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Dynamic Entry: The Game

"Rainbow needs people who will challenge the future of the unit, and...and those who remind it of its roots. It needs people who can be the scalpel and the hammer."
Harishva “Harry” Pandey

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege is a multiplayer First-Person Shooter video game in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six franchise, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft.

Unlike earlier Rainbow Six games, Siege is a multiplayer-focused competitive shooter, though it retains the military theme and contains many realistic elements. New mechanics introduced in Siege include destructible environments, allowing players to both breach walls, doors, floors and windows to create new lines of sight and shooting angles. Siege also adds the Operator system, where players would select individual classes, known as "Operators", each with their own special gadgets and weapons.

The game is set years after the events of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 when the Rainbow program is reactivated by a new leader simply known as Six to face a mysterious new terrorist force called The White Masks.

Players play as Rainbow team operatives recruited from around the world going through exercises to prepare them for combating the White Masks, training to perform hostage rescue and bomb disposal. After completing the exercises, the operatives are called into Bartlett University to stop a bio-chemical attack launched by the White Masks and eliminate their presence at the university.

The storyline ends right after that, and the game moves the player on to the more interesting multiplayer, the mainstay of the game.

     Game Modes 
  • Situations: The closest thing that the game has to a story campaign, Situations are a series of single-player scenarios that serve as a tutorial for the game's various mechanics leading up to the "Article 5" mission.
  • Bomb: A multiplayer mode which has the attackers tasked with locating and defusing one of two bombs or wiping out the defenders. The defenders must stop the attackers by killing all of them or destroying the defuser. It is the only mode in Unranked and Ranked matchmaking.
  • Secure Area: A multiplayer mode which has the attackers fighting their way into a room holding a biohazard container protected by the defenders. The match ends when the biohazard container is secured by the attackers when there are no defenders in the room or when all players from one side are killed.
  • Hostage: A multiplayer mode where the attackers must extract a hostage being held by the defenders, while the defenders must prevent the hostage from being rescued. If a player wounds the hostage, the hostage will go into a dying state and if not revived quickly enough, the team who damaged the hostage loses.
  • Team Deathmatch: A multiplayer mode where players can change their operator between respawns as well as their loadout as they race for 80 kills or highest amount after five minutes. Intended as a warmup mode with no chat, no operator gadgets, and a few grenades for secondary gadgets. Added in Year 7 Season 1.
  • Training Grounds: A single- and multiplayer mode in which one team of players is pitted against a larger team of AI-controlled terrorists. Modes are primarily variations of multiplayer ones where terrorists spawn at set intervals or after specific accomplishments, including Disarm Bomb (Bomb mode where players must seek out and defuse both bombs, with more terrorists spawning to rush the defuser), Extract Hostage (players act as the attacking team in regular Hostage mode, more terrorists spawn in upon grabbing the hostage), Protect Hostage (players must defend a hostage from four waves of terrorists), and Elimination (players seek out and kill every terrorist in the map like the Terrorist Hunt mode of previous Rainbow Six games).

In addition, there is the Tactical Realism variation of the standard multiplayer modes which was added with the release of the Operation Skull Rain DLC. Tactical Realism removes some of the unrealistic elements such as One Bullet Clips (magazines are now properly tracked as in the original trilogy of games), most of the Heads-Up Display, and the abilities to mark opponents or see the outlines of teammates through walls.

The game has received free seasonal DLC updates after release, about once every three months or so.

     Seasons 

Year 1

  • Operation Black Ice: Adds two Operators from one of Canada's special ops forces, Joint Task Force Twonote  and the map "Yacht".
  • Operation Dust Line: Adds two Operators from the United States' Navy SEALsnote  and the map "Border".
  • Operation Skull Rain: Adds two Operators from Brazil's special police unit, BOPE,note  and the map "Favela".
  • Operation Red Crow: Adds two Operators from the Japanese Special Assault Teamnote  and the map "Skyscraper".

Year 2

  • Operation Velvet Shell: Adds two Operators from Spain's Special Operations Group, or GEO,note  and the map "Coastline".
  • Operation Health: A season that was centered around performance optimization and bug fixing.note 
  • Operation Blood Orchid: Adds three Operators, two from Hong Kong's Special Duties Unit,note  and one from Poland's JW GROMnote  and the map "Theme Park".
  • Operation White Noise: Adds three Operators, two from South Korea's 707th Special Mission Battalionnote  another Operator from the JW GROMnote  and the map "Tower".

Year 3

  • Operation Chimera: Adds two CBRN specialists from the GIGN and Spetsnaz respectively,note  and featured the limited-time Outbreak event.
  • Operation Para Bellum: Adds two Operators from Italy's Special Intervention Group, or GIS,note  and the map "Villa".
  • Operation Grim Sky: Adds two Urban Warfare specialists from Delta Force and Scotland Yard respectively,note  as well as a rework of Hereford Base.
  • Operation Wind Bastion: Adds two Operators from Morocco's Groupe d'Intervention de La Gendarmerie Royale, or GIGR,note  and the map "Fortress".

Year 4

  • Operation Burnt Horizon: Adds two Operators from Australia's Special Air Service Regimentnote  and the map "Outback".
  • Operation Phantom Sight: Adds two Operators that each have gadgets matching its name, from the Danish Jægerkorpsetnote  and American Secret Servicenote , as well as a rework of Kafe Dostoyevsky.
  • Operation Ember Rise: Adds two Operators that also have gadgets matching its name, from the Peruvian APCAnote  and Mexico's FESnote , as well as a rework of Kanal.
  • Operation Shifting Tides: Adds two Operators from the multinational NIGHTHAVEN private security groupnote , as well as a rework of Theme Park.

Year 5

  • Operation Void Edge: Adds two Operators with vastly different abilities, a Dutch scientist from the REUnote  and a Jordanian-born GIGR soldiernote , as well as a rework of Oregon.
  • Operation Steel Wave: Adds two Operators - a Norwegian NIGHTHAVEN recruitnote  and a South African anti-poaching specialistnote  - and a rework of House.
  • Operation Shadow Legacy: A crossover season with Splinter Cell, introducing the series' protagonist, Sam Fisher, as the new Operator. A rework of Chalet also makes its debut.
  • Operation Neon Dawn: Adds one Operator from Thailand working for NIGHTHAVENnote  and a rework of Skyscraper.

Year 6

  • Operation Crimson Heist: Adds an Argentinian former burglar note  and a rework of Border.
  • Operation North Star: Adds a First Nations helicopter pilot and medical officernote  and a rework of Favela.
  • Operation Crystal Guard: Adds NIGHTHAVEN's Croatian head of R&D note  along with smaller improvements for Bank, Clubhouse and Coastline and changes to the health system.
  • Operation High Calibre: Adds one Operator from the Irish Gardaí note  and changes to the HUD alongside a rework of Outback.

Year 7

  • Operation Demon Veil: Adds a Japanese police officer-turned-bodyguard note , team deathmatch, attacker repick, and later in the season, the map "Emerald Plains".
  • Operation Vector Glare: Adds a Belgian Special Forces Group Operator note , the Team Deathmatch map Close Quarter, and the shooting range.
  • Operation Brutal Swarm: Adds a Singaporean NIGHTHAVEN Operator note , the 2021 Stadium map to the normal map rotation, and changes to the attachment and recoil system.
  • Operation Solar Raid: Adds a Colombian AFEAU Operatornote , the map NIGHTHAVEN Labs, and changes to the rank and battlepass system.

There have also been several themed special events featuring temporary game modes that complement the standard multiplayer along with themed cosmetics.

     Special Events 

Outbreak

The Outbreak Event was added in Year 3 Operation Chimera, a radical Tone Shift from the rest of the game and the series. In New Mexico, a mysterious, Soviet-era space capsule falls in the town of Truth or Consequences. A few days later, a mysterious viral outbreak infects much of the town, with the infected people having their bodies mutate in strange, gruesome ways. A week later, the National Guard has placed the town on quarantine, as humans infected by the virus, now dubbed the "Chimera Virus", mutate into hostile monstrous beings dubbed "Roaches". Team Rainbow is assembled to discover the truth behind the outbreak.

Showdown

A limited-time Wild West-themed event called Showdown was playable from July 2, 2019 to July 16, 2019. Players take the role of three man teams, either The Law (the Attackers) and the Graveltop Gang (the Defenders) on a small outdoor map called Fort Truth. Operators had their loadout replaced with BOSG.12.2 shotgun and the LFP586 revolver with most of the HUD removed.

Doktor's Curse

From October 22nd to November 5th, 2019, a Halloween event called Doktor's Curse was made available where you play as either monsters (taking the place of defenders) trying to survive or exterminators (taking the place of attackers) trying to hunt down the monsters in a deadly game of hide & seek.

Money Heist

A tie-in event for Money Heist ran 21-25 November, 2019. The event features a special hostage mode and cosmetic items based on the series iconic red outfit and Dali mask.

The Grand Larceny

The Grand Larceny, another limited time event themed around The Roaring '20s, was run through May 5th to May 19th 2020. Set in a modified version of old Hereford, the event centers around the Attackers looking to secure three safes from the Blighters (the Defenders). Notably, this resurrected Hereford features the fully destructible floors Dummied Out from the game's initial reveal, and it is only emphasized with a focus on shotguns.

M.U.T.E. Protocol

Available from August 4th to August 24th, 2020, M.U.T.E. Protocol takes place on a retrofuturistic version of Tower. Attackers are tasked with securing two out of three servers from the Defenders with no drone phase — the Attackers ARE the drones! Attackers dematerialize when they enter their drones and rematerialize where their drones were when they exit. Defenders can use a network of bulletproof cameras to teleport around the map and can add to the network with their own cameras.

Sugar Fright

From October 27th to November 10th, 2020, Sugar Fright was a Halloween event set in Frost's candy-fuelled fever dream. In a radical departure from normal gameplay, the gamemode, called Sweet Hunt, features a respawn mechanic and is more symmetrical. The Tricksters (Attackers) and Treaters (Defenders) are equipped with the same loadouts and tasked with the same objective: secure sweets dropped from enemies they kill while denying the same from their opponents. Whoever reaches fifty or has the most at the end of ten minutes wins. The map, Neighborhood, is candy-themed and features no destructible walls or barricades and mostly takes place outside, with no detection for defenders.

Road to S.I.

Since 2019, this playlist has been active every January to Febuary to promote the Six Invitational esports event. In 2019, the playlist consisted of the seven maps in the esports map pool with Unranked gameplay rules, and gave out promotional cosmetics in special packs acquired through purchase or completing challenges.

The S.I. 2020 playlist kept the same rules but instead moved to a new map called Stadium, combining elements of Oregon and old Hereford while introducing a new material: bulletproof glass. All operators are available, even the ones players do not own. Cosmetics have been moved to a 35-tier battlepass. In addition, the playlist is accompanied by the CGI cinematic "Tournament of Champions," a public training exercise intended to test Rainbow on everything they had learned in Harry's "Program."

