Operation Phantom Sight is coming to technical test servers this week, and many Rainbow Six Siege fans are left with one question: where are the new weapons?

Both new operators, Warden and Nokk, are outfitted with weapons previously used by other operators making this the first operation, outside of the optimisation season seen in Operation Health, to launch without any new weapons.

We sat down with Rainbow Six Siege game director Alexandre Remy, to ask about the reasons for the change.

Related: Best PC Games

“They are some extremely simple reasons we haven’t added new weapons to the game.” said Remy.

“The simplest is that there are now, if i’m not mistaken, there are more than 80 unique guns in the game at this point. Now, we’re getting to a point where finding new weapons that we can legally adapt for the game is getting tough. We nearly have a complete list.”

Remy isn’t mistaken. Although a few are model variants like the M249 and the M249 SAW, there are 99 different weapons in the game, excluding unique gadgets like Capitao’s crossbow. Remy mentions that the team only like to add weapons to the game that they can do something interesting with, and with that amount of weapons, it’s understandable that the team are struggling to find something new to play with.

Related: Best FPS Games

“It can be good for the players too,” adds Remy. “A new operator comes out, but with a familiar weapon you don’t need to learn a new recoil pattern. We can’t expect players to learn the recoil patterns for hundreds of guns, especially if they’re coming into it new.”

“Similarly,we don’t want players to have to buy a cool skin for every gun on every operator. A side effect of this is that you can take your cosmetics and use them in more places.”

This focus on streamlining for new players coming into the game has also been seen with the game’s maps, as new maps are now rare, with the team focusing on map reworks for a lot of Year 4’s content.

“The answer for us, now, is to add new attachments or interesting operators to the game so that using the weapons can feel more different,” says Remy. “We can see that with the silencer that we’ve added to the D50 this season, which should make the gun feel more interesting to use.”

This doesn’t rule out new guns next season, and Remy couldn’t talk about Ubisoft’s future plans, but it does make it sound like we won’t see a wealth of guns added with every new season of the game.

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, …