From Mario to Machine Guns: How Ubisoft Paris Built Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Tactics

The studio is swapping Mushroom Kingdom's bright palette for blood-soaked military action. After Mario, where do you go? That is the question the Ubisoft Paris team asked itself three years ago, after finishing work on the charming turn-based tactics adventure Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, the sequel to the unexpected success of its crossover, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. By merging a fairly specialized genre with gaming's biggest household names

Where do you go after Mario? That's the question the team at Ubisoft Paris pondered three years ago after finishing work on the fascinating turn-based tactics adventure Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, the sequel to its unexpected crossover success, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. By merging a fairly niche genre with the biggest household name in video games, the developer introduced the strategic bargaining game to a new audience. "Having the opportunity to work with the Mario franchise was a privilege, and I'm still very proud of it," says Level Design Director Julian Viall. I still remember seeing the first prototype and being blown away by all the possibilities.

Now Ubisoft Paris is back with a new project, but this time the studio is swapping the vibrant palette of the Mushroom Kingdom for the blood-soaked sand of the military action series Rainbow Six. Where Mario and Rabbids saw spiraling creatures harmlessly jump across levels as Mario encased his enemies in honey, Rainbow Six Tactics, a turn-based tactical spin-off of Rainbow Six Siege, sees hooded rebels taking shrapnel bullets to the chest. So a seamless tonal change.

One of the most popular and popular testosterone-fueled online shooters, on paper, Rainbow Six: Siege and turn-based strategy have little in common. Where tight-knit team play Siege and wild first-person firefights sell out arenas at esports competitions in São Paulo and Atlanta, even the biggest brand in the world. The tactical sim genre, X-Com, is unlikely to win energy drink sponsors or adorn team jerseys.

However, for Ubisoft Paris creative director Eli Benhamo, a veteran of the Ghost Recon series, the meticulous planning you need to be good at Siege is well suited to turn-based strategy. "What makes Rainbow Six unique is that it's a smart shooter," he says. "It's not a shooter that's necessarily about who's the wildest, but who's the most prepared... Every decision matters because it has strong consequences. That's the exact order of a tactical game."

My demo starts with a night operation in Nigeria. As I watched a team of four helmeted operators work their targets with drones and explosives in preparation – their coordinated teamwork was soon transferred to a heavily guarded warehouse. While smoke grenades blind their unsuspecting foes and sniper fire rings through the air, the Rainbow Unit's sturdy clip construction makes short work of the remaining enemies. This is where Benhamo's words start to ring true. Even with the bird's-eye view and pauses between gunfire, Tactic still channels the tense thrills of its real-world brethren.

After inviting skeptical first-person shooters to test it, Benhamo says he knew they were on to something. Hardcore FPS players sitting alongside Real-time Tactics fans were quick to use their Siege knowledge to execute a similar precision attack in Tactics, advising Tactics-style players alongside them on how best to command Siege operators.

The demo ends with the Rainbow Unit taking the key hostage by running towards a speedboat. Here, you can take a non-lethal approach with enemies, capturing fighters to collect intelligence points, which will strengthen your team and improve equipment for future missions.

"The most important thing for me is that a game respects my intelligence - I don't want to be over-directed," says Benhamo. "It's okay to fail and experiment... Freedom is the key: there shouldn't be just one way to win. We have 15 unique operators, so a problem can be solved or approached in many different ways."

Story-wise, Rainbow Six Tactics promises to be your classic Tom Clancy's fare with shadowy government agencies and worldwide conflict. You play as Commander Paul "Big Boy" Bishop, the hero of Rainbow Six Vegas, trying to rebuild Team Rainbow. Narrative director Barnabas Angled says, “From a narrative point of view, we're trying to bridge the gap with the classic Siege and Rainbow, and we're trying to have the best of all these worlds and eras in the series. Compared to Siege, it's a much broader and smaller perspective. Here, you're at the base and can see the big picture... whereas Siege is much more moment-to-moment in the eyes of the operators. It still delivers that good old techno-thriller, but it's closer to the books."

After working in the world of gravity jumps and banana-shaped boomerangs, the biggest challenge after replacing Rabbids with Rainbow was creating convincing levels that were completely realistic. "In Mario and Rabbids, most of the constraints were tied to the characters and their abilities, while the level design itself had a lot of creative freedom," Viall says. We can have a gameplay concept first, then let the artists build a colorful and imaginative environment around it. In Rainbow Six Tactics, we have to consider the reality of the location, which requires closer collaboration between level designers and level artists.

Turn-based tactical sims have been neglected as a mainstay of the gaming industry since the 1970s. However, after the high-profile commercial failure of Marvel's Midnight Suns in 2022, things look bleak for fans of the slow-moving units on the maps. However, after last month's one-two punch from Star Wars Zero Company and Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, the super-nervous genre is seeing a resurgence.

"The genre never went away — it just faded away or fell out of the limelight," says Benhamo. "Even in [such] a competitive business, when the games are great, people play them."

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Tactics is scheduled to release in 2027 for PC, PS5, and Xbox.