The S.I. 2021 playlist contains much of the same, but this time Stadium has been reconfigured to be a combination of Border and Coastline. Cosmetics are tied to a 100-tier battlepass available since the beginning of Operation Neon Dawn. Included with the event is the cinematic "The Playbook."

For the 2022 Invitational, both maps are available, but with slight tweaks for playability. Included with the event is the "Sisters in Arms" cinematic, exploring Zofia and Ela's relationship and revealing that after the invitational, Ela, along with several other operators, left Rainbow for NIGHTHAVEN.

Apocalypse

From May 4th to May 18th, 2021, the Apocalypse event takes place in a Mad Max-inspired version of Outback. The attacking Warband wants to steal the last plant on Earth from the Keepers, who are able to pick up the plant and move it around the map. To help the attackers, there is no prep-phase or reinforcing and the Attackers can secure rooms; any Defender that steps into them will be pinged.

Containment

Available from August 3 to August 24, 2021, Containment is a tie in with Extraction taking place in a corrupted version of Consulate at night. Attackers have to find and destroy two minor Prothean nests before destroying the main one and Defenders have to protect them ... without guns. Defenders have massively increased health, Oryx's mobility, Aruni's punch and their Quick Melee are still instant kills.

Snow Brawl

Available from December 14, 2021 to January 4, 2022, Snow Brawl is a symmetric Capture-the-Flag gamemode taking place in a Christmas-themed version of Chalet. Attackers and Defenders, the Orange Blizzards and the Blue Blades, respectively, are armed with snowballs and a snowblast launcher that knocks players off their feet and can respawn. Boosts to fire rate, running speed, snowblast ammo, and health can also be found on the map and picked up.

Rengoku

A Samurai-themed event available from April 26 to May 17, 2022, Rengoku is a symmetric Domination-style gamemode on a slightly modified Skyscraper. Attackers and Defenders, the Devoted and the Possessed, fight over a trio of objectives that rotate around the map and gain points depending on how many they control. Whoever reaches 300 points or the most after 10 minutes wins. All operators have increased health and speed, can jump up hatches, and are equipped with shotguns and kunai with a variety of special effects.

M.U.T.E. Protocol: Flesh & Metal

Retrofuture Tower returned from August 2 to August 23, 2022. Two teams, Organics and Robotics, fight for the hearts of a giant brain in the tower. To do so, they race for kills to advance through a series of weapons up to a hammer that can then smash the brain case on each floor of the Tower. First to two rounds wins, with the third taking place on the roof of the Tower and both teams only having hammers.

A co-op Spinoff game called Rainbow Six Quarantine was announced at E3 2019, and was released under the title of Rainbow Six Extraction on January 20, 2022.


OPFOR has eyes on the trope list.

