The next season of Rainbow Six Siege, North Star, will be deployed today, according to a surprise announcement from Ubisoft.
The approximate downtime will be an hour per platform. For Steam and Ubisoft Connect users, the download will be available at 8am CT. For Xbox, you can download it as of 9am CT, and for PlayStation, 10am CT. The patch size will be four GBs for Steam, six GBs for Ubisoft Connect, four GBs for Xbox One, five GBs for the Xbox Series X, and four GBs for both the PS4 and PS5.
North Star will introduce Thunderbird, an aggressive defender armed with the Spear .308, the Bearing-9, and a choice between the nitro cell and impact grenades. It also brings fixes to bullet-hole peeking and Smoke’s toxic gas canister propagation. Favela has been reworked as well, but don’t expect to see it in ranked or unranked—it’s a mere casual rework.
All in all, North Star doesn’t have lots of new content but comes with a ton of minor game tweaks to improve the title’s quality of life. The fixes to frustrating experiences like bullet holes and map reworks are nice, but complaints from the community about the lack of new content have grown louder every season where there aren’t two new operators and a new map like there was in every operation up until Y5S1.
Regardless, the new season will excite and invigorated Rainbow Six Siege fans, even if it’s for a smaller amount of time than in the past. The new operator and some tweaks or nerfs to existing operators like Mira and Melusi should make for enough fresh changes to the game for now.