AGR-S was fortunate to be invited to e3 courtesy of Ubisoft this year. Here what we experienced at e3 and our hands-on with Siege. Pictures taken by Deosl.

We arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday after an 11-hour flight and 9 hours difference from Europe. We were staying at the Standard Downtown in LA, not far from the Uplay lounge and Los Angeles Convention Center. On Sunday evening, we had a welcoming event where we chatted a little with the CEO of Ubisoft.

Monday was the big day, as Ubisoft was holding their press conference at the Orpheum Theatre. We got early access to the show and met up with some R6 devs and R6 community developer Livinpink.

The theatre was packed with gamers, press and cosplayers from various Ubisoft Games. Our friend Jonathan from Sweden was cosplaying as a Rainbow Six Operator.

We also spotted the lovely developers from Ubisoft Paris in the crowd before the conference started. Earlier Rocky and I went to Ubisoft Paris to give feedback on their latest title Ghost Recon Wildlands before it was announced. Read more at ghostrecon.net

Being a huge South Park fan since 1997, I was shocked to see them at the conference! Looking forward to the new game!

Finally after a few games, it was time for Rainbow Six to shine. We expected them to talk about SP/COOP and they delivered on all accounts!

The devs we met before hand the press conference get ready to take on the AI on realistic setting. There were seats there earlier for the For Honor demo, but I guess these guys don’t need any crutches! 😉

As always, the CEO of Ubisoft Yves Guillemot comes in at the end introducing a surprise. People were not disappointed! We tracked down game designer Andrew Witts after the conference and had a brief chat with him.

After a long and intense day on Monday, we geared up for Tuesday. We finally made our way to the Uplay Lounge in the afternoon 1 hour before it opened for other attendees. We tried For Honor, The Division and of course Rainbow Six Siege!

We also finally met community developer eletr1cpanda! At the lounge, we were lucky to play a new PvP game mode where you had to capture/defend a designated area. We played on a never before seen map based in Hereford along with new operators never seen before!

AGR-S can exclusively reveal that the game mode and map in Hereford was the first map developed for Siege and has been playtested a lot by the devs. The map was an old building with several floors. You can rappel to the roof or breach the basement. It felt quite in line with the CQB map design we know so well in R6. I can see this map being played a lot, but come on guys, City street Large is where it’s at, make it happen!

The latest build felt really well with the changes done since the Alpha. It felt more like a R6 game and it was a great experience playing with the devs and other R6 fans 71 floors above the ground! The movement felt much better as they’ve reduced the movement speed and the recoil is much higher now! The visuals were quite good and the smoke and debris when breaching is always disorienting for unsuspecting players!

Fellow R6 Reddit moderator TheLucarian and I were watching others play Siege and we talked to one of the devs who works on the levels in Siege. We were saying all of our favorite maps from the previous R6, but he only smiled and could not confirm anything. Recently on twitter they confirmed that a remake of the Chalet map from Rogue Spear will be in Siege!

Later that evening at the Uplay lounge R6 was hosting a master class showcasing the COOP and they had a QA. They started off with the presentation of COOP, the same one they give the press in their booth at e3. After that followed a COOP session on realistic against the AI, they successfully failed

After that, we had a QA session hosted by electr1cpanda joined along with Game Designer Andrew Witts and Animation Director Scott Mitchell (no relation). I managed to ask a question, but sadly they were not ready to talk about matchmaking just yet.

The event was streamed live on Twitch, but you can watch on Youtube,

Wednesday was e3 day! We had exhibitor passes which allowed us to roam the show floor 1 hour before regular attendees.

We naturally drifted towards the Ubisoft booth, it was massive! There was only Siege COOP playable for press with appointments at the Ubisoft booth, but you could play PvP at the Xbox booth.

Luckily the devs hooked us up and we got to play COOP before the show floor opened. Rocky, Mattshotcha, Jonathan, Game designer Andrew Witts and I, played a round of COOP on normal difficulty. We managed to win despite not knowing the map, but we had great help from Andrew. The new map was based in the Ivory Coast at the French consulate.

It was fun and tense, we only lost 1 teammate in the process. Normal was not difficult enough for us, but we wanted to give normal a go just to get a sense on how the game felt and try to go all the way. We would later on try realistic

Community developer Livinpink does a great job conveying how the COOP works in Siege. She introduces the concept before the live gameplay of devs try to beat the AI on realistic setting. She is well guarded against the White Masks by Jonathan!

After many hours of waiting we finally had a chance to get a second try of COOP, but this time on realistic mode. It was not so forgiving and the teamplay had to be spot on at this level. Sadly we only made it to the first bomb and failed. On realistic mode it will take a well-coordinated team to pull the mission as a success. It gets very frantic when you are defusing the bomb and the enemy is coming from multiple doorways, breaching the walls and rappeling into the room. You have to cover each entry point and stick close to each other in case someone goes down.

I left wanting for more and to avenge myself, but the White Masks won this time.

Seeing the game running on PC and the big screen, it looked quite crisp. A huge upgrade from what we saw during the Closed Alpha. We did not check out the Xbox version since we are primarily PC gamers and love our keyboard and mouse! Playing it at the lounge I had a sneak peek at the settings I saw the game was running on a GTX 970. The settings are quite in-depth and there’s no doubt that the PC version getting the proper attention. Rainbow Six were the only cross-platform game that offered both controllers and keyboard and mouse at the Uplay lounge!

Both Siege and Wildlands had special VIP areas where they can have interviews. Sadly we did not get an interview scheduled with any of the Siege devs even though we talked to a lot of them casually. However, we did manage to get an interview with the Wildlands devs, read it on ghostrecon.net. We will definitely try and interview someone from the Siege dev team in the future!

We also attended the Ubisoft e3 Party where we also met Tom Clancy’s son, Thom and Christian Allen from Serellan LLC.

That’s it for our experience from e3 and Siege. We are very thankful for attending e3 and the Uplay Lounge courtesy of Ubisoft. Thanks to the whole Rainbow Six team from Ubisoft Montreal, from the community devs to marketing/PR! Also a special thanks to Rainbow Six Community manager Ubi_Chem for putting up with us every day!

Stay tuned for more Rainbow Six content and exclusive features on AGR-S! We got some lovely R6 T-shirts from Ubisoft we are giving away to YOU in the near future! Connect with us on Twitter for the latest news on Rainbow Six and you can discuss this on our forums