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    Base Game 
  • Absurdly Ineffective Barricade: The defenders' barricades go down easily to gunshots and explosions or three melee hits, and door barricades have this big gap at the bottom which drones and bullets can pass through, but preventing entry is not really their main purpose. They are very useful at gaining useful intel on where the enemies are coming from since they make a lot of noise when destroyed, and at a distance, the barricades block visual knowledge on what's happening inside. They also allow some Defenders to anchor the objective and move away when they hear the Attackers break through the barricades.
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
    • Environmental gadgets from Defender like the Barbed Wire and Bandit's Shock Wire will not affect their teammates. Teammates on either side will also avoid triggering traps like the Welcome Mat, the Entry Denial Device, or the Claymore.
    • Thermite and Hibana's exothermic gadgets can only breach reinforced walls, while being unable to destroy the metal beams inside some walls for balancing reasons.
    • If a teammate tears down one of Castle's armor panels with a crowbar, Castle regains it back in his inventory, despite the animation showing the barricade being completely destroyed.
    • Wall Reinforcements conveniently transform into different sizes so they can cover a perfect fraction of the wall you're reinforcing. They can even transform into trapdoor reinforcements.
    • Until the release of Operation Para Bellum, the defuser was immune to explosives and gunfire, but could somehow be disabled by a Defender bashing it four times with their gunstock. After Operation Para Bellum, Defenders now use a hacking device to disable the defuser.
    • If Jackal kills an enemy who had their footprints tracked, their footprints will instantly disappear.
    • Meleeing a destructible wall makes the operator punch a perfectly round hole in it (which is a key tactic in creating murder holes). It's best to not think too much about how they did it.
  • Advertised Extra: The new "Six" (leader of Team Rainbow) is heavily advertised in the game's trailers, and a big deal is made about how she's played by Angela Bassett, but she only appears in the game's Excuse Plot videos.
  • A.K.A.-47: In modern Ubisoft tradition, some guns keep their names (at best excising the manufacturer's name, as has been the case for the Rainbow Six series ever since Rogue Spear's Black Thorn expansion), while most of the rest are renamed into a mutated but usually still recognizable form of the weapon's actual name. Some recurring names from past Ubisoft games like Watch_Dogs, Far Cry 4 and The Division include the 417 (HK417), SMG-11 (MAC-11), D50 (Desert Eagle) and Vector .45 ACP (TDI Vector), as well as new guns following trends such as going by lesser-known military designations (the USP45 Tactical and HK11 go by their "P12" and "G8A1" German military designations) or being misidentified as a different version of the same gun (the Makarov PM is referred to as the newer, higher-capacity "PMM", and whatever the heck Nomad's AKM-frankengun is misnomered as the AK-74M, as it clearly isn't a 74 in the first place based on the magazine model alone). Tachanka's deployable RP-46 is an iffy case - it could be a renamed DP-28, or an actual RP-46 Tachanka modified to look like a DP-28 (which is possible in real life) just because he likes the DP's looks and handling better.
  • All Bikers are Hells Angels: The multiplayer map "Clubhouse" is the Trope Namer's headquarters in Hanover. The flavor text in Bandit's bio says he was previously undercover there.
  • Always Accurate Attack: Melee strikes (with the exception of Caveira's). They will instantly kill any Operator if they come into contact, like headshots.
  • All There in the Manual:
    • While all the operators look like The Stoic at a glance, they actually have distinct backgrounds and personalities that you can only read in their bios in the operator screen. Or the Wiki.
    • If you want to follow the game's lore, you'll need to read tie-in comics and watch a fair number of animations and cinematics on Ubisoft's YouTube channel in addition to the in-game material.
  • Amazon Brigade: The in-universe South Korean 707th Special Mission Group, formerly the 707th Special Mission Battalion, that Dokkaebi and Vigil are affiliated with is noted to maintain an all-female division.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Upon unlocking an operator, all attachments for their weapons are also unlocked. It didn't use to be this way, but it skips a lot on the grinding to get an operator's weapons to a usable state.
    • With each competitive season, operators that were released in previous seasons decrease in price to make them more accessible to newer players.
    • Getting scanned or "red-pinged" alerts the pingee that they have been spotted and how (camera, Alibi Prisma, Caveira interrogation, etc.), a strong suggestion to reposition before bullets and/or explosives start flying their way. However, a contextual "yellow ping" does not have such an alert.
    • If a teammates finishes off a player you downed, you actually get more points (50 from the down plus 75 from the kill assist versus 100 for killing them yourself) to alleviate the frustration of a Kill Steal. This was later changed in Year 6 Season 3 to a player receiving the full 100 for killing or injuring while the player that finishes them off gets the assist score.
    • Colorblind (and able) players can change the color and opacity of their reticle as well as have options for text to speech, though some critical colors like lasers and cameras are still the same.
    • If a player abandons a ranked match before the first round begins, either through lost connection or a Rage Quit, their teammates can vote to cancel the match with no impact on their stats while the leaver gets slapped with a penalty.
    • If a match is going completely one-sided, the team getting stomped can vote to surrender and save themselves a few minutes.
    • When a cheater gets banned, the matches they won in get voided and any MMR lost for playing against them gets voided. But if you beat a cheater, you get to keep your MMR.
  • April Fools' Day: In a jest, a bugfix claimed it was caused by one:
    Reloading does not always properly reload the weapon, even if the animation plays. Bandit’s April Fools joke of replacing some magazines with empty ones was not received well by Rainbow Six Actual.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The team size for players is capped at 5 for all modes, even though Team Rainbow consists of 46 operators and Terrorist Hunt can put them against upwards of 30 terrorists. Still a step up from Vegas having, at absolute most, four guys on the ground to take on an entire city of terrorists.
  • Armor Is Useless:
    • Your operators' actual armor rating, which is on a three-point scale, generally means a difference of one or two bullets depending on the weapon. Rook's Armor Pack ability allows additional resistance of one or two more bodyshots. It's useless in medium skill play, where everyone gets headshots, but vital in both low and high skill where nobody either has the skill or gets the chance.
    • Helmets however, are completely useless. A headshot will result in an instant kill regardless if the Operator is wearing a woolen cap or a huge Russian full-head helmet.
  • Artificial Stupidity: The terrorist bots are extremely simple and are known for being braindead on occasions, especially the one with the pistol and shield, which can occasionally kill themselves using the thermite charge. Other times, his pistol can instantly kill the hostage, resulting in an instant loss. They also stand right in the open when fighting players and never sprint.
  • Ascended Meme:
    • When Rook has his elite skin on, his armor pack has a folder that says "Operation Rook Mine", referencing the meme where a player was teamkilled for taking Rook.
    • "Lord Chanka" for Tachanka. The Russian word for "Lord" is written on the side panels of the ballistic shield for his LMG, and Ash refers to him as "Your Highness" in one of the cinematics for Outbreak.
    • One of Maestro's quotes is "How does anyone manage to shoot Ash? Her head is so small!", acknowledging the community meme that Ash has no head hitbox.
    • A bounty reward for finding bugs on the TTS is the Raptor Legs charm.
    • ACOGs being a coveted item for Defenders, especially Jager, was acknowledged in M.U.T.E. Protocol with a giant ACOG hologram in one of the rooms.
  • Awesome Aussie: Gridlock and Mozzie added in with the Operation Burnt Horizon update.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Hot breaching. Plant a Breach Charge on a barricade, and detonate it while you vault in. The problem is that this tactic relies so heavily on timing - do it right and you'll gain access, but do it wrong and you'll blow yourself up, leaving your teammates with one member down for the rest of the round.
  • Badass Boast: All the operators (with the exception of some of the DLC operators) have an introductory video that plays when they're unlocked, which usually features the operator in question giving one of these. Some operators also tend to give out one at the round-start conversation. Especially prevalent in Terrorist Hunt.
    • Jackal tends to give one out after he's killed a Defender that he tracked previously with his Eyenox visor.
  • Bad Guy Bar: Clubhouse is a biker bar run by the Hanover Hells Angels.
  • Balance Buff: As with any competitive multiplayer game, characters and game mechanics are frequently tweaked. Some examples include:
    • To combat the increased prevalence of smoke planting, Ubisoft defenders a new Bulletproof Camera. It's a non-rotatable square-shaped camera that can be drilled onto surfaces and used to monitor hallways. It's main gimmick is in the name, as it cannot be destroyed from the front and must be taken down either with explosives or a hit from the side, where it's still vulnerable. It also has heat vision, allowing it to more easily pick out attackers in the environment and see through smoke grenades. Later patches made melee crack the glass to make it opaque and gave the camera rotation and an electronics-disrupting EMP burst.
    • As of January 2019, Caveira's Luison was tweaked to do 65 damage instead of 99, but have a smaller damage fall off so her pistol hits harder at longer ranges.
    • Ash had her ACOG removed from her R4-C in March 2019 because she was too overpowered otherwise.
  • Berserk Board Barricade: A variation of it, though it is similar in nature. Defenders all get infinite wooden barricades that they can deploy on doors and windows. They come in pre-made rolls of connected wood planks, and the defenders unroll them over the desired area (just nicely fitting the size of the doorway or window) and secure them with their nail gun. Defenders can also pull them off with their crowbar rather than having to break through them like Attackers (although they can also simply destroy them.
  • Benevolent Architecture: The buildings in Siege have some weird elements to them for gameplay reasons.
    • Many of the buildings completely lack doors, only having door frames in order for the barricades to be implemented. Some of the maps had smarter designs to justify the lack of doors on doorways, (e.g. having the door completely opened to one side, having the door removed and lying down on the ground, or replacing the doorway with a door-shaped hole in the wall) but it is still weird to see a Chicago mansion without doors of any kind.
    • There are many conveniently drone-sized holes connecting weird areas, allowing drones to pass through. There is no clear reason as to why they are there, and most aren't even ventilation shafts since they are often located at floor-height.
    • There are many destructible wooden trapdoors at completely inappropriate positions such as in the middle of a kitchen or office.
    • Instead of remote-controlled metal sheets, all garage doors in the game are apparently a solid wall of destructible wood sealed to the wall on all sides.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Rook was born in a French city called Tours. Tower is "Tour" in French, and yes, it is pronounced exactly like the town. The Rook chess piece is called the "Tower" aka "La Tour" in French. So Rook was born... In "Rooks".
  • Bizarrchitecture: In additional to various gameplay conceits, some of the buildings are just very ... weird.
    • Bank has no bathrooms. Most maps just have one that is unisex even in contexts where they should be segregated, such as the nightclub in Coastline.
    • On Consulate, there is a van inside the garage that should be too tall to fit through the door.
    • On House, the one bathroom has a shower with windows on three sides.
    • On Plane, the one room designated "toilet" is empty and there is a random "ladder room" for access to the server room upstairs connecting to the press section.
    • Chalet and Villa are massive mansions with only one bedroom and bathroom, despite having many spaces for guest entertainment.
    • Some maps have unusually large "dead" spaces, inaccessible between hard walls, such as above white stairs on Oregon and between Tellers and Small Office on Bank.
    • Some unbreakable windows do not match up between the interior and exterior, such as on Oregon.
    • Villa's third floor is completely inaccessible, without the suggestion of stairs or a hatch on the second floor.
  • Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Out of the three female base operators, IQ is the blonde, Twitch is the brunette, and Ash is the redhead.
  • Body Armor as Hit Points: Until Year 6 Season 3, an operator's armor rating reduced their incoming damage by a fixed percentage (0% reduction for one-armor, 10% for two-armor, 20% for three armor). However, in Crystal Guard, armor was reworked to provide flat HP bonuses. One-armors are still at 100 health, two-armors have 110, and three-armors have 125.
  • Boom, Headshot!: Headshots are instant kills regardless of the condition. One nick to the head hitbox, and you're dead regardless if you're light armor or heavy armor.
  • Bomb Disposal: The Bomb mode is like a thematic inversion of the Bomb Defuse mode from Counter-Strike, where the planted object, rather than a bomb, is a defuser that somehow defuses the existing chemical bombs when planted in the same room with them. The defenders have to destroy the defuser after it's planted by using a hacking device to disable it (bullets don't work; the defuser is case hardened against physical attacks).
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • The Barbed Wire does nothing other than slowing down enemies, but it is very effective at preventing rushes and slowing down pushes. It's also loud to travel through, and destroying it gives distinctive jangling cues to the Defenders.
    • The bulletproof camera. It's nothing more than a camera that is bulletproof, but it can see through smoke and is only destructible via melee strikes or shooting from the side.
    • Drones, because of their extreme versatility. Rappelling through a window? Drone the corridor. Destroying a barricade? Drone the area around it. Breaching a floor? Drone the floor above it, or below it. Drones are incredibly useful in giving Attackers intel. Sure, they're not as flashy as breaching and going in blind, but they can make the difference between survival and failure.
    • Rook's gadget. It's nothing special, just a few extra plates of armor, but it allows the Defenders to take two extra hits. Combine Rook with Doc, and you've got a perfect pairing.
  • Break Out the Museum Piece: Almost every single elite uniform has a historical theme. Kapkan's elite is a set of Soviet-Afghan war-era Vympel Spetsnaz gear, Thermite uses old FBI combat gear, Sledge is a WWII-styled L Detachment SAS uniform, Twitch's appearance is based on a WWII French fighter, Blackbeard is based on a Vietnam-era Navy SEAL, and Jager's elite is based on a WWI-era German pilot, Red Baron-style. In addition, due to how the operators need to be visually distinct, many operators use outdated but visually distinctive equipment from their CTU in their default uniforms.
  • Broad Strokes: Given that the game has an Excuse Plot, the setting inherited all the way back from Tom Clancy's books is taken very liberally, with non-NATO forces joining into Rainbow and the past events from previous games barely mentioned, and Rainbow apparently being disbanded just before the start of the story.
  • Bullethole Door: The destruction power of bullets in this game are slightly exaggerated, making it possible to create big holes on walls by putting enough bullets in a small area. Shotguns do the job much faster and can even shoot out the beams inside the walls, creating a true traversable doorway.
  • Camping a Crapper:
    • Apparently possible for the terrorists of Terrorist Hunt. As they tend to move around, it was probably more of a Good Bad Bug rather than intended.
    • Some maps do have bathrooms, allowing for this trope to be Played Straight. However, more often than not, the Defenders use bathroom sections as murder holes for an ambush.
