The fourth and final season for year six of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege is out now. This season provides a pretty massive shakeup to the UI of the game, a new operator, and map rework for Outback. This new season also comes with a new battle pass and new elite skins for purchase.

For starters, I feel like they should have waited until Year Seven to implement the new UI changes. Having it released at the end of a year doesn’t make sense. The UI sort of makes the game feel fresh, so it makes the most sense to me to release that for the start of a new year, which is associated with new beginnings and whatever. I like the changes, except for the massive ugly compass in the middle of the bottom of the screen. Good thing you can turn it off.

Along with this UI change is the overhaul to operator customization. We got a taste of this update last season when a player could change the headgear on an elite skin and still keep the card and MVP animation. Now, you can have any headgear OR body armor and still keep the card or animation. Heck, you could even have the whole Elite skin on but then take off the card and animation. Players can now change the background of every operator, with the main options being red, blue, and gray, and then gold is available for operators you have the elite skin for. In the battle pass and a holiday event bundle there were also background cards that come with photos, such as the Six Invitational arena and the holiday event arena.

In addition to this is the character art. You can switch between the normal and elite art, but now in the battle pass and event bundles there is art for the different skins. The event bundles are much better because they are hand drawn and fit well with the standard art. The operator art in the battle pass is crappy 3D renders of the characters skins. They look hideous compared to the hand drawn art. So while I’m glad there is art for specific skins, they look bad. I have always wanted to be able to change the art for the characters that I have skins for, such as for the Doktor’s Curse skins and a modern looking Tachanka skin that I have, but if it’s just a 3D render instead of a hand drawn piece of art I may pass.

The new operator, Thorn, is another trap operator. Her ability is a sticky frag grenade that takes three or so seconds to detonate. It’s basically useless because at that time an enemy can just run out of the way or shoot it. If you pair it with another gadget that can slow or stun an enemy, it might be useful, but otherwise it sucks. She does come with a new SMG which is pretty good, the magazine is not the biggest but it does some decent damage.

The new map update for Outback I am indifferent about, I will probably never care about map reworks because I feel like instead of changing an old map they should just add a new map. We haven’t gotten a new one since Outback originally came out at the start of Year Four, which was THREE YEARS AGO! Jeez, give us a new map please Ubisoft.

Finally, for the battle pass, I bought it because of the seasonal skins and card background. It is full of ugly, similar looking skins to celebrate the S.I, which I don’t care about. A lot of the gun skins in the pass look so similar to the seasonal skin for the pass that there is no point in getting those skins. At least it seems there aren't that many charms. The big draw for a lot of people I think is the first “dynamic”, moving skin for Zofia’s gun. Now that I have it, I can say it sucks. The moving part is only at the barrel, which isn’t visible to you, so it doesn’t matter. I hope to have more moving skins, but not like this. I also hate that it’s only for one gun. And for the elite skins, the Ace one looks pretty bad, and the Nomad one, which hasn’t been released yet, looks pretty good from the leaks, but the animation doesn’t make sense. She is dodging swinging axes and stuff, which I feel doesn’t fit the skin. That should go on the Tomb Raider skin for Ash.

I think this is a pretty good update overall, and it will be interesting to see what Ubisoft does with all of the new operator customization. Will they start to sell animations and card backgrounds separately? Probably.