I’ve been rewatching some old VODs of early Siege from Year 2. It’s been a fun trip down memory lane but I was shocked to see just how fast the game was back then. It makes sense, throughout the years Ubisoft has consistently slowed down movement and leaning for…obvious reasons.
This has happened a few times, from specifically targeting leaning or 3 speeds to broad universal changes slowing down animations like vaulting and ADS speed., so it’s no real surprise that Siege is slower paced compared to 5 years ago. But it wasn’t just general movement that’s changed. The game isn’t slower from simply removing thou holy Beaulo peek who art in Heaven, something else contributed to this slowdown. That something else is operator synergy. Up to a certain point, operators had completely different utility that had very basic synergy with others.
Looking at early operators there was almost no overlap in roles, if there was they did the same job in drastically different ways. Hibana and Thermite were both hard breachers, but one excelled at opening hatches at a distance while the other was better for making breaches on walls point blank. Smoke and Echo both served to deny plant, but Echo relied on Yokai while Smoke yeets a gas canister at an area. Same role, wildly different application. This had 2 effects on the game. One: adaptation was pretty straight forward. They take Pulse and you take IQ. They roam clear quickly off drones, you take Mute to slow down the info game. But this simplicity also meant that you couldn’t stack similar operator abilities on top of each other. Picking Echo and Smoke for double plant denial left big holes elsewhere in the Defense.
When operators like Mozzie started releasing Siege fundamentally changed in nature. Before Operation Burnt Horizon, each op had a clear purpose that had little overlap with others. With the addition of Mozzie and Gridlock the first iteration of “the same, but different” operators came into play. Mozzie pretty much did what Mute did in a very straightforward manner. Both gadgets primarily served to deny drones. When used together, Defending teams get even more effective drone denial. Basic 2+2=4 stuff. Mute was already an operator used to slow down takes by denying information and he had gotten more powerful thanks to synergy with Mozzie. Attackers had twice the denial to get through, which inevitably slows down the Attack. This type of synergy was previously impossible. There are the obvious combos like Thermite and Thatcher, but application of those two was linear. Throw the blue softballs and thermite the wall. Bing Bang Bosh, move on with life. Each gadget was needed to accomplish opening the reinforced wall, but leaving out either op made the task impossible. The way Mute and Mozzie worked together was different. This was passive utility that did the exact same thing. Killing a Mute doesn’t get rid of his jammers nor does it prevent Mozzie from using his utility.
Since the addition of Mozzie there have been more ops that create these passive synergies across the board, usually on Defense due to the Attack having little room for redundancy. (Nobody wants 3 flank ops, regardless of how good Nomad, Gridlock, and Zero are) Goyo came out as an area denial op in the same vein as Smoke, and the very next season Wamai came out as a direct copy of Jaeger. This started the Utility burn meta that drastically slowed down the game, in part because of unintentional synergies between ops like Goyo, Maestro, and Jaeger but also due to intentional synergies.
Wamai was just Jaeger that could counter Capitaõ and Gridlock util. He was presented as an alternative to Jaeger, seemingly without the consideration of what would happen should a Jaeger and Wamai be played together. Add in the effects of adding the bullet proof laser gates and banshees, which all serve to passively burn Attacker utility in one form and another, and the Utility burn meta came into full bloom. Intentional or not all these gadgets serving a similar purpose combined to create one of the most punishing and slow metas the game has seen. Attackers had tons of bullet proof gadgets that needed to be destroyed and Defenders had even more utility designed to protect it, leading to the slow paced game we have today. When bringing 9 flashbangs was considered light util, you know there’s something wrong.
Even after the Util Burn meta is gone (thank god) the effects it had on Siege are still felt, and the effects of operator synergy will be felt until the game stops getting updates. Releasing similar operators was a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. Balancing Siege is now a precarious ordeal. Add an op that fills the same role as a preexisting op and the game risks seeing 100% pick/ban rates on those ops. While it’s a little hyperbolic and was a specific situation, this classic highlights what happens when synergy gets a little too good.