If it wasn’t evident when Rainbow Six: Siege was announced and shown off at Ubisoft’s E3 2014 press conference, Rainbow Six: Patriots is no more and has been replaced by Siege.
Rainbow Six Brand Director Alexandre Remy talked about the cancellation with Polygon:
It’s not in development anymore. The main decision was some months after Patriots was announced in 2011 that was the first moment we knew the first generation of new consoles were coming. So obviously at that moment and for a franchise such as Rainbow we needed to decide if we could make something for next-gen and we were already pretty advanced in the development of Patriots.
It would require doing a lot of extra things.
The decision to cancel Patriots was a “strategic” one, with Remy adding that “it’s hard to imagine a Rainbow Six game that doesn’t use the latest technology. We had to decide: do we keep working on something that might be a bit late in the cycle, or do we actually take that opportunity of next-gen?”
Despite the most recent comments, it appears Patriots has been dead for over a year, as Remy said that a team of 40 people started fresh with a new Rainbow Six game once Patriots was cancelled, and Siege development started about 18 months ago.
