Rainbow Six III

Ubi Doob Scooby Dooby Benubi

So Rainbow Six 3 is old news, right? After all, Raven Shield has been out for a couple months now and we already ran through it. After visiting Ubi Soft’s booth to check out Rainbow Six 3 on Xbox, we see that it’s not quite the straight port that some other PC to Xbox games are.

First of all, it’s just Rainbow Six 3, period. No mention of Raven Shield, perhaps to differentiate itself from its PC counterpart, or just for the sake of simplicity since it’s unlikely that the Xbox game will be receiving the exact same expansion pack content from the PC version.

One of the immediately noticeable differences between the PC father and Xbox son is that the console version features a slightly different graphics engine. While both are built on Unreal Engine technology, Rainbow Six 3 for the Xbox utilizes many of the tricks that the Ubi Soft Montreal used on Splinter Cell. The neato light effects found in Splinter Cell have made their way into Rainbow Six 3, as have the soft-bodies (remember playing in the curtains?) and the colorful thermal vision.

Transparent HUD overlay.	Sight-seeing, get it?	Smart, let someone ELSE take the point.
Tango Down! .. again	A dank, dark place.	Hmmm, volumetric lighting.

At its core, Rainbow Six 3 is still Raven Shield, but in a prettier dress. Just like how Xbox Live gave Ghost Recon its real life on Microsoft’s console, Rainbow Six 3 promises to have excellent Live support. In addition to the online play, there will be downloadable content (just like how Splinter Cell Xbox got Kola Cell). We were told that there are currently four additional levels planned, with more after that. We asked if there would be any fee to download additional content, and Ubi Soft’s answer to that is that there will be both free and premium (i.e., gotta pay to play) downloadable content. Rainbow Six 3 is currently slated for release later in 2003.