Rainbow Six has always been a tactical series, just one you play through a gun barrel. With Rainbow Six Tactics, Ubisoft Paris is taking the franchise into turn-based territory, and game director Martial Potron says the studio had to borrow heavily from an unexpected source to get the formula right: Mario + Rabbids.
In an interview with TechRadar Gaming published on September 27, 2026, Potron explained that the team took the “DNA” of Ubisoft’s turn-based Mario + Rabbids series as inspiration for tactical level design. “Mario + Rabbids helped us shape some parts,” he said. “The team, especially the level design team that came from Mario + Rabbids, really helped us to understand the metrics of tactics.”
That background is baked into the studio itself. According to Game Informer’s coverage of the reveal, the Ubisoft Paris team behind the game includes veterans of both the Mario + Rabbids and Ghost Recon games.
From cinematic illusion to pure rules
The more striking part of the interview is Potron’s frank take on how his own design habits had to change. Coming from Ghost Recon, he said, one of the core rules was to design the experience players expect, using “smoke and mirrors” around things like lethality and enemy behavior to “make the experience cinematographic.” A turn-based tactics game does not allow that kind of sleight of hand.
“In tactical, everything is very precise,” Potron said. “It’s pure. It’s like chess. So we had to change a bit of our mindset to adjust to this philosophy.” He went further, calling it “a bit of a paradigm shift for us in terms of habits. It’s 15 years of my habits that I need to shift.”
It is a telling admission. In a shooter, an enemy that dies a little faster or reacts a little more dramatically just feels good. In a grid-based tactics game, every hit chance, line of sight and cover value is visible to the player and has to hold up under scrutiny, turn after turn.
Why turn-based at all
Potron said the team chose the turn-based tactics genre instead of the series’ usual first-person style because it felt that Rainbow Six’s DNA is already “tactical.” What Ubisoft has shown so far backs that up:
- A single-player campaign of counter-terrorism operations with handcrafted maps
- Varied objectives, including bomb defusal, VIP capture and hostage rescue
- Breach phases for coordinated squad entry
- Destructible environments and gadgets drawn from Siege
- The player takes the role of Six, Paul Bishop from the Rainbow Six Vegas games
- No in-game store or live-service structure
Release
Rainbow Six Tactics was revealed at Gamescom Opening Night Live on August 25, 2026. It launches in 2027 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. No exact release date or price had been announced as of September 2026.
