Non-verbal communication in Rainbow Six Siege is getting a major upgrade. With Ping 2.0, players will have new ways to call out gadgets to teammates without a mic. The first iteration of Ping 2.0, coming to the Siege test server in the first half of Year 5, will let players ping gadgets to show their exact location on the map.
This is the first big iteration to Siege’s ping system since the game’s release in 2015. Currently, you can ping a location with a generic yellow mark. It works great, but it’s hard to tell why somebody is pinging something unless they accompany it with a voice callout. After seeing Apex Legends’ innovative contextual pings last year, Siege fans started asking Ubisoft to implement something similar.
It’s taken a year, but it’s finally happening (sort of). As you can see above, Ping 2.0 only works when pinging a gadget. Each player can only have one of these gadget pings active at once, but they stay on-screen indefinitely (or until that gadget is destroyed). It’s a solid first step, but a long way from Apex’s extensive wheel of contextual callouts.
Apex Legends-Inspired Ping System (Fan Concept) from r/Rainbow6
Speaking to lead game designer Jean-Baptiste Halle and game director Leroy Athanassoff at the Six Invitational 2020, Ubi is definitely aware of how players would like to see Ping 2.0 expanded in the future. “Players have been showing us mockups of [ping systems] for years,” Halle said. “The thing is, we want it to be an iterative process because it’s a big game.” Basically, the plan is to start small and improve instead of upending the ping system all at once.
Ubi doesn’t know what the final iteration will look like, but Athanassoff says the end goal is a contextual system where I can, for example, ping a wall with a specific icon that means “breach this.” It might take a long time to get there, but it sounds worth the wait.
