need a sequel?

The answer, according to Siege creative director Alexander Karpazis, is an emphatic no.

«I can confidently say that we have probably one of the best engines in the world when it comes to live PvP shooters,» Karpazis said in a group interview held at the Siege Invitational 2024 in Brazil. «The team is incredible, and we have a huge engine pipeline team that every single month incrementally improves the way that we can deliver content faster, more robust, more stable, hopefully as much as possible.»

Siege's engine, Ubisoft Anvil, is a frequent target of derision when problems arise in-game. As new seasons introduce fresh batches of bugs, many players like to blame old technology, characterizing Siege as a creaky old building held together by duct tape and stubbornness. The truth is that Siege has been buggy for as long as I've played it, and in my experience is more stable now than it was in its early days. Still, Siege is showing its age in other ways, like its functional but unremarkable graphics.

To Karpazis, who joined the Siege team in 2018 as presentation director before ascending to the lead role in 2022, the notion that Ubisoft should invest in a Siege sequel with a new engine is not only unnecessary, but potentially a big mistake.

«The idea of switching engines to something that can be off-the-shelf ready simply