Siege is a game of decisions. You choose to play Smoke, you can’t play Valk. Your team chooses Jaeger/Wamai and certain playstyles become more effective and others less so. By holding certain points in the map, you physically can’t hold others. This same song and dance plays out on Attack too, albeit with different lyrics. If you make a choice and want to renege on it, you’re at a disadvantage doing so. At every level of the game, Siege is about making choices and accepting that they inherently limit what you can and cannot do.
But when it comes to picking optics, this isn’t the case. Since the introduction of the 1.5x scope, the decision making in optics is nonexistent. Not only is it the most common of all high powered optics, this is a scope that gets the best of both worlds, a little bit of zoom, but not so much that it gets in the way of close quarters fights. Compare that to the 1x’s and higher zoom scopes, all of which have clear costs and benefits.
The 1x scopes are the most common, as every operator has access to them. This is because they feature the lowest zoom out of all guns, providing no assistance to mid or long range gunfights. This isn’t necessarily a problem, the dated statistic is that gunfights usually happen around 9 meters distance, very visible without magnification. However, there are plenty of angles, both baked into the maps and created by Attackers, that can create very long lines of sight. That’s where using the 1x starts to hurt. However, this disadvantage at range also means that the 1x’s are most useful in close quarters engagements, you’ll always have a good view of what’s going on around you while ADS’d and won’t be tunnel visioned by your scope. When in a room with many angles to clear, the 1x is the ideal choice.
For higher zoom optics, the 2x, ACOG, and 3x, they are an inverse of the 1x’s and their strengths. They excel at longer ranges, but this can create very uncomfortable situations at close range. For the Attack, who has the bulk of high powered optics, this is an acceptable trade off given the nature of their high damage, low fire rate rifles. But this high zoom causes trouble when clearing a room with plenty of angles. You’re physically zoomed in on a single angle, making it hard to respond to any other position. As a result, even back when available to every Attacker, many entry players ignored the ACOG and used 1x scopes as it better suited duties of the role.
There’s also the discussion of housing and reticle. With the 10+ 1x’s to choose from there’s a glut of scopes with good and bad housing or good and bad reticles. Red Dot A might have a great reticle, but the housing around that reticle makes it irrelevant. For the 1x’s in particular, it truly is a matter of preference, though most players end up using Holographic A anyways. Higher zoom optics typically have beefy housing, on account of all that zoom, furthering the disadvantage in close quarters dangerous.
But everything I’ve just talked about doesn’t apply to the 1.5x. It’s perfectly good housing for the benefits it provides, and actually gives you an advantage through the fact that you’re never at a disadvantage. It’s “good enough” at all ranges without sacrifice. Sure, you can’t fight nearly as well at long ranges compared to an ACOG, but you get enough zoom to not be outright out of the fight, and that’s a big deal. It’s the very reason the 1.5x is so prized on Defense.
On Attack
What used to be a conscious choice by Attackers, choosing the 1x or the ACOG to excel at a specific range, is now a nonfactor as the best answer is the 1.5x. There is no choice that comes at a cost. Unlike every other decision defining gameplay in Siege, there are no significant downsides to taking the 1.5x. What range or disadvantage do you get from using the 1.5x that other scopes do not deal with?
This eliminates the choice in Attacker optics, and by extension removes player expression as a result. It’s no longer about what the player prefers or what their role is, it’s about being able to take any fight at any range. The 1.5x ensures this without sacrifice and is thus the best scope.
What compounds this problem is that Ubisoft treats higher zoom optics like my hot chocolate: heavily rationed. Few Attackers have ACOGs anymore and I can think of maybe 7 who have the 2x off the top of my head. Even if these optics were popular, we wouldn’t know since so many Attackers only have access to the 1.5x. Entry ops only having 1x’s and 1.5x’s makes some sense, but why does Brava, a bonafide support, only have the 1.5x? What made Sledge so deadly with the ACOG? I barely saw the scope used when he had access to it. I can’t claim that the 1.5x is the most popular scope, but given how often you see it taken even on Attackers with access to higher zoom scopes, you can make an educated guess.
