Rainbow Six Siege's Next Season North Star Detailed During The 2021 Six Invitational

The champions for the 2021 Six Invitational is Ninjas in Pyjamas, which had a dominating run during the playoffs. Before the grand finals were played though, fans of Rainbow Six Siege were given a detailed sneak peek at the next season called North Star, detailing all you need to know about the new Operator Thunderbird, and the big changes coming to the game.

Thunderbird!

To be fair, the leaks were accurate. Thunderbird’s gadget is the Kona Station and it spits out heal pellets to any operator (attacker or defender) that enters it’s radius. It’s heal amount is small but can be significant if played right. Thankfully, her gadget is susceptible to almost anything from bullets to Thatcher’s EMP grenades, so smart placements will be needed to get the most out of her in a round.

What’s insane is that Thunderbird, on paper, can be played as either an anchor that protects the objective, or a roamer, which hunts for attackers or simply kill time. She can be equipped with either Caviera’s SPAS-15 shotgun or Finka’s Spear .308 assault rifle as a primary, then the Bearing-9 or Q929 as a secondary. Solid options for future Thunderbird players.

Favela Reworked

In this season we are also getting the rework of everybody’s not favorite map Favela. Based on the changes, the personality of the space is intact but everything else was completely changed to a point that you can even consider this a new map. The current Favela map had numerous problems as to why players aren’t too keen about playing in it, but the biggest problem would have to be the ability to get lost almost instantly. Hearing the devs in the video above say they made each room distinguishable to have players know exactly where they are in the map. Only time will tell once we learn the ins and out of the new Favela.

North Star key Changes

There’s a lot of new features coming to Siege like the new scoreboard, the simplification of barrel attachments, and how the corpse of dead operators now disappear and is left with an icon reminding you of who died. But the balance changes to the gadgets of Mira, Melusi, Maestro, and Smoke is something to keep an eye on.

Melusi’s gadget is more vulnerable

Melusi’s gadget is getting nerfed as it now needs smart positioning to keep it active as long as possible in a round. Once the update goes live, attackers can now shoot the device once they reach a certain point in the gadget’s radius. melee isn’t the only option anymore if you don’t have explosives available to take it out. An understandable change as despite the many changes since Melusi was introduce to the game, she still remains as a solid operator that can work in almost all situations.

Mira, Maestro gadgets, plus bulletproof cameras can now break

For Mira’s Black Mirrors and Maestro’s Evil Eye, these gadgets will now lose their ability visual gather intel with a single melee hit from an attacker. This change also applies to all bulletproof cameras. An interesting change as it gives attackers more option to be proactive once they encounter Mira and Maestro’s gadgets as their presence in a room can be enough to halt an attacker’s advance. Cameras with broken glass isn’t completely useless as audio can still be picked up, so there’s still info you can get from it. Also, Maestro can still open their evil eye to see, but that can be a risk as we all know by now how vulnerable it is once you do it.

Armor, simplified

This is probably the most exciting change as they made it easier to understand what armor means to an operator. Simply put, operators with 1 armor will have a total health of 100. 2 armor operators will have a total of 110 health, while 3 armor operators will have 125 health to work with. With this change, Rook’s gadget was also adjusted to reflect the change. If an operator gets a vest from Rook, they are given an additional 20 in their total health. Simple. Easy.

Other changes are coming as Ubisoft is looking to implement the ability to have dead players impact the role more like dead attackers controlling their drone or Echo, Maestro, or Mozzie operators given the ability to use their gadget’s abilities even after death. It’s an insane change and will not go live in the season North Star. The changes will be available though the Test Server, which goes live on May 25 as Ubisoft hopes to get more player feedback about such a change.

Exciting changes are coming to Siege and no official release for North Star was given by Ubisoft. But we have the Test Severs to keep us in bay for the time being to get an idea of the changes ahead of time.

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