Next month, Rainbow Six Siege will be getting a special limited-time co-op event called Outbreak as part of its Operation Chimera content drop, a drop which will officially herald the beginning of the game’s Year 3 content season. Now, Ubisoft has posted a full breakdown of how the Outbreak event will work along with a teaser trailer that hints at the origins of the new extraterrestrial threat that players will face.
According to this new post on the Rainbow Six Siege website, only a select few operators will be playable in the Outbreak event’s new PvE game mode. Along with Operation Chimera’s two brand new operators, Lion and Finka, players will also be able to suit up as Smoke, Ying, Buck, Kapkan, Ash, Doc, Tachanka, Glaz, and Recruit. Once players have selected their operator, they’ll venture into the quarantined town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico where they’ll battle a hostile alien force called Apex which has transformed the local residents into terrifying monsters.
Interestingly enough, there will actually be three different Outbreak maps, each set in a different part of the town. Ubisoft says these maps will be larger and more open than Siege’s typical competitive maps, but they’ll also be presented in a more linear fashion, giving players a clear sense of where to go next. Since this is Siege we’re talking about, the Outbreak levels will also naturally feature destructible elements, allowing players to make their own paths by blasting through walls and floors. In addition to the standard Normal difficulty level where friendly fire is disabled, the Outbreak mode will also have a harder ‘Pandemic’ difficulty where friendly fire is turned on and enemies are stronger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx6vm_6Isgk
Along with the new game mode, the Outbreak event will also include a new collection of event-exclusive cosmetic customization items which will be obtainable in new event-specific loot boxes called Outbreak Packs. There will be 50 cosmetic items in total and the Outbreak Packs will never award duplicate items so, theoretically, a player who obtains 50 Outbreak Packs will be guaranteed to get every available item. However, while four Outbreak Packs will be granted for free to every player who logs into Siege while the Outbreak event is live, additional Outbreak Packs will only be available via microtransaction purchases.
Those who have access to Rainbow Six Siege’s test server will be able to start testing out the Outbreak event on February 20, and Ubisoft says a more in-depth reveal for both Operation Chimera and the Outbreak event will take place during the Six Invitational eSports event which is scheduled for February 18-19. After that, the Outbreak event will officially go live for Siege’s public servers on March 6 and will stick around until April 3, giving players an entire month to see how they stack up against the new Apex creatures. Meanwhile, in the wake of fan backlash, Ubisoft has decided not to raise the price of Siege’s standard edition from $40 to $60.
