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Ubisoft has u-turned a decision to prepare Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege for Asian territories by amending or removing a number of in-game visuals to temper references to violence, sex, and gambling.
Earlier this month, Ubisoft said it was preparing for a "single, global vision" and outlined planned changes to make the game compliant with Asian laws. But as the development team wants to avoid the duplication of work involved in running two or more different builds to appease the laws in different countries, the changes were initially intended to come wholesale and affect all versions. However, the community pushed back and many expressed their dismay at the announcement, with some players insisting that some of these changes, such as removal of the slot machines, will indeed have an impact on gameplay.
The publisher has now announced that it will be reverting those changes given the strong community feedback. A new blog post (thanks, Eurogamer) said the team had "spent the last week working on solutions and have decided that we will be reverting all aesthetic changes".
"We will begin reverting these changes alongside the launch of Wind Bastion so no player is impacted; we ask you to be patient if some elements remain," the post adds. "We will carefully remove them all to the best of our ability considering the short timeframe and with the lowest impact on the season’s launch date and our build stability."
The decision to revert the changes came about "following the conversation with our community over the past couple of weeks, alongside regular discussions with our internal Ubisoft team". The team wants "to ensure that the experience for all our players, especially those that have been with us from the beginning, remains as true to the original artistic intent as possible". Interestingly, "current players in Asian territories can continue enjoying the same game as the other players", too.
Despite approaching its third anniversary, the Six community is alive and well, and Ubisoft continues to support the game with regular updates and expansions. Rainbow Six Siege’s latest update, Operation Grim Sky, released in September, offered the usual blend of improvements and updates, as well as an interesting ploy to encourage players to activate two-factor authentication (2FA). The next expansion, Operation Wind Bastion, is available to play now on the Siege Test Server.
