Rainbow Six: Siege pits two teams against each other in tense multiplayer shootouts where one group of terrorists try to get away with something terrifying and a team of cops try to stop them, but Ubisoft doesn't play favorites when it comes to hostages.
They're equal-opportunity digital-hostage… developers?
Speaking with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Technical Artist Oliver Couture said that male hostages will appear in the game, though Ubisoft has only shown a single female hostage:
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. 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.
And it wasn't added to the plan just because someone asked!
We're trying to define next-gen with the hostage. 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.
Yes, f*** hostage comfort. We need the player to feel comfortable, until the hostage starts coughing and gives away his or her position. All in all, the hosties in Rainbow Six: Siege might very well add to the game's depth, but Counter-Strike remains one of the most heavily played competitive shooters in the world and it doesn't have all this weird hostage A.I. stuff.