  • Character Class System: The Operators can select one of two secondary gadgets available to them (selected from a pool of side-restricted gadgets) and one out of a few weapons available to them (selected from a pool of side-restricted CTU-specific weapons), and each get their own special Operator gadget, which tends to define their role the most. Recruits can select weapons from several CTUs (though still restricted in combination, such as being unable to use a Defender weapon as an Attacker), and get a second secondary gadget in place of their operator gadget (such as being able to take both breaching charges and a grenade).
  • Cherry Tapping: Getting hit with a projectile like a smoke grenade or Valkyrie's cameras deals a tiny bit of damage. It is common for players to humiliate downed enemies in safe zones by killing them with these "attacks".
  • Close-Range Combatant: Anyone choosing to wield a shotgun as a primary weapon is necessarily this, unless it's loaded with slugs.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Drones and Cameras will change color based on who's controlling them at the moment. Those controlled by the Attackers flash yellow; those controlled by Defenders flash blue. This also extends to team-centric gadgets, such as the lights on Nomad's airjabs and Jager's ADS. When the teams swap sides, camera color follows with them.
  • Combat Resuscitation: Siege has "Down But Not Out" (or DBNO) states for operators who do not suffer a headshot but have had their health drained sufficiently. The operator cannot use a weapon and has only two choices: crawl to safety (and bleed out more quickly) or attend to their injuries by applying pressure to the wound to slow the death counter (and being fixed in one place). Teammates can revive you from this state, but a favorite tactic of enemies is to use the downed operator as bait to lure out the rest of their team. A friendly needs to go through an animation to get them back on their feet, leaving them with 20 health (or 75 if revived with Doc's stim pistol). Running out of health again is invariably fatal.
  • Common Tongue: Even though Team Rainbow is an international team, all Operators in game use English, with the occasional Gratuitous Foreign Language popping in a few times here and there and in some Operator trailers. This makes sense since having everyone speak their mother tongue would severely mess up communication.
  • Competitive Balance:
    • Attacking players and defensive players choose from an entirely different roster of operators for balance reasons. Abilities like Pulse's heartbeat sensor are restricted to the defense, while things like Frag Grenades are restricted to the offense. Confusingly however, Defenders get submachine guns but not assault rifles - except for Jäger and Wamai, for some reason.
    • As for the player characters themselves, things are a little more complicated. Rather than traditional "tank, support, dps" hierarchies, Siege instead opts for a more dynamic playstyle with classes like "roamers" note , "anti-roamers" note , "anchors" note , "soft breachers" note , and "hard breachers" note . Even then, none of these classes are specifically outlined in-game, as every character is capable of doing multiple roles depending on their kit. For example, Rook can spawnpeek and roam just as good as Jaeger - he just isn't as good as Jaeger due to having 3 armor and 1 speed.
  • Competitive Multiplayer: Outside of Situations and Terrorist Hunt, all of the game modes are 5v5 player versus player. It is also worthy to note that there are three matchmaking lobbies, Casual, Unranked and Ranked, with the Ranked playlists giving out seasonal charms based on player performance. Ranked and Unranked are bomb only, and allow each team to ban one of out three maps given to them and one operator from each side. The Defender can also choose their site, locking the ones that they win on.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The bots in Training Grounds have perfect recoil control and can track players through walls, making up for their other deficiencies.
  • Concealment Equals Cover: Averted, even moreso than most other games. Fragile materials like wood will conceal you, but bullets can pass right through them. In fact, some of the map props can even be destroyed completely with enough hits.
  • Concussion Frags: Interestingly, both subverts this trope and plays it straight; Frag grenades will damage the environment in a realistic way, leaving a consistent pattern of shrapnel holes in surrounding walls just like a real frag would, but in terms of damage it behaves the same way as in other games, only doing damage within a limited radius. However, explosions can also damage gadgets and players through destructible cover, with the path represented by a hole that shrapnel would have made. Hence, the grenades behave like frag grenades relative to the environment, and concussion grenades relative to the players.
  • Continuity Creep: The game's storyline went from being non-existent to crucial as the years pressed on, with later events featuring a much heavier focus on the story. This culminated in Year 8, which has a definitive Big Bad who makes his entrance by killing Harry.
  • Continuity Nod:
    • In spite of the Broad Strokes continuation of the Rainbow Six lore, the Velvet Shell Mid Season Reinforcements mentions Greek Rainbow sniper Kure Galanos from Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield and the events of that game (specifically a mission set in Rio de Janeiro), as well as title dropping the name of the game as the name of Galanos' operation.
      • This isn't the first time RAINBOW had to drop into a biological hotzone with protective gear - the first game and the novel it's based on had missions revolved around averting a biohazardous outbreak, albeit one without angry alien zombies. Biological and chemical weapons also show up in the plot of Raven Shield and Vegas 2 - and this game takes more cues from the latter, since you don't get the chance to stop it from happening in the first place.
    • One of the maps is an amusement park taken over by terrorists - the first game and the novel heavily featured one.
    • Pulse's main gadget is a souped-up and stylized version of the heartbeat monitors available in the realistic, earlier games.
    • White Noise, the Operation revolving around the Korean operators, adds a map around a Korean business high-rise presumably taken over by terrorists. This is exactly what happened in a Korean-exclusive Rainbow Six game based off of Rogue Spear, aptly titled "Take-Down: Missions in Korea".
  • Co-Op Multiplayer: Terrorist Hunt is the co-op mode of the game, though it receives far less attention in comparison to the competitive modes. Bomb, Hostage Protection, and Hostage Extraction are available modes, slightly modified from multiplayer modes to accommodate for AI behavior, and there is also the Terrorist Hunt Classic mode, where the objective is to simply kill all terrorists. In addition, Article 5, the final "Situation", is also a co-op game of Terrorist Hunt Bomb, and it is possible to be matched up into one when searching a Normal difficulty game with the Bomb mode enabled.note 
  • Cosmetically Different Sides: Averted. Both sides have different objectives for winning a round, and they also get different gadgets and weapons. The game is also asymmetrical in the metagame, where defenders gravitate towards roaming and point defense, getting weapons meant for closer ranges like submachine guns and shotguns, while attackers use counter-roaming and point breach to enter the objective, using longer-ranged weapons like assault and marksman's rifles.
  • Covers Always Lie:
    • While downplayed in that it still depicts what the game is about, none of the characters on the box art are actually in-game. They only appear in the game's earliest E3 build.
    • Confusingly, the cover also appears to show the attacking team inside a structure and the defending team outside, rather than the other way around.
  • Crossover:
    • The Money Heist event was a special playlist of Hostage on Bank with a unique hostage and themed cosmetics for Vigil and Hibana.
    • Ash received an elite skin dressing her up as classic Lara Croft.
    • Zofia and Lion received elite skins dressing them up as Jill Valentine and Leon Kennedy, respectively, for the series' 25th anniversary.
    • Smoke and Sledge received bundles turning them into Pickle Rick and a Gromflomite respectively. Later, Doc and Fuze received skins for Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith respectively, while Thermite and Ace got ones for Krombopulos Michael and Mr Meeseeks.
    • Echo received an elite skin that turns him into the Mad Dog of Shimano, Goro Majima, as well as a standard skin for Kazuma Kiryu. Hibana received one for Kaoru Sayama.
    • Several WWE sets were released - Blackbeard got one for The Undertaker, Thorn got one for Becky Lynch, Oryx got one for Roman Reigns, and Ash got one for Rhea Ripley.
    • Flores received an elite skin that turns him into Altair.
    • Sledge received an elite skin that turns him into the Master Chief.
    • As a promotion for Street Fighter 6, Ying and Grim received skins that turns them into Chun-Li and Ryu respectively.
  • Damage Over Time:
    • Defending Operator Smoke has special Gas Grenades that can down and kill enemies quite quickly if they can't leave the area of affect. This is especially effective against Slow Operators like Fuze, where they can't get out of the poisonous fog quick enough.
    • Capitao, Goyo and reworked Tachanka have incendiary gadgets that blanket an area in fire, dealing damage over time to anyone in their area of effect.
  • Deployable Cover: One of the defender team's gadgets common to many of the defenders is the Deployable Shield, which provides a small amount of cover just enough for a player to crouch behind. Some also use it as an obstacle by putting it inside a doorway, having just enough space to fully block the door, forcing the enemies to either leap through it or destroy it.
  • Denser and Wackier: The game is a bit more cartoony and less realistic in its themes, more so in later seasons and especially when compared to the canceled Patriots that this game replaced, which was a Darker and Edgier Deconstruction of Rainbow Six. Lack of an actual story aside, the Operator designs and backstories get more questionable for some of the newer Operators (such as adding several Military Mavericks like Dokkaebi, comic-book-style backgrounds like Lesion and the Bosak sisters, and more and more futuristic gear, like Finka's nanobots and Lion's EE-ONE-D Drone), the cosmetics go straight into ridiculous territory with clown mask paint jobs, anachronistic uniforms, and neon Tron Lines, and Operation Chimera is straight up a sci-fi zombie/monster apocalypse. This was latercompletely played straight with the Rainbow is Magic update.
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • Hostages cannot be killed without first going into a dying state that gives players a chance to revive them, and will always do this before being killed. Reasoning some players out there would amuse themselves by discovering this, the score popup for putting the hostage in a dying state past the first time have their text changes to "You Monster!" and progressively causes you to lose 100 more points than the last time you did it.
    • The Bearing 9 (Minebea PM-9) has two empty reload animations for charging, one for with the regular iron sights and one for when any other sight is attached and blocks the normal animation.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: Certain feats of Emergent Gameplay are known to be rather difficult to pull off properly, but will yield extremely good results for their team if one is skilled enough.
    • Operator "tricks" rely on having both high situational awareness and good reflexes to be able to react to the other team's actions in a heartbeat. If done properly, a potential enemy utility or breach can be nullified entirely. If not, then the player will get an explosive to the face, or worse.
    • Run-outs as a Defender, which can be done in conjunction with a prepped barricade to surprise Attackers. A well-executed run-out can allow you to gun down unexpecting Attackers very easily, especially if they're busy rappelling or droning the map for their teammates, but flunking this maneuver will just get you shot or exploded with a claymore.
  • Dress-Coded for Your Convenience:
    • SAS wear gas masks and dark blue uniforms.
    • FBI SWAT wear eye-obscuring shades (or goggles), black uniforms, and black vests that wouldn't look out of place on a 90's SWAT team. The two medium-armored operators (Thermite and Castle) in addition wear black PASGT helmets.
    • GIGN wear balaclavas and visored helmets, and generally wear heavier armor.
    • Spetsnaz wear Russian woodland camouflage patterns, Russian gear, and are overall bulky-looking.
    • GSG 9 wear balaclavas, civilian clothing like jeans and sneakers underneath or alongside their equipment, and also wear distinctively-shaped helmets with large ear defenders.
    • JTF2 wear uniforms with arctic camouflage patterns and knitted hats.
    • The Navy SEALs wear uniforms with desert camouflage patterns.
    • BOPE wear black uniforms, fingerless gloves, bare forearms, and berets with the BOPE logo on them.
    • The SAT wear civilian clothes like jackets and hoodies underneath their equipment (a bit more subdued in colors and style than GSG 9), a police armband on their left arm, and for some reason, climbing harnesses outside of their equipment.
    • The GEO wear teal clothing and other pieces of equipment that generally center around protection. Mira especially, but Jackal's thick vest (which contrasts his pants in a very peculiar way) still gives a bulletproof appearance. They are also each carrying an air canister.
    • The SDU wear brown pants and blue tops with interlocking armour plates on top. They also both have trainers and goggles, but Lesion's goggles are on top of his helmet.
    • The 707th SMB wear shiny black jumpsuits, keep their gadgets attached to their torso, have something framing their eyes (glasses or a mask) as well as have 707 as part of their headgear (wool hat or the mask).
    • Played with for GROM, due to their coming from vastly different backgrounds they have distinct differences and similarities. Both wear green beige coats, dark green pants, black gloves and black hats with headsets, but they wear different styles (fingerless vs arm-length gloves, hoodie vs jacket, baseball cap vs beret) and Ela wears lighter shades than her sister .
    • The CBRN specialists wear NBC suits with yellow highlights, drawing inspiration from real CBRN, MOPP and NBC suits.
    • Italian GIS operators wear olive green/brown camouflage and red berets. Incidentally, both GIS Operators bare their forearms, pulling the sleeves up to their upper arm.
    • Played With for the GSUTR, both emphasize Grey in their designs to reflect their urban focus, but contrast in their uniform style to emphasize their Red Oni, Blue Oni attitudes.
    • Moroccan GIGR operators wear plain brown tops, striped desert camouflage pants, and brown boots.
    • Zig-Zagged with NIGHTHAVEN. The two operators that released together, Kali and Wamai, both wear blue wetsuits, but the ones that came separately, Ace and Aruni, wears a red rescue suit and beige tones with red prosthetics, respectively.
  • Dialog During Gameplay: At the start of a Terrorist Hunt game, two Operators on your team might have a quick chit-chat. The conversation consists of one Operator saying a "statement" line and another Operator following up with a "reaction" line, both chosen from random, and the reaction might be absent. This can occasionally result in some funny dialogue like Blitz asking if he can go to the bathroom and Fuze telling him to shut up and focus on the job, or Dokkaebi saying that she's hungry and Glaz telling everyone to clam up.
  • Dynamic Entry:
  • Elite Mooks: The "Bomber" enemies in Terrorist Hunt. They're heavily armored and can take an absurd amount of bullets to bring down unless you score headshots; even with headshots it takes 2 or 3 hits to kill them. Most dangerously, they're also strapped with explosives and upon spotting you will charge at you and detonate, putting you into a DBNO state instantly (or killing you if you've already been in a DBNO state) They're also more aggressive than regular terrorists and will actively patrol the level looking for you instead of bunkering down in one location. Fortunately, only 2 or 3 appear per map and they have very loud Vader Breath which gives away their location.
  • Elites Are More Glamorous: This time, instead of focusing on characters from a single unified international Team Rainbow, the character roster is spread around the Counter-Terrorist Units around the world that formed Team Rainbow, which includes both military units and law enforcement units. Current CTUs include the British SAS, American FBI SWAT, French GIGN, Russian Spetsnaz (more specifically Alpha Group), German GSG 9, Canadian JTF2, American Navy SEALs, Brazilian BOPE, Japanese SAT, Spanish GEO, Polish JW GROM, Hong Kong SDU, South Korean 707th SMB, Italian GIS, London's SCO19, and America's Delta Force, with plans to add more from the Moroccan GIGR.
  • Emergent Gameplay:
    • Since there are two layers of walls, it is possible to make a variety of weird killhole angles. Some tactics include punching the wall at an extreme angle, creating two displaced holes that don't seem to lead anywhere but still provide an angle to a desired spot.
    • Barricades are designed to break upon three melee hits but are vaultable on two. Since window barricades stretch a bit below their window frame, it is possible to "prep" a window by hitting the wood below the frame two times then jump out later to surprise enemies on the other side.
