Rainbow Six: Vegas Played an Invaluable Role in the History of the First-Person Shooter
I’ve always found it funny that so many people elope to Las Vegas to get married in one of the city’s many chapels, because ten years ago, Vegas is where I learnt to fall in love.
I remember Vegas as a place of neon lights, slot machines and armed terrorists, where rolling firefights, scripted action sequences and the art of poking a little fiber optic camera under a door returned my faith not just in the Rainbow Six series, but shooting games in general.
Rainbow Six: Vegas is one of the most important shooters ever made. It was a bold reinvention of the series that showed not only that there was a market for AAA single-player tactical shooters, but also that you can experiment with a series safely, as long as you remember what made it so great in the first place.
The franchise was in disarray after 2005’s Rainbow Six Lockdown bombed and the general consensus was that the series had lost track of its roots. The hardcore fans wanted Rainbow Six 3 again, while thousands of angry forum posts complained that the series was too slow, too hard and didn’t have a gravity gun. What they got was a run and gun blaster that left many dissatisfied.
A year later, Rainbow Six: Vegas breached onto the scene, clutching a realistically modeled Glock 18 in its hands and urging you to pay attention. Vegas was a “real” Rainbow Six game, with just a handful of bullets delivering you to an untimely game over screen. This and many other features signaled a return to realism, a series hallmark, although the game itself was a reinvention of the Rainbow Six series that had come before. The biggest up front change was doing away with pre-mission briefings and even the concept of separate missions to keep the pace consistent, but it also made bold steps with concessions to the difficulty including a regenerating health system and a forgiving cover system.
The loss of the planning stage drew a lot of ire from fans, myself included, but I found that the core loop of planning and executing was still there, except instead of plotting an entire raid of an embassy in one fluid sequence, it became more granular. The scope of my plans tended to stick to the act of breaching and clearing the next room, and no further. It was quite satisfying, hanging outside of a window on a rappel and marking terrorists from above as they argue amongst themselves about how best to execute a female hostage who’s sobbing on the ground between them. There’s an element of danger you didn’t really get with the sterile planning phases of the original, and you were often forced to act using imperfect intel or a flawed starting position because time is of the essence.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
