Game Analysis

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege — Gameplay Design Analysis

Character & Level Design Insights | Gameplay-Driven Perspective

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is an online tactical shooter developed by Ubisoft Montréal and published by Ubisoft.

The setting is based on real-life counter-terrorism operations involving special forces and terrorists. Players complete team objectives by manipulating special forces with their own combat tools and weapons—such as rescuing or protecting hostages, destroying or protecting biological containers, or eliminating opponents. Team and individual performance significantly impacts victory or defeat. Even players who aren’t experienced FPS marksmen can exert meaningful influence via role tools, teamwork, and well-controlled weapons, and even defeat high-skill opponents to gain a full experience. Every player can influence the flow of battle at any time, and each player’s unique tool matters from the start.

1.Role & Utility: The “Hard Breacher” Contribution Anchor

For example, the operator Thermite possesses a tool capable of breaching reinforced walls—opening new paths for his team, creating offensive space, and applying psychological pressure on defenders.
This role is very accessible for newer players: micromanagement is minimal, yet the impact is high. His weapon setup supports fixed-point confrontations when he anticipates opponent positions. Additionally, a solo-player selecting this role can naturally become the team’s “problem solver”—teammates will communicate and guide the breach direction, building tacit cooperation.
In summary, both offensive and defensive roles in the game include such tools (e.g., hard breachers) that satisfy players’ psychological need to feel needed, while also being fundamental to the gameplay mechanics and encouraging cooperation and individual empowerment.

2. Map, Tactics & Variety: Preventing Static Playstyles

Teams, maps, and internal map attributes vary, requiring fluid tactics for victory. This ensures gameplay remains flexible and dynamic, rather than stagnant. Effective communication within the team becomes critical. For example:

Player A knows the map’s corners and interference routes.
Player B has map awareness but limited combat time.
Player C has unstable aim but strong gadget knowledge.
They devise: “A will hold position X and intercept; B and C will breach together.” If executed well, they win through cooperation.
Thus, success depends not only on technical skill, but on role fit, communication, and planned synergy. Good chemistry enables even less skilled players to contribute meaningfully.

3. Map as a System: Destruction, Audio & Tactical Layers

The map is not just static terrain—it’s a living system. The procedural destruction engine (RealBlast) enables players to alter walls, floors, and sight lines.
Dynamic audio uses propagation nodes so breaking a wall changes both visual and auditory information flows.

This design transforms terrain state into tactical currency: when the environment changes, so does information, strategy, and control.

4. Compare with Overwatch — Team Composition & Role Dynamics

Early versions of Overwatch allowed free character pick without enforced role balance, often resulting in attacker-heavy teams lacking support or tank roles, which led to imbalance.

By contrast, Rainbow Six Siege embeds role responsibilities within objective, map, tool triads (e.g., hard breacher, intel gatherer, roamer, anchor). Balanced team composition emerges from mechanics, not solely enforced queues.

Thus, character design, flexible role selection and smart tactics become crucial for victory. The systemic cohesion of map/objective/role is stronger than external role restrictions.

5. Psychological & Social Design: Empowerment + Cooperative Flow

The design caters to players who seek to feel needed, to cooperate, or to contribute strategically over raw aim. By giving each role and tool meaningful impact (e.g., a breach opening a line of sight, a drone revealing location), the game fulfills intrinsic motivations: competence, relatedness, autonomy.

Player empowerment via utility and cooperation shifts the focus from pure shooting to team-based tactical interplay.

6. Summary

Rainbow Six Siege is a game that addresses players’ psychological needs (role importance, cooperation, strategy) as much as their gameplay expectations. The design team embedded these systems deeply—map, tools, roles, meta design—all contributing. The map’s flexibility enables varied offense/defense combinations and real-time player-driven change. In terms of balance and player experience, Rainbow Six Siege serves as an excellent learning object for other online competitive games.

7. References

“The Art of Destruction in Rainbow Six Siege – An Interview with Julien L’Heureux” (Ubisoft)
Thermite operator page, (Ubisoft )
“Dynamic audio in destructible levels in Rainbow Six: Siege” (Game Developer)

BABA IS YOU Mechanic Analysis

BABAISYOU is very unique from most games. In addition to the fact that “winning” is consistent with a lot of game completion, the rest of the game is vastly different. Take the rules of the game: the simplest level is “BABA IS YOU”; “FLAG IS WIN”; “WALL IS STOP”; “ROCK IS PUSH” … Maybe only the first two of these sentences define the conditions necessary for winning and losing. The characters are free to move around like a box, free combinations as long as they satisfy A IS B, a new condition will be established. The game seems to be very free to complete the level with the clues in your hand. This is very novel, which is why I want to analyze this game.

