Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege demos at E3 presented a new direction for the franchise, opting for a decidedly multiplayer-focused experience –– one team is tasked with defending a house while the other has to extract the female hostage within. When asked why no male hostages were present in the E3 demo, Ubisoft said it was a matter of empathy.

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“I know some people asked about the hostage in the demo," technical artist Olivier Couture told Rock, Paper, Shotgun. "I mean, when we did that design we felt a lot of empathy with the hostage. We wanted people to want to protect her. If the hostage gets killed a team loses the game, so we wanted players to care about the hostage so that’s the design we chose. But we’re also gonna have male hostages. That’s part of the plan.”Couture said that Ubisoft is implementing features that make the character what he calls a "living hostage," and that the company is taking advantage of next-gen capabilities in order to create a more believable experience."She’ll react to explosions and things like that," he said. "It’s pretty cool. She’ll cough because of the dirt in the air, she covers herself when there’s shooting – those sorts of things. We want the player to be able to move her into different positions, for there to be fluid controls. It’s a balance between player comfort and reality.”Although little story context has been released regarding the multiplayer-centric installment in the Rainbow Six series, Ubisoft has promised a wider variety of missions upon the game's release. For a more in-depth impression with the hostage extraction mission, be sure to check out IGN's hands-on preview

Mike Mahardy is a freelance writer for IGN. To hear him rant about Wes Anderson and Kurt Vonnegut, you can follow Mike on Twitter