Ubisoft announced the third year of support for its highly-successful tactical shooter, Rainbow Six Siege, last year. But this time around, the game is straying from its usual update pattern, as kicking off the new year of content will be a brand-new limited-time cooperative game mode titled Outbreak.
Details surrounding this mode were scarce until today, with Ubisoft giving a sneak peak of the first upcoming Operation to the game in 2018, Chimera. As seen in the trailer above, the co-op event is connected to a USSR space capsule that has crash landed in the city of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico.
Ubisoft describes the situation that players will be dropping into as follows:
The town has come under attack from an extraterrestrial parasite – called the Apex – that has transformed much of the local population into horrific creatures, forcing the government to set up a quarantine zone around the town and prevent the spread of the parasite. A team of three Operators will be tasked with not only entering the quarantine zone but also destroying the infestation at its source.
The enemies will range from "exploding monstrosities to hulking horrors," and players will be able to tackle the new dangers with Operation Chimera"s operators Lion and Finca, as well as Lord Tachanka, Ash, Buck, Doc, Smoke, Ying, Kapkan, Glaz, and Recruit.
The three player mode will be playable in two difficulty settings, Normal and Pandemic. While both modes will supposedly require coordination among teammates to succeed, the latter difficulty will enable friendly fire and buff the enemies for a more challenging experience.
The Outbreak mode will feature three exclusive levels designed specifically for the co-op mode, that will be "larger and more open than the game’s competitive maps," while keeping the usual high levels of destructive environments.
Rainbow Six Siege Operation Chimera will be going online on March 6 on all platforms for free, with the Outbreak mode running from that day until April 3. Technical Test Server participants on all platforms will be able to help test the content starting February 20, however, only PC players will have access to the Outbreak event in the test server.
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