    • Another tactic involving door barricades is to destroy a few rows of planks at the bottom of the barricade, leaving just enough space for the player to crawl through. Combine it with a rapid prone-dive-to-stand-up, a player can dive out of a door barricade without making much noise.
    • Putting a deployable cover near a wall next to a window can prevent enemies from vaulting through. However enemies can rappel through and will destroy the deployable cover in the process.
    • Players have found out that it is possible to jam certain trapdoors by putting a Mute jammer on a raised surface underneath it like a table, making the jam radius cover the trapdoor. Note that this was impossible at game release, since the jamming radius was smaller.
    • A well-known trick that could be done with either Pulse or Valkyrie is to stick a C4 below a wooden floor, use their gadgets to scan enemies above the wooden floor, then blowing them up with their C4 when they pass over it.
    • Since hatches are destroyed instantly if they are just caught in the explosion radius of Hibana or Thermite's gadget, it is possible to destroy a Muted reinforced hatch by causing an explosion with the gadget nearby.
    • A really tricky way to use the claymores is to punch a tiny hole on a wall so that its laser sticks through a bit. This will cause it to blow up when triggered by enemies across the wall.
  • Every Bullet is a Tracer: Unsuppressed weapons leave a discernable white trail, giving away the shooter's position with wanton firing.
  • Everything Breaks: The game's new engine adds procedural destruction in as a major game mechanic. Bullets and explosions can destroy surfaces and barricades, as well as the occasional obstructive prop. In fact, the destruction of walls and doorways plays significantly into the available tactics.
  • Everything Fades: Related to Everything Breaks above, the destruction engine creates a massive amount of physically interacting debris when even just a single wall is breached. To prevent the game from becoming an unplayable CPU eater, most of the created debris disappears after a short period of time. Everything else stays though.
  • Excuse Plot: The closest thing that Siege has to a story is a series of singleplayer missions more like tutorials and a multiplayer mission that gives a great opening for a story, but never follows through. The actual player versus player modes can't really be considered "canon" since both sides are clearly members of Rainbow.
  • Expansion Pack: Ubisoft releases major expansion packs every three months or so, adding in new Operators and new maps. These Expansion packs are free, released as updates, though paying players will get some extra advantages such as instant operator unlock. There are also Mid-Season Reinforcements, which involve updating and balancing the mechanics of existing Operators, weapons and so on and so forth.
  • The Faceless:
    • Many of the base game Operators wear balacavas or other face-concealing gear. Later added Operators reveal more of their faces, though Vigil has a face-concealing ballistic mask as a point of the backstory.
    • Updates have now shown the faces of several old operators, including IQ, Ash, Doc, Twitch, Frost, and Thermite. Hilariously the same update revealed that Tachanka wears a balaclava at all times under his iconic helmet.
  • Fast-Roping:
    • Taken to new heights, where now the attackers can rappel on almost every surface on the exterior of the map structure, and sometimes on the inside too. They can even jump into windows from a rappel, and there is also a mechanic that allows you to breach a window barricade while you're jumping, giving you a cool moment of Dynamic Entry as your character enters the room with an explosion and a cloud of debris.
    • Amaru's gadget is a physical grappling hook that can also kill Defenders if they are in Amaru's way.
  • Fragile Speedster: The Light Armored Operators. They can travel the maps the fastest, but take the full brunt of bullet damage compared to the rest. The current ones are Ash, Pulse, IQ, Bandit, Capitão, Caveira, Hibana, Ela, Vigil, Alibi, Maverick and Melusi. All of them overlap with Glass Cannon to an extent.
  • Friendly Fireproof:
    • Played straight in the way of most non-explosive gadgets, which will never activate on a friendly stepping into them, so you will never have to worry about crossing a doorway that a Kapkan teammate had trapped, nor will Welcome Mats put you into DBNO if you're a Defender.
    • Fully averted for guns and explosives, and you can injure or even hose down your teammates and hostages if you so choose. However, doing so enough times will activate Reverse Friendly Fire on you (and in the case of a hostage being killed, immediately ends the round for your team as a loss), after which point any further damage dealt to friendlies will be inflicted upon you instead (or in the case of a gadget-sourced damage, the device itself will be destroyed). This persists until the match is over regardless of how many rounds it takes. If you were the one being killed by friendly fire, you will get the option to confirm the act as intentional griefing, or forgive it as an accident, which may or may not result in the offender being forcibly kicked from the match the next time they repeat it.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: Being made on the same engine as the legendarily-buggy Assassin's Creed: Unity, this was bound to happen.
    • Few things causes players as much agony as watching the killcam of their killer's head rear back as if shot there (which should have killed them) due to a hit detection issue.
      • In a bit of Memetic Mutation, the fan community relentlessly mocked Ubisoft's initial response to this bug, which was to suggest that players were, in fact, not getting head shots in these instances but instead getting "neck shots". To their credit, Ubisoft instituted serious netcode changes to address these changes soon after.
    • Players have noticed that Blitz's shield doesn't seem to protect him very well. To wit, you can kill him with things like a shotgun blast to the front. This wasn't a problem on the game's release, where out of the shield operators, players definitely preferred Blitz, but whatever emergent bug caused this problem lead more players that like to use shields to possibly prefer Montagne since at least his Extended Shield gadget will reliably protect you from bullets.
    • Because destruction is client-side, it is possible for small-scale destruction to be not synced up between players. This is generally not a problem until things like getting shot through a seemingly unbroken window or an entire Impact Grenade hole disappears on one player's screen happens.
    • Sometimes enemies will teleport behind shields (due to latency) and kill them without the shield realizing that they're behind them until it's too late. It is almost exclusive to Montagne when he is blocking pathways.
    • After her release, Hibana on the PS4 version can crash the game when using her gadget, disconnect players randomly or drop the frame rate to 0 for seemingly no reason (bearing in mind that the Xbox One and PC versions suffered no issues with it at all). Ubisoft quickly issued a patch (about a day after the launch of the DLC) that, in lieu of actually fixing anything, completely prevents PS4 players from picking Hibana at all. This situation worsened when it was discovered that this fix actually prevented players from progressing past the end of season rewards pop-up. Attempting to click through this pop-up would result in the game crashing. With no other choice, Ubisoft restored Hibana into the game, and thus the glitch with it.
    • Overlapping with Good Bad Bugs, sometimes an operator will have their weapons out on their screen, but on others' screen they are instead holding their gadget like they're preparing to deploy it or sticking out of their body. It becomes game-breaking when an Operator with a deployable shield gets into this bug, because then you'll see them in game with a functional shield covering their torso, causing severe problems when you're trying to kill them.
    • Hibana's pellets have a bug where they will just not detonate, effectively rendering the gadget useless. The bug happens without any sign or any clear reason, occurring seemingly at random.
    • A bug can happen when the player is in the middle of a deploying animation, causing the player to get stuck in it, unable to move or do anything for the rest of the round. The only way to get out of this state is to have another player down the bugged player and help them back up.
    • After the September 19, 2017 patch, inviting a friend to a party in the PS4 version of the game would result in a very nasty bug: not only did this crash the game and somehow glitch your PSN account so badly that you could never send invites for any PS4 game ever again, some users reported hard drive corruption as a consequence of the glitch. This is now fixed, but it gave PS4 players quite a scare.
    • A player may find upon loading after picking an operator that their screen stays black. This persists until they die.
    • The discovery of a Clash glitch in mid-2019 essentially divided the fanbase with the two factions - people who exploited it and people who hated it. Ubisoft eventually disabled Clash gamewide until they could issue a fix for the glitch. Unfortunately, history repeated on December 12, 2019, when the discovery of another glitch forced Ubisoft to disable her again. She was re-enabled on January 10, 2020.And then disabled on February 21, 2020, until it was finally fixed.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration:
    • Since Ela and Zofia grew up together, trained together, and both have experience with concussive weaponsnote , they are resistant towards each other's concussive explosives. As well, due to their rivalry, they get extra points for killing each other.
      • This concussion resistance (along with their passive abilities while downed) was later removed as even gameplay based on lore could get confusing - these abilities had little to do with their actual gadgets and inserted inconsistency into a game already filled with moving parts.
    • Because of their frequent collaboration, Echo is quite familiar with Dokkaebi's Logic Bomb, and developed counter-measures against it, rendering him immune to it.note  This was later changed when Echo was given a ringable phone as a Nerf.
      • Played one step further, when Dokkaebi gains access to the defenders' cameras, Echo's drones are still not available for the attackers. This was also changed in the same update that gave Echo a phone, giving the Attackers access. Dokkaebi seemingly stepped up her game.
    • Finka's Adrenal Surge causes gives all Attackers extra health and steadier aim... but also boosts their breathing and heart rate, making them extra vulnerable to Smoke's Gas Grenades and detectable from further away by Pulse's sensor.
    • Nokk's cloak erases her appearance from most Defender cameras without a trace. Echo and Mozzie, being talented computer scientists, have developed countermeasures to get a Vigil-style bar effect when Nokk affects their drones.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • In multiplayer, the Attackers and Defenders are both teams of Rainbow Operators, even though most situations involving the Defending team's objectives lean on terrorist activities, including hostage-taking and setting bombs of several varieties. In fact, not even the Attacking team is that good. Some can interpret the biohazard container as theirs, or aim to take back one of their own. Really neither side gets out of this scot-free. Or a virtual reality simulation, which is canon according the original Tom Clancy novel.note 
    • Intelligence (the guy on the radio) is the same for both teams and also uses the term "OPFOR," both of which strongly suggest that the multiplayer is actually nothing more than the Rainbows completing elaborate training exercises. Violent, destructive, and bloody training exercises (Though in the original Rainbow Six novel it's been stated that VR training existed).
    • If the game truly is only a simulation, then Caveira's special ability, which has her threaten an enemy into revealing their allies' location, ought to be much less effective. Never mind that the game's elite special agents probably wouldn't spill anything in such a situation, the threat holds no water anyway if it's only a training exercise and they're not actually being tortured or killed.
    • The co-operative "terrorist hunt," where the enemies are White Masks, is probably the closest the game gets to story mode.
  • Genius Bruiser: Some of the Operators just happen to be Gadgeteer Geniuses while being elite special forces, and invented their gadgets to be used in the field. Even operators that didn't engineer their own gadgets tends to have a few degrees.
  • Genre Shift: From a tactical shooter bordering on mil-sim with high emphasis on squad tactics and fire team leadership, to a Counter-Strike esque pseudo-tactical shooter with operator abilities to make it stand out.
  • Grenade Hot Potato: It is possible to pick up a thrown frag grenade and throw it back. It happens rarely due to just how risky it is - player thrown grenades have usually been cooked. But if they're not...
    • It was so rare that Ubisoft eventually removed it entirely.
  • Gun Accessories: Gun modification is present in the game, though there is a fairly limited variety and most players would gravitate to the same choices. An interesting note is that the same gun can have different attachment options for different Operators.
  • Gun Porn: Every CTU uses completely different weapons, and since every season comes with a new CTU, the game has a lot of guns from all over the world.
  • Guide Dang It!: Short video tutorials, text descriptions, and situations do an okay job at explaining the basic mechanics, but with fifty-plus operators with unique mechanics and more than a dozen highly-modifiable maps, Siege can be a difficult game for players to get a handle of.
  • Hammerspace: Everyone's primary weapons and gadgets are pulled out of thin air, along with most of their ammunition, but some take the cake.
    • The fortifications the Defenders carry are ludicrously large. The wall fortifications alone are nearly as wide as most characters are tall, and still occupy a huge amount of space when folded up. And they carry two of them, alongside an infinite amount of wooden barricades.
      • It used to be even more ridiculous during the earlier versions of the game and the Alpha, where hatches were the size of freezer doors instead of a neat little square, but the reinforcement panels themselves were just as small as they are now. Reinforcing a hatch has the window-sized panel unfolding an utterly bizarre amount of plates from within its thin structure to cover the entire surface.
    • No one has any idea how Bandit manages not have his back shatter from carrying all of those along with his weapons, ammunition, and four car batteries that probably weigh 40 pounds each, let alone where he stores them.
    • When Tachanka's ability was a turret, he pulled out a machine gun with a chest-high tripod straight out of his pockets.
  • Hand Cannon:
    • The Desert Eagle that the Navy SEAL Operators use. As usual, the gun has high damage, high recoil, extreme loudness, and is impractical at times, but it can also destroy entire sections of walls with just a few shots, seeing that destruction is caliber-based.
    • Subverted with the Taurus Judge, or "Bailiff 410" as it's called in-game. A mix of a pistol and shotgun that struggles to perform the duties of both with poor environmental destruction and low damage and range.
    • The Gonne-6, introduced in Crimson Heist, is a secondary weapon that fires a single explosive round to clear utility. Its name is derived from "handgonne," an archaic word for "hand cannon".
  • Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Many of the Operators by default don't wear any helmets, not like they provide any additional protection in-game. The rest are either wearing hats or balaclavas or are just bare-headed.
  • Hero Shooter: The game mixes the more realistic gunplay of the Rainbow Six series with some Hero Shooter elements, where Operators get their own weapons (somewhat shared between a CTU), gadgets, and personalities.
  • Hidden Depths: The background information for some of the operatives goes into detail about their off-hours hobbies. Glaz for instance was an art student before he decided to join the military, and in his spare time paints. His artwork is described as bright and expressive.
  • Highly-Conspicuous Uniform:
    • Mostly averted due to the urban environment and most CTUs wearing dark colors, but everyone pretty much plays it straight on the map Yacht, where you can see black uniforms, desert camos and woodland camos in the pure white Canadian arctic.
    • At least, that's if you stick to the default costumes. Some of the alternate costumes and headgears get extremely conspicuous with things like clown facepaints and digital camouflage in orange and white. Jager infamously has a full orange helmet with golden visors as an option, which sticks out in all environments like a "shoot me here" sign.
    • Frost and Buck aren't any better, wearing a bright white uniform which sticks out like a sore thumb on most maps and makes them a perfect target. They're one of the few characters who should have a skin that's not a default skin.