This limited access creates another problem: players are more hesitant to use high magnification scopes in the first place. Since the sensitivity is different scope to scope, if a player equips the 2x on Thermite, they’ll be using a different sens than when they play Ace with the 1.5x. They’ll be willingly introducing inconsistency into their game. For players aiming to win, for competitive players whose livelihoods and futures are on the line, why introduce inconsistency willingly without gaining a major advantage?
On Defense
If we talk about Defense on a macro level, the influence the 1.5x has is even more profound. The general philosophy of Defense, particularly in casual play, is to take ops with high zoom optics or play the ops so powerful you can’t ignore them, like Solis and Azami. This makes sense, as Defenders don’t want to be on the back foot when fighting at longer distances and picking meta ops is playing to win because it’s, well, meta. As a result, the player base flocks to any operator with a 1.5x regardless of utility. This is something that Ubisoft knows and willingly leans into.
Ubisoft uses the 1.5x as a way to make players play less popular ops, like Oryx, to corral players into trying different ops and seeing their potential utility value. It’s the same way you train a dog using treats. It’ll work in the moment, but permanent change is yet to be seen. This isn’t bad per se, but I wouldn’t call it balancing so much as manipulating player behaviour. These kinds of changes aren’t aimed at making the game balanced but are instead a way of the developer speeding up the “solving” of the game. At the moment it seems like the scope will bounce on and off operators like Wamai as Win Deltas rise and fall with access to the scope. It also raises a fundamental question: what is the conclusion of this game of 1.5x hot potato?
Scopes with increased magnification have always been powerful on Defense, look no further than Bandit and Jaeger, Rook and Doc, or Echo and Maestro with the ACOG. There’s a reason these scopes were gradually removed. The 1.5x goes against this very trend that Ubisoft started themselves.
At a conceptual level the Defense has always been meant to be better in close quarters, with SMGs that fire faster but don’t have the damage, range, or optics that the Attack has. The 1.5x changes that dynamic, and not in a good way. The defining trait of a Defender in the modern day is if they have a 1.5x. As already explained, the Attack is being funneled into the 1.5x through various factors. There’s no more “range advantage” because both sides are using the same optic. Bedded in that statement is the fact that Defensive ops with the 1.5x are not at a disadvantage when taking long range fights, something they should explicitly be bad at given the nature of their weaponry compared to Attackers. I cannot understate how this affects the flow of the game in a negative way. The 1.5x’s contribute to the brawly nature of Defense in the current meta, as there’s no position where the Defenders feel like they’d be taking a “bad” fight, only a 50/50.
As to what to do with the scope to fix all these issues, there aren’t that many options due to its nature. You could increase the housing size, making the 1.5x a bit more hazardous in close quarters. A bit antithetical to the whole “good at any range” deal but it’s an option? Make the reticle a mess? Such a change would be on a razor’s edge between useless and too impactful. Changing the availability of the scope could work. However, it would also require changes to the availability of the 2x and ACOG on Attack to really see if there’s an impact. For Defense it wouldn’t change much save a more extreme version of 1.5x hot potato than we already have. That is, unless the 1.5x was removed from Defense entirely. This would drastically change the game, for better and for worse. Ops like Rook and Goyo would become more popular as their 2x is the only high zoom scope on Def, but it’s hard to say how much of an impact such a wide sweeping change would have over the entire side. Given how slow Ubisoft addresses balancing for clear as day issues like Lion, LMGs, or Azami, it’s hard to see them taking such extreme action soon, if ever.
At every level, the 1.5x removes the choice around optics. It’s a Goldilocks scope whose use is encouraged at a fundamental level. It offers no disadvantages for the Attack and on Defense, well, you all play ranked. Whether it’s a redesign to make the scope less appealing, adding high zoom optics to more Attackers, or if it’s limiting access to the 1.5x, the scope needs to be addressed. Because for a game of choice, there really isn’t much to see here.