Ubisoft are stopping Rainbow Six Siege’s mid-season reinforcements with the upcoming Chimera and Outbreak update due to pro-league pressure.

Find out more about Rainbow Six Siege Chimera.

In an interview with us, Rainbow Six Siege’s creative director Xavier Marquis revealed the developers are doing away with mid-season reinforcements.

After playing a build of the game’s latest update, we noticed changes to some operator loadouts, including that Ela has lost her grenades, while Kapkan has gained some. This prompted us to ask whether there was more to the latest update than just Chimera and Outbreak.

“Yes, because now for each season we do not want to do the mid-season reinforcements in the middle of the season,” Marquis reveals. “It is too complex for pro league, it is not enough time for them to train themselves in the meta modification before the final, so we prefer now to do all of the modifications during the same season. So we release new content and we modify the previous operators as well.”

It’s unusual for developers to openly admit pro-league pressure has affected game updates, but it seems mid-season reinforcements were having an adverse effect on Siege’s pro-league meta.

Mid-season reinforcements typically see loadout tweaks and a few major reworks to operators. Now, Ubisoft are minimising these changes to gadget reshuffles and operator changes that will be made at the start of the season, but won’t feature any major operator reworks as in previous mid-season reinforcements.