Rainbow Six Siege Year 5, Season 4, entitled Operation Neon Dawn, is here! The new season offers one new operator, Aruni, a rework of the Skyscraper map, a variety of balance tweaks, and more. First off, let’s talk about Aruni – she’s a defender who can plant laser gates on doors that will fry any unsuspecting opponents as they pass through. You can check out Aruni in action, below.
Here’s a fun animated short featuring the new defender.
Aruni is a new Defender from Thailand coming to Rainbow Six Siege in Operation Neon Dawn. Her gadget, the Surya Gate, projects a laser grid over doors, walls, hatches, and windows. These gates will destroy any drones or utility projectiles they come in contact with, and will damage Attackers that touch them, making Aruni a powerful architect of defense.
Primary Weapons
- P10 RONI, Mk 14 EBR
Gadgets
- Proximity Alarm, Barbed Wire
The following new content and features are also included in the Neon Dawn update:
- Map rework: Skyscraper – Skyscraper has been reworked to balance gameplay and enhance navigation. Players have a new angle of attack, as Operators can now rappel onto the roof. As well, Dragon is now an interior room, and provides a bridge between 2F House and 2F Restaurant. For balancing reasons, some entryways have been blocked and part of the balcony has been removed to prevent Attackers from camping outside. Despite these changes, the map’s identity and art style remains intact.
- Defuser planting detection improvements – A “no-drop zone” has been added to the edge of bomb sites to prevent players from accidentally dropping the defuser while trying to plant it in that area. As well, the “plant defuser” animation has been moved closer to the Operators’ feet. This prevents furniture or other objects from blocking the defuser from being planted.
- Gadget on gadget interactions – Some of the physical interactions that occur between gadgets have been revised. A notable change to come out of this update is that most sticky gadgets should now stick properly on bulletproof gadgets, rather than bouncing off them. For example, Ash’s Breaching Round can now stick on Melusi’s Banshee Sonic Defense and destroy it.
- Chat accessibility – Voice to Text and Text to Voice options for the in-game chat channel as well as chat assistance like Narration and Hints have been added to the Options menu. Players can also adjust the audio/visual cues for the chat and the font scaling.
Finally, the following operators are being rebalanced:
Hibana
- You can now choose 2, 4, or 6 X-Kairos to shoot from the X-Kairos Launcher. A crosshair and red highlight are visible when ADSing. These visual guides will change according to the configuration selected.
Jäger
- The ADS device has a cooldown of 10s after destroying a projectile. While in cooldown, the ADS will not interact with enemy projectiles.
- The ADS device now has an infinite number of charges up from the previous 2.
Echo
- Yokai Drone cloaking has been removed and is now always visible.
Ash
- The number of Breaching Rounds is increased to 3 up from the previous 2.
- Breaching Round damage is reduced to 50 HP down from the previous 90 HP.
- Stun Grenades are replaced with a Claymore.
Twitch
- Stun Grenades are replacing Breach Charges.
Wamai
- The number of Mag-Nets is reduced to 4 down from the previous 5.
- Mag-Net explosion has been removed when the device auto-destroys.
- Impact Grenades are replacing the Deployable Shield.
Dokkaebi
- Frag Grenades are replacing Stun Grenades.
Valkyrie
- Impact Grenades are replacing the Deployable Shield.
If you need to know about every minor tweak and bug fix, you can check out the full, unabridged Operation Neon Dawn patch notes, right here.
Rainbow Six Siege is out now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4. The Xbox Series X/S and PS5 upgrades for the game are also available as of today (get more details on them here).