Flexibility in the levels is the key to cracking the game.
In the level, players need to change their situation according to different conditions in order to crack the level, different from the normal game, you need to use the conditions in hand to meet the need to finish the level, and finally pass the level. At the same time, there are complicated checks and balances between conditions. The level is not about dragon slayer warriors and big and small monsters, nor is it about warriors fighting dragons to save princesses and return to the castle. The rules in the game are defined by “definition” statements composed of grids, and the components of these statements, such as baba, is and you, or flag, is and win, can be promoted by the characters manipulated by players. Rules exist in the game in the form of an entity, and changing the rules is naturally a means. But BABA IS YOU sometimes goes a step further and tells you that the entity of these rules can sometimes act as a stepping stone, a stepping stone, to help you achieve certain behaviors. The game is calm and independent, and like every condition in it, seemingly rigid but incredibly flexible! Every time you make a breakthrough you feel a huge sense of accomplishment and are amazed at how clever the level design is. It’s like seeing a piece of art that you and the author have in mind and thinking, “This is how it should be designed, this is what I always thought, and the artist did it!” This feeling, in turn, encourages further exploration of more challenging and newer levels.

The operation method of the game is what players have seen, such as the gameplay of the Sokoban, the elements inside the scene are moved and placed, but the clearance way is a leap. In this type of game, players basically don’t need to learn the basic gameplay in the game, and then they can easily learn different rules in the game and prototype in the process of playing. This is like an arithmetic problem, which can be solved only by equations. As long as they master the solution of equations to do other problems of the same type, they won’t feel completely confused. That’s why BABA IS YOU has no barriers to immersion.

Mechanic & Design Insights — Expanded with Gameplay Focus

1. Role & Utility: The “Hard Breacher” Design Parallel

For example, the operator Thermite (in a different game) has a tool that can breach reinforced walls, creating a breakthrough for teammates and opening offensive space. (Although Thermite is not in BABA IS YOU, this analogy helps underline the design logic of giving meaningful contribution beyond pure movement.) The notion in BABA IS YOU similarly gives players tools (word-tiles) that are meta—redefining how characters move or interact, not just the characters themselves.

This role is excellent for less-skilled players because there is no need to micromanage game details — being responsible for certain key actions already elevates the player’s sense of agency. In BABA IS YOU, the word-tiles themselves become contribution tools: you push, you rearrange, you solve. In sum: the game satisfies both the psychological need to be needed (via utility) and the desire to explore freedom (via rule manipulation).

2. Map, Tactics & Variety: Preventing Static Playstyles

Players must adopt tactics dynamically since levels behave differently depending on what rules you rewrite. This ensures the gameplay remains flexible and varied, not fixed. Listening to team opinions is important in team-based games; similarly, in BABA IS YOU your “teammate” is the puzzle system itself—you adapt to its rule-logic. The feeling of cooperating with a system rather than merely playing against it enriches the experience.

3. Map as a System: Rules, Objects & Language

In BABA IS YOU the map isn’t just spatial — the rules are represented as objects you can move. The rule tiles NOUN IS PROPERTY/OBJECT act as live syntax in the level. Changing “WALL IS STOP” to “WALL IS YOU” or “WALL IS WIN” rewires the objective itself. This layering of grammar → mechanics → objectives makes each level feel systemic. As one developer interview outlines, the rule-system was rewritten multiple times to maintain logic consistency while preserving openness.

4. Compare with Traditional Puzzle Games

Unlike puzzle games with fixed rules (move box, reach flag), BABA IS YOU treats rules as manipulable variables. For instance, in Sokoban you push boxes; here you push “IS” tiles. The meta-twist is that the objective itself (WIN condition) can be redefined. That shift elevates the puzzle: not just “how to solve” but “what even is solving?”

5. Psychological & Social Design: Empowerment + Exploration

Because the game allows you to manipulate rules, players feel empowered—not just to solve the puzzle, but to rewrite the puzzle. Early levels teach you the vocabulary, later levels remix and combine. The low-friction loop (push words, test, undo) encourages experimentation. This design addresses intrinsic motivations: autonomy (you rewrite rules), competence (you solve unexpectedly), and novelty (the system surprises you).

Summary

BABA IS YOU is accessible because its base mechanics are familiar (grid, push blocks), yet its logic layer is radically open. By embodying rules as tiles and giving players safe, reversible iteration, it transforms puzzle-solving into live rule editing. That combination—visible grammar + reversible experimentation + systemic level pedagogy—is why it’s both welcoming to newcomers and endlessly surprising to experts.

References

Teikari, Arvi (Hempuli). “Designing Baba is You’s delightfully innovative rule-writing system.” Game Developer, May 8 2019.
Interview with Arvi Teikari. “A Coffee Break with: Arvi Teikari, Baba Is You.” Medium, 2019.
Charity, Megan; Khalifa, Ahmed; Togelius, Julian. “Baba is Y’all: Collaborative Mixed-Initiative Level Design.” arXiv, 2020.
Developer Interview: “When We Made… Baba Is You.” MCV/DEVELOP, Aug 8 2019.
“Reading the Rules of Baba Is You” — GDC Virtual Talk by Arvi Teikari. YouTube.