Rainbow Six Siege gets new PvP map, Tachanka tweaks

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege [official site] is getting some substantial changes. The Mid-Season Reinforcements update tweaks Tachanka, one of the game's operators, introduces a new map to PvP, and makes a number of weapon balance tweaks.

Tachanka is one of Siege's playable classes, called Operators, and he has a deployable turret. Despite being popular with the community as a design - he looks a bit like a tank - his pick rate "is the lowest in the game" according to the design notes on the above linked patch notes.

"When looking at Tachanka, the biggest downside lies in the gadget. The tradeoff between his turret's stopping power and his lack of mobility isn't good enough. Attackers have several ways to deny him with the element of surprise, and can easily headshot him once they know his position.

"In order to introduce a counter to this weakness, we've added a shield in front of the turret which protects him from frontal headshots. The objective is for Tachanka to be the king of the angle that he positioned into, while being very vulnerable to other angles."

The new shield can be broken separately from the rest of the turret, which seems in keeping with Siege's granular destruction, in which environments can be shot to pieces in order to create new attack angles through walls, floors, ceilings and doors.

Meanwhile, PvP's new map is Bartlett University, which was previously only available as a Terrorist Hunt map. "The newly redesigned map removes all the gas and PvE elements from the original design, and introduces better destruction, improved visual layout for better orientation, and a new two-layer destruction."

Terrorist Hunt is great by the way, and was great in previous Rainbow Six games like Vegas and Vegas 2, particularly if you have some friends with which to fight the marauding computer enemies. All of Siege is pretty great, as I've said many times before. It'd be on our Calendar of the best games of 2016, if only it hadn't been released in December of 2015.

The smaller tweaks include an extra cluster charge for the operator Fuze, a fourth battery for Bandit, Blackbeard is being nerfed with changes to his shield health, and a couple dozen weapons are being substantially rebalanced with changes (mostly reductions) to their recoil. You can see a complete list of changes, which is hundreds of items long and also include bug fixes, at the game's blog.