First, let’s figure out what Rainbow Six Siege is, many will watch this video knowing about this game. But you never know, someone will be brought here completely by accident, because this game is worth talking about, and not only in terms of sound. Some people have heard about it and haven’t played it, so it seems completely logical to me to talk about the game itself in addition to the sound, maybe someone will discover it for themselves. And stay until the end to find out how this game stands out among other shooters, it will be very interesting.
Rainbow Six Siege is a tactical shooter with very deep mechanics, a high barrier to entry and an indescribable feeling of delight when you alone managed to take out an entire enemy team. We have two sides: attacking and defending. Each team has 5 operatives with unique abilities. The attacking team has two ways to win the round, either destroy the entire enemy team, or (depending on the type of match) defuse a bomb, rescue a hostage, or hold the territory for a certain amount of time. In total you need to win 3 rounds, alternating sides.
The defensive team can also win the round in two ways. Kill all enemies or prevent them from completing one of the three above-mentioned objectives within the allotted time. Seems easy? But every time you make a mistake, the game will punish you harshly, in other words, your character will often die. They ran into the room without thinking about caution? Death. Staring at security cameras for too long? Death. Playing without sound? Death, death, death.
Sound is part of the gameplay
In this game, sound is part of the gameplay, it can help you win if you listen, or cause you to lose if your opponents have already started listening. In the last article (and video) I talked about ambience and specifically about the roome tone (room hum) necessary to create an atmosphere. Thus, the developers leave no doubt that you are in the real world, that everything around is not just polygons, but a living world with its own sounds, in principle it is the same in reality. In the rooms you can hear a lot of different things if you listen closely, only here, since these are games, the ambiance is especially pronounced, in reality the sound is not so dense. If you are at home now, then listen to what is happening around you, does it look like this
for example, there is no such strong hum in my room. As I said, this hum is due to the fact that this is a game and the developers wanted it to feel alive, the world does not end with these walls, there is something behind them and it makes a sound.
While the Rainbow Six Siege team didn’t want to add a lot of fake ambience, because it would only interfere with the gameplay. Indeed, if you listen to the environment in the game, it may seem very sparse. In addition to the technical aspect, this is also necessary for artistic purposes. Such silence begins to become annoying if you listen to it for a long time, and this effect was achieved by the developers by accident, they did not deliberately intend it this way.
Silence and inaction are https://all-british-casino.co.uk/withdrawal/ almost the main task in this game, although in fact it would be more correct to say patiently waiting until the enemy makes a mistake (of course, I know that some people know how to rush every room in a matter of seconds).
The developers deliberately made the rustling of your equipment louder than in regular games, because on a psychological level it makes you move slower, because you feel like you are walking noisily since everything is so loud. And if you make so much noise, you won’t hear the attacker approaching.
Tactics are the key to victory
First you need to deal with the operatives in this game, of course I won’t go through them all, that’s not the goal. It is worth noting that each operative has its own characteristics, what is even more important is that the abilities and these abilities sound completely different, which allows you to determine who is who if you could not visually recognize the operatives of the other team. At the beginning of the round, neither side has information about which operatives are on the opposing team; the composition of the team can be determined in several ways: using a drone, surveillance cameras, or a direct meeting with the enemy.
But let’s say that we don’t know what operatives the other team has and it’s impossible to find out. How will we determine who is knocking on our door?? If you take the Russian operative Fuze, who has a charge with three grenades, the device with which he places on a destructible barrier and launches. Then after the first time you will immediately remember this sound and as soon as you hear the installation of this device on one of the walls or ceiling, you will run as far from the room as possible faster than Usain Bolt. Or you will start shooting to destroy the threat. If you hear the sound of a smoke grenade exploding, there is a 90% chance you better take cover, otherwise the Eye (Glaz) can see through the smoke and can easily kill you.
examples with different abilities
In addition to abilities, each opera has 2 statistics, these are speed and armor. As you can guess, armor affects the “heaviness” of the character, and therefore the noise produced. If you play or will play, pay attention to the sounds made by the characters’ abilities. It may seem obvious to some, but imagine many people playing “rainbow” without sound.
Unique sound system
The Rainbow Six Siege audio team was faced with the difficult task of creating a system that works not just in a shooter, but in a shooter with a destructible environment. Maps in the game during a match can change dramatically and sound propagation must adapt, in addition there are many different surfaces, they absorb sound in different ways.
Louis Philippe Dion, the chief sound designer of Rainbow, says that the sound in the game looks for the shortest path from the source to the listener. While in other games, the sound tries to pass through the nearest obstacles with a filter, removing high frequencies. As if you were standing in one room, and your friend was in another and was saying something through a thin wall. Why doesn’t this approach work here?? In the game you can reinforce walls and sound does not pass through them as well as through unfortified ones, and if the game had the same system as in regular games. At the moment when the enemy passes by an unfortified wall, he will be clearly audible, so the “defense” can barricade all the walls and wait until the “attack” passes by the unprotected walls.
As soon as you create a hole in the wall, the sound stops being filtered and becomes “clean”. The sounds of gunshots are always filtered, but in some cases, filtering is turned off to reduce the load on the processor, for example, if someone is walking above you, then these are pre-recorded walking sounds, not filtered, and they can be mixed with those sounds from the previous example, if a path can be found to your position.
In addition to all this, the game uses pulsed reverbs to simulate echoes. Simply put, they take an audio snapshot of the acoustics of a real room, since the capabilities of conventional parametric reverbs are not so good.
Real threat
I would like to return to the topic of ambience, since the developers managed to achieve an incredible result when they almost completely removed it. Through sound design you can convey a lot of emotions, including tension, but after some time you get used to such sounds, especially if the game absorbs you for many hours. In horror films we hear all sorts of incomprehensible crap and very often it’s just part of the sound environment, a small deception that makes us think about a threat around every corner.
If you stop and don’t move in the “rainbow” what will we hear?? Almost nothing, but it’s worth waiting and there someone touched a piece of wood, broke a window, your heart starts beating faster because the enemy has begun to attack and any mistake can lead to a loss, no one wants to lose. You are waiting, time is running out, at any second the enemy will begin to storm your room and it is unclear from which side. The sweat starts to appear on your hands and..
The developers managed to create something that no other game has – tension created not by the environment, but by the players themselves. Any sound in the game is made either by you or, even worse, by other players, and at any moment you can be destroyed.
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