Ubisoft has announced that the Doom Slayer is coming to Rainbow Six Siege on Tuesday 22 December, which is a little like hearing that a rhinoceros has been booked for the village chess tournament. Creative director Jonathan Mills revealed the crossover on stage at the Rainbow Six Major in Osaka this weekend, as part of the unveiling of the game’s next season, Operation Vital Signal.
The Slayer will not be a playable operator in his own right. He arrives as an Elite skin for Tachanka, the veteran Russian defender best known for his enormous machine gun and his long career as the community’s favourite joke. It is an inspired bit of casting. If any member of Team Rainbow was going to be possessed by the spirit of a man who settles disputes with a chainsaw, it was always going to be the one who thinks a light machine gun is a subtle opening move.
Nobody outside Ubisoft has seen the skin itself yet. What was shown in Osaka was a short teaser: a portal to Hell tears open inside Clubhouse, the biker-compound map, the Slayer steps through and shoots a passing Rainbow drone, and one of Mick Gordon’s guitar riffs crashes in behind him. Ubisoft’s own social post invites players to step through the gates of Hell on the 22nd, and for now that is the extent of the brief.
The comedy, of course, is in the collision of temperaments. Siege is a game about patience: leaning round door frames, listening for footsteps, reinforcing a wall and then worrying about it. Doom is a game in which the correct response to a wall is to go through it and the correct response to everything else is also to go through it. The developers acknowledged the gap, in their way, when explaining why this is a costume and not a character. “You can’t just take any IP character and throw them in,” the team told TechRadar, adding that skins are where such team-ups work. One of the developers reportedly put it more bluntly, joking that a fully operational Doom Slayer would be rather too much of a threat. Quite. The round would last four seconds and the hostage would need counselling.
Siege has form here. Master Chief has already turned up as an Elite skin for Sledge, and there have been crossovers with Resident Evil and Tomb Raider. Live content director Christopher Budgen said Doom carried personal weight for members of the team who grew up playing it, which is how most of these things begin: someone in a meeting who was eleven in 1993.
The skin is the garnish on a larger plate. Operation Vital Signal goes onto test servers on 16 November and launches for everyone on 1 December, which happens to be the game’s eleventh birthday. It brings a remaster of the medic Doc, who can now heal team-mates remotely, a long-requested split of ranked play into solo and duo and flexible queues, a new defender weapon and another round of changes to the Bank map.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we remain fond of the idea that every video game is slowly becoming the same fancy-dress party, with the same dozen guests circulating between venues. The Doom Slayer has at least dressed for it. Whether Tachanka’s team-mates will be allowed to go on calling for careful, coordinated tactics while he stands next to them in that helmet is a matter for their consciences.
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