    • Exaggerated with the CBRN, whose default uniform is bright neon yellow. Even their alternate outfits, while more supdued, are still glossy neon colors in Blue and Green.
    • Befitting his background as a rescue worker, Ace wears a bright red suit with reflective highlights. At least a lot of walls on most maps are red.
  • Hollywood Silencer: Downplayed. Suppressed weapons still have a noticable report, but can easily get lost in the noise of battle and importantly remove threat indicators from missed shots and bullet trails. The main drawback is their lack of recoil reduction and prior to Brutal Swarm, slight decrease in damage.
  • Hostage Situation: The Article 5 Situation, which has Rainbow clear a university campus of White Masks who have attacked it with chemical weapons.It's shown that despite Rainbow's intervention, the White Masks have already inflicted mass casualties.
  • Improbably Female Cast: Some have noted that the game's gender representation is actually unrealistic, since most special units are populated with an overwhelming majority of males (GIGN, for example, does not admit females in its intervention force, which is the main assault force of GIGN), unlike the 50-50 ratio that the game is slowly approaching. Few have complained about it though.
  • Improperly Placed Firearms: Many of the guns are not actually used by their CTUs in real life, and are presumably present just for coolness and making sure that at least one gun is from the country the CTU is from. The biggest offender would be the Desert Eagles that the Navy SEAL operators use, but later additions with the CBRN and SDU feature guns that either aren't used by any military yet or never even entered the prototype phase!
    • The two Moroccan GIGR operators use an AMC Auto Mag as their sidearm - a weapon infamous for being too heavy, too big, too inaccurate, significantly rare and thus extremely expensive, as well as having borderline unobtainable proprietary ammunition and being all-around impractical in general.
  • Incredibly Obvious Bomb: The bombs in Bomb mode are giant man-tall gas canisters held in large cages with electronic stuff attached to it. As if that wasn't enough to indicate that it's a chemical bomb, they even added beeping lights and a gas dispersal effect.
  • Ink-Suit Actor: Angela Bassett is the head of Rainbow (the "Six"), but appears only to introduce the singleplayer situations.
  • Jack of All Stats:
    • Medium Armored Operators. They're usually equipped with decent weaponry and special gadgets, though some are unremarkable as well as a result.
    • In terms of weapon attachments, the Flash Hider. This barrel attachment is the most versatile of the five, useful for controlling burst fire as well as the added bonus of hiding the flash and slightly dimming the bullet trail.
  • Land Mine Goes "Click!": Several Attackers have access to claymore mines. While they don't go click and are not the remote-detonated mines they are in real life, they are instead mounted with a laser trigger which shoots out three lasers (somehow, the laser disappears after a short range) in an arc and detonates the claymore when a defender steps on any of them with a distinctive beep.
  • Laser Sight: The Laser sight can't be toggled on or off, but it does increase hipfire accuracy. Originally, it was a borderline useless attachment in online multiplayer, since the entire beam of the laser was visible to the enemy team, creating a literal bright-red line pointing out exactly where you were hiding to the other team. Now, it has been patched so that only the dotted point of the laser is visible, making it a more viable option.
    • Nomad has an exclusive yellow laser sight which only appears when she's firing her Airjabs. However, unlike the default laser sight, the entire yellow line is fully visible.
  • Let's Split Up, Gang!:
    • Defending teams often designate specific players as 'Roamers', players who position themselves way outside of the objective area and try to flank enemies from behind, pick off enemies with guerrilla tactics, or at the very least waste time. Roamers often use Fragile Speedster Operators such as Jäger, Bandit, and Caveira, providing high speed to outmaneuver enemies, though slower operators can be used to roam as well. In fact, all-out turtling is considered a bad idea since it surrenders the rest of the map, and Fuze will absolutely obliterate any attempts at doing it.
    • Splitting up on the attacking side is also a valid strategy, able to gain control over significant portions of the map very quickly and hunt down roamers by attacking from multiple angles. They will most likely converge on the objective from multiple sides in the last minute of the round.
  • Long-Range Fighter: Glaz, Twitch, Dokkaebi, Blackbeard, and Kali can count as this. Glaz's Unique Flip Sight coupled with his unique Sniper Rifle makes him a powerful marksman, while Twitch, Dokkaebi and Blackbeard have semi-automatic Marksman Rifles that can make them function like one as well. Kali's bolt-action sniper rifle can down players in one hit. While they're not terrible at close range, automatic fire can bring them down easily. Unless you're Blackbeard and have a Rifle Shield on.
  • Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Siege uses Ballistic shields more extensively then the previous games. In particular, Montagne has a ballistic shield called "Le Roc" (the rock) that can expand to cover his entire body and pretty much makes him (and the teammates behind him) invincible from the front. Since the Dust Line update, Montagne's Shield received a significant buff in the form of side panels. These allow him to be an even better pointman, since his shield can protect him much better now as he previously left his flanks easy to shoot at. Other Operators who use shields include Blitz, who can use a custom Flash Shield that can blind enemies akin to flashbangs, Clash, a defender with a full-body shield with a tazer, Osa, who can deploy her shields as static cover, and Fuze, who has a shield without a gimmick.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • Applies to most of the operators' nicknames'. Take the GIGN defender Rook for example, his nickname is taken from rook in chess. The rook has a strong defensive role on the chessboard, which complements with Rook's special ability to drop a pack of armor plates for his teammates. It's also a reference to his hometown, as he hails from Tours, a city in France. (Tour means tower in French, and Rook's former Operator icon - the rook chess piece - resembles a tower.)
    • The names of the JTF2 Operators allude to Canada, with Buck referring not only to his buckshot shotgun but also the deer in Canada, while Frost is a reference to just how cold Canada is.
    • Both of the Navy SEAL Operators, Valkyrie and Blackbeard, have names related to naval legends and mythologies because they're Navy SEALs.
  • Mechanically Unusual Class:
    • Clash, a defender with an electric shield.
    • Thermite, Hibana, Maverick and Ace have the unique gimmick of being able to breach through reinforced walls, giving them incredibly important and irreplaceable team roles. While this has been diminished with the introduction of the hard breach charge secondary gadget, a dedicated hard-breacher is almost always taken.
      • Maverick has a gadget that lets him breach reinforced walls in any way he likes, be it small peek holes or straight through electrified or muted walls.
    • Caveira has a lot of gimmicks that give her a completely different playstyle from everyone else in the game. Along with a unique (supposedly) non-lethal pistol called Luison, she also has a special cooldown-based ability called Silent Step, which allows her to be deathly silent and incredibly hard to listen for, and she has the ability to interrogate the enemy to reveal the other enemies' locations for a small period of time.
    • Vigil follows suit by having a different take on the same "recharging stealth" idea, by instead rendering him electronically invisible. This makes him harder to spot on cameras or drones and allows him to ambush where people think they're safe.
    • Nokk combines the traits of Caveira and Vigil with the same stealth mechanics, wiping her image from cameras and reducing her noise.
    • Lesion and Wamai gain their gadgets over time, making them more powerful the longer in the late round.
    • Oryx and Amaru are the only members of their respective teams capable of going up hatches.
  • Metagame: The game has a well-developed and still constantly evolving metagame, as each "season" brings two new operators, a new map, and a host of new weapons to the table. The exceptions being Seasons 2 through 4 of Year Two, the former of which focuses on game health and doesn't add any operators, and the latter two which add three Operators (one each from the Polish JW GROM alongside the intended two from, respectively, the Hong Kong Special Duties Unit and South Korean 707th Special Mission Battalion).
  • Metal Detector Checkpoint: A few maps, like Bank and Border, have metal detectors. They are noted to be a bit inconsistent, sometimes going off when an Operator passes through and sometimes ignoring them.
  • Mighty Glacier:
    • Attacking Operator Fuze is this by virtue of his more varied set of weapons, unlike the other two Shield-Centred Operators. His Cluster Charges are the most powerful gadgets in his arsenal, and can also swap from a Stone Wall to this trope since he has a wider selection of weapons. He suffers from low speed because of heavy armor though. On the defending side, Operators Rook, Doc, Kapkan, Tachanka, Mira and Maestro are known for their powerful equipment and high armor, but slow speed.
    • Played with in regards to Navy SEAL Operator Blackbeard. When deploying his Rifle Shield, he's immune to headshots from a frontal assault and has two powerful rifles on his loadout, but is reduced to a one tier movement speed without an equivalent armor upgrade to the rest of his body as long as its equipped.
    • For the defenders, the newly added Clash brings the first defending shield. What changes her from a Stone Wall though is her offensive abilities while the shield is up, as well as its vulnerability to melee attacks making her ineffective in close quarters compared to other shields.
  • Military Maverick: A few operators, crossing over with Mildly Military.
    • Ela wasn't a lifer with the military or federal police like every other operator - the closest she got to formal military training prior to showing up to GROM tryouts was attending a military high school academy. Instead, she was trained by a small mercenary outfit and combat in Iraq, and was known for being disrespectful to her chain of command.
    • Dokkaebi comes from a hi-tech, non-military background, and did not play well with the others on her team, due to her carefree, joking attitude grating with the more serious ultra-moto operators, ranging from non-standard gear and tactics to, well, acting like a civilian. She's a lot more playful, non-reg, and overall a lot more talkative than most of Rainbow's Operators. Unsurprisingly, her overall attitude did not sit well with her former superiors, not helped by the fact that she deliberately played up these aspects to piss them off.
    • Alibi leaked intel in order to force an Operation to take down a local crime organization that was trafficking in refugees and immigrants.
    • Maverick went MIA for years before returning to dismantle terror cells single handedly!
  • Mocking Music: Tame Impala's "Elephant" has an absolutely viscous bass that makes for good fight music in The Hammer and the Scalpel CGI Short. It's also a song mockingly describing an unlikable and obstrucutive man pridefully and aggresively set in his ways very much like Thatcher.
  • Mother Russia Makes You Strong: The Russian Spetsnaz are assault-centered Operators who wear heavy-duty gear (none of them are Light Armored Operators). All of them have a level of seriousness instilled in their characters.
  • Multinational Team: More heavily emphasized than previous games and mostly enforced. Without using recruits to fill up the ranks, it is not possible for either side to consist entirely of Operators from a single country, since there are at most 2 operators of a single CTU from one country on one side, and there are only 6 CTUs that are from the same country. Specifically, the FBI have two attackers each from Delta Force and the Navy SEALs and another SEAL and a Secret Service member as a defender, the GIGN now have a third attacker through CBRN, as do the Spetznaz, and the SAS have a third British defender from the SCO19.
  • Multi-Ranged Master: Buck. His gadget, the Skeleton Key, is an underbarrel shotgun that allows him to swap from his primary weapons' mid- or long-range to close-range at a moment's notice, allowing him to be very versatile at any distance.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: Many trailers and promotional materials made it seem like that the Rainbow operators are fighting as a single unified force sieging into terrorist hideouts. They did not mention the Gameplay and Story Segregation that the defenders are also Rainbow operators. Some of the later trailers decide to make it clear.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Fuze's cluster charges obliterate anything in the zone, which can unfortunately include the hostage and even his teammates.
  • Not the Intended Use: Breach charges can be used as impromptu manual landmines by placing one on the floor and blowing it up when the enemies pass over it.
    • Sledge's hammer is a One-Hit Kill if it hits any enemies. It consumes 2 out of a maximum 25 charges, but it looks cool.
  • Non-Standard Game Over:
    • In Bomb mode, the defuser counts as defused (and thus round loss for the attackers) if it is moved in any way. Therefore, if a defuser is planted on top of a destructible hatch and the hatch is destroyed, the defuser will fall down and the attackers will immediately lose.
    • In hostage extraction/defense, death of the hostage counts as an immediate loss for whichever side killed him. This gives a slight advantage to the Defenders, since it makes some Attacker gadgets with wide and unfocused areas of effect (like Fuze's cluster charges) useless, and even if the Defenders don't consciously use the hostage as a shield, the Attackers still need to take care not to accidentally hit him.
  • Nonuniform Uniform:
    • Every operator wears a slightly different battledress to differentiate them while fitting their CTU's "theme". For instance, SAS's "theme" is dark blue battledress with a gas mask headgear, and each of the four SAS Operators uses a different gas mask, and Thatcher also uses a noticeably older bulletproof vest compared to the rest. This has been averted in Year 2 of the DLCs, as now each CTU can purchase "season" themed uniforms - allowing for all the players to match if they are so inclined.
    • This also applies in another way. Apparently, Rainbow allows its Operators to dress in their old combat uniforms from their CTUs when operating as Rainbow, nevermind that most of them look widely different (the most extreme contrast would have to be JTF2 operators wearing arctic camo alongside Navy SEALs wearing desert camo, CBRN in neon yellow, and SAS wearing black) and could cause problems with friendly identification in a real situation. Compare with the earlier Rainbow Six titles, where all Rainbow operators use more similar-looking combat uniforms.
    • Justified with the CBRN Threat Unit. They a specifically brought in to deal with Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear threats, and as such have to wear the proper protective gear to deal with them. Why they are wearing suits coloured neon yellow and black, when every major military has protective suits that are either camouflaged or in muted colours is another question...note 
    • Especially notable with the GSUTR. Maverick wears a US Army desert uniform with some traditional Afghan clothing, while Clash wears her Metropolitan Police uniform and riot gear. This highlights the fact that they aren't actually from the same unitnote , but were instead brought in due to their experience with fighting in urban environments.
  • Obvious Rule Patch: Defenders used to be able to exploit a tiny bit of platform of a deployable shield by vaulting on to it from the side, allowing them to reach otherwise unreachable areas. The amount of unexpected exploits coming from this ended up making Ubisoft patch it so that standing on it will cause it to immediately collapse.
  • One Bullet Clips: Normal gameplay plays this as straight as the previous Rainbow Six: Vegas games, with the caveat about chambered rounds taken to the extreme that it even works on open-bolt weapons that only ever have a bullet in the chamber when the trigger's already been pulled to fire them (a later update removed this for the belt-fed machine guns, but other open-bolt weapons still have it). Averted in Tactical Realism mode, which goes back to tracking individual magazines just like in the first three games.
  • Quick Melee: Melee is done by a quick press of a button. It kills enemies in one hit or downs them if you have a shield, though most of the time it is used for punching holes in walls and breaking down barricades.
  • Qurac: The map Border is set in a border checkpoint between two unknown Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern countries (the trailer simply identified it as Middle East). Generic depictions of outdated technology, barren landscape, military and terrorist presence, and Islamic architecture are present on the map.
