Back in June 2019, Ubisoft unveiled Tom Clancy"s Rainbow Six Quarantine. This was at the E3 conference, and a few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic would send many people home in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus. The company had recently hinted that it might rename the title in light of ongoing real-world events, and now it appears that it has finally reached a decision.
As can be seen in the artwork above, the game might be renamed to Tom Clancy"s Rainbow Six Parasite. This change was first spotted over at MP1st, which says that it got the information from a site which scrapes information about game updates on the PlayStation Network. You can still see the listing for yourself here.
The patch listing shows it as an "initial launch patch". This is interesting because Ubisoft delayed the title a couple of months ago, and it still has no firm release date. Even during the firm"s earnings call recently, CFO Frédérick Duguet committed to a timeline of around September 30, 2021. However, based on the patch, it would seem that the entry is much closer to launch than anticipated.
When Ubisoft unveiled Quarantine last year, it described it as a 3-player squad-based survival FPS in which players "will face off against a mysterious threat infecting human hosts and their surroundings". Given the above description, the rebranding to Parasite is still apt. Even though the report and supporting evidence appear to be legitimate, it is important to note that Ubisoft has not officially confirmed the rebranding as of yet.
Update: Ubisoft has now announced that the next Rainbow Six game isn"t named Parasite after all. In a statement to PCGamesN, the company had the following to say:
While we recently shared that we will be changing the name of Rainbow Six Quarantine, ‘Parasite’ is only a placeholder that our internal teams use. Recently, we ran an internal test for the game and some of its details became public. We can confirm this is a glimpse of the upcoming game, and we will share more details, including the official name, soon.
There you have it folks, while the company definitely plans to update the name, it"s not going to be Parasite.
Editor"s Note: The article originally stated that the game had been announced in 2019 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We"ve updated the article to correct that reference, as the pandemic only started in 2020. Thank you for pointing out this oversight.