Rainbow Six Siege’s new season adds a new operator, map, and cross-play

The newest update to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege brings a new operator who can detect enemy tech, a new map, plus cross-progression and cross-play. The fourth and final season of Year 7 is called Operation Solar Raid, and defender Solis takes the stage. The Colombian character has a SPECI-IO Electro-Sensor gadget that detects attacker drones and devices. Solis also has special gloves that interact with the gadget overlay, allowing her to trigger a cluster scan for enemy tech.

The brand new map is called Nighthaven Labs, and it’s a mix between open sea, verdant cliffs, and a laboratory of technological marvels. Players will be able to break down the walls of the lab with Rainbow Six’s signature siege combat, so it’ll be interesting to see how players adapt to this new locale, especially since it will not be bannable in competitive play to allow players to learn the layout.

The Solar Raid season also brings lots of big picture changes for quality of life. Ranked play now has a new system that has players compete up five divisions throughout the course of a rank, instead of having their progress linked to a matchmaking rating. MMR is now known as “skill” in the system, a hidden value for all styles of play that does not reset at the end of a season. Players can squad up with any of their friends, and the matchmaking system will find a group of equivalent skill.

Tuesday’s update also brings cross-play and progression over Ubisoft Connect, which will allow players to keep their account progress and unlocks across console and PC. Players can opt-out of cross-play in the Options menu. Ubisoft has also added a host of smaller quality of life changes, like removing friendly fire during team set-up and allowing Zofia and Capitao to switch ammo types for their devices when they are unequipped.

Operation Solar Raid goes live on Dec. 6, and is available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.