Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege is still one of the best multiplayer games on PC and it’s about to hit Season 1 Year 7 – now officially revealed as Demon Veil. He’s also set to get a new Operator with a game-changing gadget, but to get there the team prototyped several Operators with unique gadgets, including one with a “pile of green goo” called Flubber.

Earlier this month, the Rainbow Six Siege team revealed Demon Veil and new Operator Azami, a Japanese defender with an anti-meta gadget called Kiba Barrier that can repair walls and other breaches. Azami is the first Operator to be able to do this, although Ubisoft did let us know of two other canceled Operators that led to Azami – dubbed Patcher and Flubber.

We spoke with creative director Alex Karpazis and asked him about Azami’s development journey, who told us that the operator has “a long and rich history” – mainly “because the idea behind its gadget to repair destruction or repair holes is such an integral part of Siege”.

Siege has always been about destruction, but the idea of ​​creating an operator around repairing breaches “has always been there”, apparently. “I think five years ago,” Karpazis says, “we had a prototype called Patcher, where it was kind of like a castle from a distance, you were basically shooting at the castle barricades at the windows and doors, as well than on reinforced double walls”. The reason Patcher never saw the light of day, Karpazis explains, was because “we couldn’t find a great way to make it really unique and really stand out from what Castle was doing before.”

More recently, just over a year ago, the team tried out another Operator dubbed Flubber with a gimmick that “was basically Ela’s Grzmot mines that you tossed and exploded into a radial pile of green goo. You could stack the flubbers all over the place and it gave us a lot of this new organic direction that we really, really enjoyed.”

Although Karpazis hasn’t revealed to us any specific reason why Flubber never arrived – other than a certain Disney movie starring Robin Williams – the operator who eventually became Azami took longer due to necessity. to change the game’s sound engine. The team “never anticipated the need to organically block sound, holes that were destroyed from the floor, from the walls. And so that meant we had to go back and do a lot of homework if we wanted to do it right”.

Soon after, the team began working on how to make Azami’s barrier gadget work. “We kind of get the metrics right, we get a lot of the creativity,” Karpazis explains, “and on the technical side we respond to things like blocking audio or blocking sound coming through the barrier as well. So honestly, it’s been an amazing journey for the team. It’s been working for a long time.”

For more on Azami and Demon Veil, you can check out the full Season 1 Year 7 roadmap here.