Are goofy crossover skins a net negative for multiplayer shooters?
That’s the question I posed to Rainbow Six Siege X creative director Alex Karpazis in an interview following the launch of its Siege X update. He took the pointed question in stride, but I knew before asking that I’d never get the response I was secretly hoping for: Deep regret and utter capitulation.
I tend to think immersion matters in multiplayer shooters, and it’s best when developers work within a game’s visual identity to let players express themselves, but that’s just like, my opinion, man. Karpazis takes the understandable stance of someone who has seen firsthand how many people buy and enjoy crossover skins that look totally out of place in the game they inhabit (and, of course, has a stake in the success of those skins).
“When it comes to Siege, we’re talking about millions of players. So to say that one taste fits all is incredibly hard, but there is a tone in Siege that we want to commit to. When we present the game to players for the first time, there is a serious tone and a story behind all of it that we want to make sure is consistent, is tactical, that honors the roots of Rainbow Six and the games that came before it,” Karpazis said.
“When it comes to skins, though, there’s clearly a variety to what players want, so for us, our goal is to provide as much variety as possible within limits.”
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Rainbow Six Siege, like its other live service FPS contemporaries, is a clown show of gaudy crossovers and ugly skins. But unlike games that launched in the wake of 2018 Fortnite mania, Siege has been around long enough to have known a time before the uglification of multiplayer shooters. For those first few years, scrolling Siege’s cosmetic store was like browsing a military surplus shop for camouflage patterns and intimidating helmets—fashion with a tactical focus.
Post-Fortnite, Ubisoft slowly but surely relinquished its coherent art style to adopt the characteristics of a Spirit Halloween store that never closes—recent crossovers include The Boys, Iron Maiden, Dead By Daylight, Yakuza, Street Fighter, and Rick & Morty.
As an example of Siege sticking to its tactical roots, Karpazis offered Clash’s new elite skin, a black and grey spec ops uniform that could’ve conceivably been worn by Solid Snake. It is pretty cool, and to be fair to Siege, the aging FPS still gets new, thematically appropriate cosmetics regularly.
I take issue with Ubisoft’s “limits,” because frankly, what limits? We have Homelander hard-breaching walls while Rick Sanchez lies in wait to stop the push. Siege has already plunged way off the deep end of artistic consistency. I consider it a bad sign that Karpazis believes Valkyrie’s new $50 Paragon skin is an example of the balance between “tacticool and fantastical.”
“We were really careful in trying to gauge where it lands when you mix tacticool with fantastical elements. It is not canon and it is out of the norm, but it is something that players have been asking for, and it’s clear that they really do enjoy it in a game like Siege,” he said.
“So while, yes, there are people who probably want to keep that immersion all of the time, there’s also players who very much want to customize their characters, too.”
To be clear, we’re talking about this Valkyrie outfit:
Her shoulders are knives, every other object glows, and her gun turns into a sword. If this is being “really careful” with Siege’s grounded roots, then remind me to never let Ubisoft borrow my car.
It’s true that Siege offers skins that appeal to a variety of tastes, but focusing on individual skins in a vacuum ignores the elephant in the room. The existence and density of incongruent nonsense makes Siege uglier for everybody, even if I choose to only wear default outfits. Sure, the onboarding tutorials are tonally consistent, but that’s not the real game. Siege is its multiplayer environment, and it’s become a real eyesore.
To that end, I asked Karpazis if Siege would ever offer an “immersion mode” that makes all operators appear in default skins.
“To be honest, we have [considered it], and it’s something we’re kind of gauging right now with the community. Nothing to announce right now, but it is a subject that we’re talking about.”
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