Rainbow Six Siege: Hands on with Thunderbird and the North Star update

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege has been an international operation, bringing aboard the best and the brightest from around the world. For the upcoming North Star update, players will get to meet a new Defender from here in North America. More specifically, they'll meet a Native American Operator from the Nakoda First Nation. Thunderbird brings some new twists to defense in Siege, ones that should greatly benefit her team, as well as the offense if the defensive team gets sloppy.

In addition to her SPEAR .308 assault rifle and BEARING 9 machine pistol, Thunderbird brings along a gadget called the Kona Healing Station. It's just what it sounds like. Kona Stations can be deployed in various spots across any map. Thunderbird has one of the higher speed stats out of the current crop of Siege Operators, which will be helpful, because she'll get up to three Kona Stations for each session. Any ally that stands near the Kona Station will receive a burst of healing. If an ally is already at full health, they will be overhealed for a brief period. The Kona Station is so effective that it can even make a teammate on the brink of death stop bleeding out, though they'll still need to be manually revived.

Defenses will need to communicate to make the most of the Kona Station. Once it goes off, there's a brief cooldown period. Don't hog the station if you're already near full health, because you might be the reason a lower-health teammate doesn't make it. The other thing to keep in mind is that the Kona Station works for everyone. If you're not careful and leave the Kona Station anywhere, the Attackers can also take advantage of it and heal themselves. There were a few instances during my hands-on time with Thunderbird where the difference in a 1-on-1 was the Attacker finding a stray Kona Station and using it to heal themselves before dispatching the last Defender.

One other big change coming in North Star is a significantly reimagined Favela map. The biggest difference is that the map will now take place in the middle of the night. As fireworks light up the skies outside, players will content with more tightly placed rooms and a better map overview, which should prevent players getting lost and going the wrong direction. Plus, exterior walls are no longer destructible, so you'll need to find a different way to get inside the building.

The new Operator and the redesigned map would normally be a good stopping point for any Rainbow Six Siege update, but Ubisoft Montreal has some big plans for North Star, some that might overhaul how the game is played, period. The first major change is coming to the armor system. Armor will now be converted to additional health, a chance the developers hope will help players better gauge armor's impact. Another massive change comes to bullet holes. To this stage, bullet holes would allow for players fire through walls from a fine point. That's now going to drastically change, as players will no longer be able to peek through or fire through a single bullet hole. Similarly, players have had issues with smoke bleeding through walls in ways they normally shouldn't. Smoke physics have been revamped significantly and will no longer go through walls in unnatural ways. The color for smoke has also been changed, so that it's easier to see from a distance.

Another big way that players have found themselves at the wrong end of a bad death has been by tripping over corpses. It's worse because corpses would only show up on the client side. Ubisoft Montreal is fixing the corpse problem by having dead bodies dissolve from play. Those bodies will be replaced by Operator icons, so that players can still determine which players died where.

North Star will introduce a new way to disrupt certain gadgets and devices. This update will debut a new shattered glass effect. Strike something like Maestro's Evil Eye turret with a few melee strikes and the bulletproof glass will be shattered. These devices will still be usable, but players will be flying blind.

This is just the beginning for a series of significant adjustments to Rainbow Six Siege as a whole. Down the road, Ubisoft is looking to add additional opportunities to keep playing after death. This includes Attackers using their drones and Defenders controlling some of their gadgets and will eventually extend to other features, such as the ability to fire EMPs from surveillance cameras.

Rainbow Six Siege's North Star update promises to be a hefty one, bringing all of the aforementioned changes, as well as bug fixes and significant balance tweaks to Melusi, Mira, and Maestro. Those on the PC Test Server won't have to wait too long to check all of this out. North Star will go live on the Test Servers on Tuesday, May 25. The full update will go out to all platforms soon after. You can learn more about Thunderbird's backstory over on the Rainbow Six Siege website. And be sure to check out the rest of the Rainbow Six Invitational, which is wrapping up today.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?