Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege Drops Controversial Tower Map From Its Ranked Playlist

Ubisoft announced that it will remove Tower from Rainbow Six Siege's Ranked Playlist. The map will be dropped in the update for the game's Operation Para Bellum DLC, which releases on June 7. This will lower Siege's Ranked Playlist from 12 maps to 11.

Ubisoft listed six reasons for their decision to remove Tower from ranked play, but two stand out as long-standing complaints from the Siege community. The first has to do with Tower's size. "Due to the size of the map, roamers have an unfair advantage as it takes a significant amount of time to drone and clear the map," the company said. Tower is currently the largest ranked map, featuring two floors, nearly two dozen rooms, several staircases, and numerous branching hallways that create plenty of hiding places and blind spots. Attackers are usually at a severe disadvantage.

The second pertains to the lighting in Tower. "Many areas are too dark for optimal performance," Ubisoft said. Although utilizing the darkness to one's advantage has been a staple strategy in Siege since its launch, Tower features more than a few near-black corners. This again usually gives the defenders an unfair advantage as, in some cases, it's almost impossible to see opponents setting up an ambush in a dark corner.

The other reasons Ubisoft cited for its decision to remove Tower from ranked are mostly in reference to how Tower fails to capture the core themes of Siege's gameplay: vertical battlefields, balanced combat, and teamwork. Whether or not Tower gets a buff (like Clubhouse) and added back to ranked play remains to be seen.

You can read about the other changes coming to Rainbow Six Siege in the game's Operation Para Bellum update in the full patch notes shared on the official Siege website. You can also watch us play several matches of Siege with Alibi and Maestro on the new Villa map.