  • Recursive Canon: Rainbow Six Siege arcade cabinets and manga books can be found on some maps.
  • Reinforce Field: The defenders' Wall Reinforcement works like a non sci-fi version of the trope. The Wall Reinforcement is a folded-up metal wall, deployed to the ground near the destructible wall folded up (its length conveniently fits the wall's size or a perfect fraction of it), and the defender pulls it up to chest height, then operates a lever which in one motion pushes the upper half to the top and with another motion secures the metal wall to the destructible wall with piston-operated pins. The resultant wall is indestructible to bullets (though taller walls leave a destructible section at the top, since the height of the metal wall stays constant) and can only be destroyed by gadgets specifically meant to breach them.
  • Remote, Yet Vulnerable: Any Operator that goes on their observation tools (cameras, drones, Iana Geminis, etc.) will have their player character persist in the world and unaware of their surroundings. Operators who do most of their work on their cameras, such as Twitch, Maestro and Echo, are especially vulnerable in this state.
  • Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The multiplayer map "Oregon" is a raid on a compound for one of these groups.
  • Ripped from the Headlines: Several of the missions in the base game are loosely based upon real-life special forces raids. For example, "Clubhouse" is based upon German police raids on the Hells Angels, "Bank" is based on the United California bank robbery, "Plane" on the raid of Air France flight 8969, "Oregon" on the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, "Kafe" on the Moscow theater siege, and so on.
  • Rocket-Tag Gameplay: One-shot headshots and very fast time-to-kill make any firefight fast-paced and deadly. This is exaggerated in the Golden Gun arcade playlist, where any hit is an instant kill. Make your one shot count.
  • Rule of Fun: Some of the mechanics are designed with gameplay than any kind of realism in mind.
    • Drones and Cameras have the ability to "scan", which places a 3D ping on the screens on all teammate players, placed on the current position of any enemies that the camera can see. How the Operators are able to actually see such a ping, nevermind how the camera identifies who and what to ping with unerring accuracy, is never explained. Also, scanned players will receive a message that they have been detected, with a similar lack of explanation as to how they're supposed to know this. They could just be a mix of Anti-Frustration Features and Mutual Disadvantage mechanics to encourage calling out the positions to your teammates instead of letting the game do its job, but it's still weird thinking about it.
  • Rule of Cool: Sledge can One-Hit Kill enemies with his breaching hammer, even though it uses 2 charges out of 25.
  • Security Blindspot: Many deployable gadgets have effect radii that can be skirted around to avoid them. Luckily, said area is visible during deployment, allowing the player to adjust them as needed. Cameras also may have limited viewing angles.
  • Shotguns Are Just Better: Shotguns are really effective in this game thanks to the more realistic game mechanics and destruction. Many shotguns in the game have a respectable reach that lies somewhere between common media depictions and real life effective range. They can also punch giant kill-holes on destructible surfaces with just one shot, and they get the added bonus of being able to destroy the wooden support beams inside (other guns can't destroy them), making it possible to create a passageway entirely through shotgun blasts. About the only situation they falter in is taking down Bombers in Terrorist Hunt, since the pellets realistically lack the armor penetration to punch through the bombers' heavy armor and shotguns in Siege lack bonus headshot damage for balance reasons.
  • Shout-Out:
    • One of Doc's headgears is called Exner and is a reference to Watchmen's Rorschach. The headgear itself is named after John E. Exner, who created a standardised system of interpreting Rorschach tests.
    • The samurai armor on display in the Skyscraper Map has the Assassin's logo from Assassin's Creed on their belts.
    • Echo's gadget, the Yokai, is a flying drone which can interfere with enemies by way of ultrasonic pulses and can land on flat surfaces to cloak itself from detection - much like the drone from another Tom Clancy-branded game, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. As a bonus, the name Yokai roughly translates to "ghost".
    • When the developers began expanding the headgear selections, they began creating a number of them as movie reference. For example, IQ's "Suckermouth" is an unmasked Predator, Valkrye's "Overlord" is the doll from Saw, Doc's "Furious" is Max's face mask from Mad Max: Fury Road, and so on.
    • Scotland Yard's Morowa Evans, experienced in urban riot control situations, was given the callsign "Clash".
    • SASR operative Mozzie's real name is Max Goose.
    • The map "Villa" is a raid on the Vinciguerra crime family, the same one referenced in Alibi's bio. The Vinciguerras were the antagonists of the film The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
  • The Siege: The game is centered around attackers trying to besiege into the main building of the map to get to the objective, and defenders defending against them.
  • Sinister Surveillance: Defenders get surveillance cameras on pre-set positions on the maps, usually three on the outside and four on the inside. Despite being relatively easy to take out after learning the map thoroughly, they are still very useful at gathering indirect information on the positions of the enemies. Defenders can add to the camera network with a variety of gadgets.
  • Smoke Out:
    • Smoke grenades are available to a variety of attacking operators, used to block lines of sight, conceal movement, and cover the plant in the Bomb gamemode.
    • Glaz however, turns the whole thing upside-down with his ability to see through smoke with his thermal optics, making smoke grenades an unintentionally dramatic sign of a massive Glaz entrance. Warden and thermal cameras can see through smoke as well, allowing them to get the drop on attackers that think they're safe.
    • SAS Defender Smoke uses remote toxic gas grenades to cut off choke points and plant spots, and while his yellow clouds are not as opaque, he can also use them to conceal movement.
  • Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: A player with a good sound quality can identify the subtle differences in a noise to gain important intel on what the enemies are attempting to do. Obvious sounds include footsteps, drop sounds, explosions, gunshots, reload noise, drone noise, and C4 beeps. Turning when prone makes loud shuffling sounds, while jumping in from a rappel makes zipping sounds. All the gadgets also make their own sounds. A Breach Charge makes an unfolding noise when deployed, grenades have the audible pin-pull sound, and even the act of pulling out a C4 is accompanied by an audible rip as the defender tears the tape from the C4. And that is not even getting to the Operator-specific gadgets.
  • The Squadette: Most of the CTUs (exceptions being SAS, Spetsnaz and GROM, the latter of which features two sisters as the CTU's representative,) feature a single female operator in their ranks with all other operators being male. The DLC CTUs, with the exception of the aforementioned GROM, also follow this rule on technicality, since only two operators are introduced per CTU and that means one male and one female operator is added per season.
    • And the Spetsnaz is an odd example, since there is a female Spetsnaz operatornote , she's just considered part of the CBRN Threat Unit CTU rather than the Spetsnaz CTU.
  • Sticky Bomb: The Nitro Cell, the game's name for C4, is a non-Operator-specific gadget available to the defenders. It looks like a C4 block wired to a cellphone and wrapped with two-sided tape. The defenders will tear out the tape when using it, allowing it to stick to surfaces and detonate by giving the cellphone a call with another cellphone. It doesn't stick to enemies though.
  • Sticks to the Back: Zig-Zagged. Primary weapons disappear when secondary weapons are selected to, but secondary weapons can be seen in their holsters or attached to where the holsters should be, as bulky weapons like machine pistols and secondary shotguns would not fit in them.
    • Shields are worn on operator's backs without attachment points when not equipped.
    • Sledge and Capitao wear their primary gadgets on their backs when not using them and have actual mounts to attach them to.
  • The Stoic: Everyone. While characters do have quotes, there is a very high chance where they will simply stay silent, giving few hints to their less stoic personalities. In fact, the people who talk the most in this game are probably the White Mask AI enemies. Justified since Rainbow is an elite unit of professionals.
  • Stone Wall:
    • The Attacking Operators Montagne and Blitz wield specialized Ballistic Shields and are generally the most heavily armored of the attackers, but are limited to pistols as a result.
    • Defending Operators Echo and Clash play a far more defensive approach compared to the other Heavy Armored Defenders. While they do still have decent firepower, these Defenders are better suited to support roles due to their gadgets and loadouts.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: To make the destruction mechanics do work, the game has a lot of explosive gadgets. Non-operator specific explosive gadgets for the Attackers include Frag Grenades (that can be cooked, thrown, and even thrown back), Breaching Charges (placed on walls and floors then manually detonated), Claymore mines are added in Update 4.2 (placed on the ground, emits lasers, detonates when defenders touches the lasers), while the defenders get Nitro Cells (thrown and sticks to any surface it touches, manually detonated) and Impact Grenades (low-damage grenades that are generally used to open perfect vault-holes).
  • Super Window Jump: Some windows that are not too high off the ground can be jumped through after their barricade is damaged enough. Naturally, defenders can utilize this to ambush attackers after learning their locations, jumping out with a cool shower of instantly-broken glass and broken barricade planks.
  • Surveillance Drone: Each attacker gets two tube-shaped hand-sized ground drones to locate enemies. They are pretty fast, can climb up stairs and jump, and can also scan enemies' positions, but are taken out in one hit. Do not underestimate them, they are highly emphasized in the attacker metagame due to the asymmetrical nature of information acquirement in the game.
  • Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: The operator gadgets are often direct or indirect counters to opposing operator's gadgets. Thermite can blow open reinforced walls, but either Bandit or Mute can prevent him, but then Thatcher can eliminate their defenses. Kapkan can blow up Sledge (or anybody) who hammers open a door, but Ash can blow them open from a distance and set off the trap. And so on.
  • Technology Porn:
    • Most of the special gadgets carried by Rainbow operators in Siege are completely fictional except for a few, such as Sledge's breaching hammer, Buck's underbarrel shotgun and Tachanka's deployable machine gun. Those that are however, tend to be bleeding-edge experimental military tech with cool demonstrations of their powers in the Operator videos.
      • Even so, Buck's underbarrel shotgun takes several liberties with its design, more like its depiction in Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 than the real weapon. The original inspiration for it (the M26 MASS) is bolt-action, while his in-game SK 4-12 fires semi-automatically.
    • If anything, the animation for reinforcing a wall is highly elaborate and believable for a completely fictional gadget. They are expanded from a bar to waist height, a lever is pulled that pushes the upper half into position, and then by pushing the lever upward pins are pushed out to hold the wall in position. The realistic sounds the gadget makes (like the thunk of gas pistons) really sells the believability of the gadget.
  • There Was a Door: With all the gadgets, barricades, and guns pointed at normal entryways, would you really go through a door when there is a perfectly breachable wall right next to it?
  • Throw Down the Bomblet:
    • Naturally, Frag Grenades are available. Useful for killing defenders, clearing utility, and making traversable holes with the right timing. Due to their high versatility, they are sparingly available and are primarily used by Sledge, Maverick, and Finka.
    • Impact Grenades are available to the Defenders, and while they deal less damage, they'll create openings cleanly and relatively efficiently. Smoke, Castle, Rook and Caveira are some of the more common users of this gadget.
  • Trap Master: Frost and Kapkan by virtue of their gadgets. Their Bios explicitly state they're also trained trappers outside of work. Kapkan's Entry Denial Device remains mostly hidden with proper care until its set off by the enemy, where it explodes. Frost's Welcome Mat can immediately put Operators in a Down But Not Out state.
    • And now Lesion and Ela can be added to the list, the former with his almost-invisible poison dart Gu mines and the latter with her sticky Grzmot concussion mines. Lesion's Gu mines shoot a poison dart into its victim's leg, dealing impact damage and causing poison damage-over-time every two seconds after. Ela's Grzmot mines don't do damage when they explode, but they stun and disorient the victim similar to how Echo's Yokai drone disorients players.
  • 20 Minutes into the Future:
    • The game apparently takes place a little into the future (no specific dates are given), since Rainbow is equipped with technologies that are a little more advanced than what we have currently. The Skyscraper map even has a holographic table in one room.
    • Even more prevalent in Operation Chimera, as Finka has access to Nanomachines to provide temporary health boosts to herself and her teammates, while Lion has a UAV that can let attackers see enemies through walls as they move. And, you know, the whole "Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico, being overrun by mutants caused by a virus from a meteor".
  • Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable: Rather notably, Plane has a hallway on the bottom floor that is fully sealed off on all sides by destructible walls. It is entirely possible for a team to trap themselves inside this hallway by blasting a hole into the hallway, get everybody in, then reinforcing all the walls from the inside, effectively giving the round to the enemy as they are now stuck in a metal box with no way to get out.
  • Unusable Enemy Equipment: No one can pick up anyone else's dropped weapons, though some shotguns and sidearms are available for Operators of the same CTU on both sides. Some of the gadgets like Rook's body armor can be be used by the opposing team if they manage to get their hands on it.
  • Violation of Common Sense
    • "Resetting" is a health-regenerating tactic allows a player who hadn't downed yet to regenerate to 20 health and potentially survive another encounter where the downed state wouldn't help. The way to do this is to have a teammate deal Scratch Damage to the low-health player to down them, then revive them to 20 hp. This way, a player might just survive an encounter that could've left them downed and effectively dead if they were any lower.
    • If a hostage is killed by a defender - including any of their Booby Traps - it counts as victory for the attackers. This results in attackers grabbing the hostage that they are supposed to be trying to save and charging towards the nearest deadly trap rather then escorting them all the way to the extraction point.
    • Conversely, if a hostage is killed by an attacker, it counts as victory for the defenders. This makes hostages (that defenders are supposed to protect) ideal Human Shields for a defender to hide behind.
      • Granted, this makes more sense. It's not exactly all that strange for a terrorist to use hostages as human shields.
  • Western Terrorists: The "white mask" terrorists are given no concrete identity, but they all appear to be caucasian males and speak with an American accent. A couple maps even suggest they could be a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic group.
  • When All You Have Is a Hammer…: The Frag Grenade is considered the best generic gadget due to just how versatile it is. Killing enemies outside of visual range, destroying unreinforced hatches, destroying defensive gadgets that are otherwise difficult to counter, blowing up enemies from below, creating perfect crawl holes on walls through timed explosion, and a host of other uses. There is a reason why people sometimes pick Operators just for their Frag Grenades, and why some of the most common nerfs are having them taken away.
  • Wreaking Havok: Half of the fun of Siege is manipulating the many destructible facets of every map's walls and floors to get the killing edge on the enemy team.
  • You Monster!: Invoked by name: injuring the hostage more than once, the score message will change from "Civilian Injured" to "You Monster". Also penalizes you with -100 points, adding on with each time you injure the hostage.

