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Rainbow Six, with its cover system, has always been more tactical than other shooters.According to Philippe, some of the guys who worked on Assassin's Creed, also a Ubisoft Montreal game, popped their heads around the wall and gave a helping hand with the presentation side of things. The AI, too, has been improved. Philippe talked about leapfrogging, where one enemy will take cover and the other will provide covering fire. The cover system, one of Rainbow Six's unique features, has undergone somewhat of an overhaul. The type of cover is all important - a wall or a solid object will provide the best cover, and conversely a chair or table will be pretty much useless. The AI knows this, and will try and find better cover when they're getting shot through a wicker basket.
The team has also added some visual clues so that players know what kind of enemy they're up against. For example, if you see a bad guy who's wearing a ballistics mask, you know they're wielding a shotgun, and so you won't want to get up close and personal. Speaking of shotguns, they're now twice as fast as in the original Vegas, and "very dangerous for the player".
There's been some other weapon tweaks. The light machine gun has a rate of penetration that's "insane" and can "probably shoot players through walls". Again, the AI knows this, and will continue to shoot you if they have that gun and you sprint behind a wall.
Four-player coop has been dropped to two-player. Happy or sad?Ah the sprint. Sprinting doesn't last very long, only a few seconds and is really only useful for going from one area of cover to another. You can shoot, but your aiming will be all over the place. It's a nice addition, but isn't going to set the world on fire.
Perhaps the biggest change is the revamped co-op. Ubisoft's decision to drop the co-op from four-players to two has drawn some criticism from battle-hardened Vegas fans, who feel the gameplay will be "dumbed down" as a result (the dev team has implemented a casual mode because they felt many people were threatened by the original Rainbow Six - but has made the realistic mode even harder). We'll have to wait until we get our hands-on the main campaign, but let's just say at this point we share those concerns. One good thing about it is you can join a mate who's got a game in progress, with no need to start the level over. "It's completely seamless" we were told.
Vegas 1 featured the PEC (Persistent Elite Creation) levelling up system in its multiplayer game modes. In Vegas 2 this has been taken into the campaign too, making it persistent across the entire game. So, if you play the single-player campaign, get Bishop to a bad-ass level, you can then take all those upgrades online, without having to start from scratch.
In-game, this is implemented via a small XP bar on the HUD. Like many MMOs, at early levels you level up quickly, but things soon slow down. Linked to this is the new ACES system, which rewards players for skilful and tactical play. So you'll get rewarded for sniper head shots, flanking, throwing flash bangs and the like, as opposed to simply charging in and destroying everything in sight. The game will then give you access to new weapons based on the tactics you employ most in the game. For example, if you get quite handy with a sniper rifle, the game will recognise this and grant you better sniper rifles. All of this was in response to a feeling that players weren't playing the original Rainbow Six tactically enough. Now you have an incentive.
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