Speaking to Trusted Reviews at Rainbow Six Siege’s Paris Major this weekend, game director Alexandre Remy opened up about the criteria the team at Ubisoft Montreal use to choose which maps they’ll be remaking.

Rainbow Six Siege’s next content drop, Operation Grim Sky, sees a full rework of the Hereford map. The sweeping changes made to the map mean that it’s almost unrecognisable, keeping the core concept but remaking it anew for players to charge around in.

Remy has restated that the aim is to provide two new maps and two new reworks with each year moving forwards, claiming that the complexity of the maps has become one of the biggest barriers for new players looking to get into the game.

“All the maps that we want to rework are maps that are showing potential,” says Remy. “We want a map that, when reworked, is going to be much more balanced for adversarial multiplayer.”

Watch: Rainbow 6 Siege Grim Sky update

A multiplayer-first approach

Remy explains that when the game originally launched, the team designed the 20 launch maps with several factors, including how the game would play in adversarial multiplayer, terrorist hunt and the game’s single player scenarios. However, two years after release, Remy says the biggest consideration now is the multiplayer angle.

“Let’s be honest,” says Remy, “those single player missions, terrorist hunt, they’re less important factors than the multiplayer experience, and the most important multiplayer mode is the bomb defusal, if we consider how most people are playing the game. Our decisions reflect that.”

Remy refers to Hereford as an obvious choice for a rework as, in addition to being the first ever map developed for the game, it was a map with a single huge flaw. “The only staircase was creating a major bottleneck,” Remy said. “We felt that we could bring the map up to date, and if we fixed the problem with the staircase we could update the map to how it plays out now.”

“We ask ourselves ‘how do people play 5v5 Siege? What is the best experience?’ That has helped us to refine and focus when it comes to choosing maps. We want maps that we can make well balanced, maps that can be brought to the next level after a major rework.”

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Fans of the Plane map however, could be left waiting. “As an example, maps like Plane, they are always going to be difficult to rework. The layout of the map, any way we look at it, is not what we call our typical Siege map. There’s not enough room and space to actually have all of the roaming that we want to see and want to have. So that is a map that is likely not going to see a rework, for instance.”

Remy says the team like maps like Plane and that they’ll”100 per cent” be kept in, but that it’s not a map that is worth putting through a rework.

Which of Rainbox Six Seige’s maps do you think is most in need of a re-work? Let us know @TrustedReviews.

Award-winning (and losing) journalist, Jake Tucker created VideoBrains, a series of talks about video games. Jake has held senior positions at Pocket Gamer, Esports Pro and MCV, with bylines at PCGN, …