    Outbreak 
  • All There in the Manual: The Rainbow Leaks site gives more details on the blockade in Truth & Consequences and a hacker group trying to expose Rainbow's involvement in covering up the virus' outbreak.
  • Badass in Distress: Jäger and his helicopter are struck down, forcing the on-site team to rescue him.
  • Body Horror: The people infected by the Chimera Virus have spikes grown out of them. The infected are less Left 4 Dead and more Dead Space or [PROTOTYPE].
  • Boss in Mook's Clothing: You have the Giant Mook Smashers which can only be damaged by shooting a weak spot on their backs, and the mage-like Apex which fire projectile attacks and also release pheromones that buff regular infected.
  • Early-Bird Cameo: The Smasher's mechanics of smashing through walls and knocking operators back (potentially through walls as well) were recycled for Oryx's Remah Dash and Nomad's Airjabs, respectively.
  • Militaries Are Useless: Averted with the New Mexico National Guard units, which were deployed to seal the area off and assist RAINBOW forces in securing the perimeter.
  • No Ending: After retrieving the Soviet-era capsule that sparked off the whole mess... that's it. There's no word on its aftermath, and the entire incident is never mentioned in any form, ever again. Well, not until Extraction.
  • Police Are Useless: The T&C Police Department was wiped out during the initial stages of the outbreak. Justified as the outbreak was spotaneous and they were taken by surprise.
  • Tone Shift: An extraterrestrial-based monster mutation apocalypse event inside a semi-realistic tactical shooter is a fairly odd concept to grasp in and of itself.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: The town of Truth Or Consequences has been overtaken by an alien parasite that turns people into spiky, mutated monsters. Same difference.

    Showdown 

    Doktor's Curse 
  • Asymmetric Multiplayer: The only way the monsters can defend themselves is with traps and gadgets and must thus run and hide — though the exterminators also have a massive information advantage.
  • Invisibility: The monsters have a unique ability called Nightstride that makes them invisible and increases their speed for a short period of time.

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