Cancelled Rainbow 6 Patriots Game Mentioned in Ghost Recon Wildlands

Before Rainbow Six Siege took online multiplayer by storm, Ubisoft had another Rainbow Six title in development. Ubisoft announced Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Patriots in late 2011. At the time, it was a pretty big deal. The elite counter-terroism squad, Team Rainbow would return and take on the True Patriots, a terrorist group bent on overturning the US government. Rainbow 6 Patriots‘ 2013 launch window was, of course, never met. Following the dismantlement of the game’s creative team, Ubisoft cancelled Patriots. During E3 2014, another Rainbow Six title, Rainbow Six Siege, took the stage and launched in 2015.

No word on Patriots has been spoken in sometime. However, thanks to the crossover mission that sees Team Rainbow team with the Ghosts for Ghost Recon Wildlands, Patriots is once again in the news. During Operation Archangel, casual banter between the two teams reveals a clever easter egg for the cancelled game.

One Ghost operative says, “hey, I heard something about an op you guys ran that went south. Operation Patriots ring any bells?” The response from the Rainbows isn’t pleasant; one of them tells the Ghosts to have their sources “mind their own business.” Apparently, “Patriots is very classified.”

Check out the full exchange in the video below, courtesy of Gaming Prime on YouTube.

Rainbow 6 Patriots‘ cancellation reportedly came as a result of the change in hardware. The transition from PS3/360 to PS4/Xbox One would not have been easy for the development team. Back then, a statement from Rainbow Six’s brand director, Alexandre Remy, claims the decision had been long in the making.

The main decision was some months after Patriots was announced in 2011 that was the first moment we knew the first generation of new consoles were coming. So obviously at that moment and for a franchise such as Rainbow we needed to decide if we could make something for next-gen and we were already pretty advanced in the development of Patriots. It would require doing a lot of extra things.

A return to the Patriots premise seems doubtful, especially since much of the franchise’s focus is now geared towards supporting the games-as-a-service model.

[Source via GameInformer]