Female hostage shown in Rainbow Six Siege E3 demo was to have players feel empathy

Ubisoft has said Rainbow Six Siege players will not only be rescuing female hostages but males as well in the game.  The fact that they showed the female at E3 was to invoke a bit of empathy out of players.  

Speaking with RPS, technical artist Oliver Couture said a few people had about the demo and while he didn’t mention specifics, I’m assuming he was asked why Ubisoft chose the ‘woman in need of rescue’ trope instead of showing a male NPC being liberated from his tormentors.

“I know some people asked about the hostage in the demo. I mean, when we did that design we felt a lot of empathy with the hostage,” he told the site. “We wanted people to want to protect her. If the hostage gets killed a team loses the game, so we wanted players to care about the hostage so that’s the design we chose.

“But we’re also gonna have male hostages. That’s part of the plan.”

Ubisoft has taken the hostage mechanic a bit further, because it wants players to care about the hostage no matter the sex of the victim. In order to herd this, the NPCs will have a ‘personality’.

“We’re trying to define next-gen with the hostage,” said Couture. “We call that a ‘living hostage.’ So she’ll react to explosions and things like that. It’s pretty cool. She’ll cough because of the dirt in the air, she covers herself when there’s shooting – those sorts of things.

“We want the player to be able to move her into different positions, for there to be fluid controls. It’s a balance between player comfort and reality.”