Operation White Noise is taking Rainbow Six Siege to South Korea, where a new map called Tower will test your tolerance for heights, and three new Operators will put new gadgets into play. Dokkaebi and Vigil are here to represent South Korea’s 707th Special Mission Battalion, while Zofia hails from Poland’s GROM, joining her sister Ela among the ranks of Operators. Here, we’ll take a look at what each one brings to the party.
DOKKAEBI
Let’s start with Dokkaebi, a 2 -speed, 2-armor attacker from South Korea, who brings a tablet into battle to disrupt her enemies in a way we all can relate to: by calling them at really awkward moments. Twice per round, Dokkaebi can remotely hack the phones of every defender simultaneously with her Logic Bomb, which does a few things: First, it causes all of the defenders’ phones to emit a loud buzzing noise. Second, it disrupts the defenders’ camera surveillance, giving the attackers a chance to maneuver without being spotted. Third, it annoys the crap out of every defender until they take a few seconds to turn off that infernal buzzing.
The Logic Bomb isn’t unstoppable, however. Being near a Mute jammer when it goes out will let you evade its effects, and playing as Echo – who frequently collaborates with Dokkaebi to develop tech in Rainbow Six’s backstory – makes you immune.
Dokkaebi’s hacking abilities don’t end there, either. When she’s in a match, every defender that is killed will drop their phone. If Dokkaebi manages to hack an enemy phone, she immediately grants every attacker the ability to access the defenders’ cameras. This presents defenders with a dilemma: shoot out their own cameras and deny themselves the intel, or just do their best to avoid their cameras’ sight lines and hope the attackers aren’t watching too closely. The best way to avoid this situation altogether is to destroy your teammates’ phones when they go down. And speaking of avoiding hacked cameras…
VIGIL
Meet Vigil. This South Korean defender doesn’t like to be surveilled, so he’s got a gadget that lets him turn invisible to camera feeds. His Electronic Rendering Cloak doesn’t muffle his steps or affect his visibility to the naked eye, but if you’re trying to drone him out or spot him on a hacked camera feed, you’re out of luck.
Affected drones and cameras emit a white light, and Vigil’s ability causes a visual interference pattern to appear on any feeds that it’s affecting. These cues tell attackers that Vigil is somewhere nearby. As a 3-speed, 1-armor defender, however, Vigil is fast enough to cover multiple areas of entry and sow doubt among the attackers about where he actually is. His ability works similarly to Caveira’s Silent Step, so he can’t be cloaked indefinitely, and his cloak vanishes when he shoots or does something to affect the environment. Also, like Pulse and his heartbeat sensor, Vigil can be detected by I.Q. when he’s using his ability. Jackal can scan his footprints, too, but if you don’t have a strong anti-roamer Operator in the field, you’ll need to be extra-vigilant.
ZOFIA
Zofia Bosak is a tough 2-speed, 2-armor frontline attacker from Poland’s GROM CTU, and she’s about as in-your-face as Operators get. Her unique gadget is the KS79 Lifeline, a double-barreled grenade launcher. In one chamber, she’s got impact grenades. In the other chamber, concussion grenades that’ll stun any nearby defenders and make them vulnerable. She can switch between barrels with the press of a button, and she doesn’t need to reload between shots.
One especially cool thing about those concussion grenades is that you can bounce them around corners and land them in some tricky spots before their timed trigger goes off. They also have a proximity trigger, so if they happen to fly near a defender, they will immediately detonate and disorient, kind of like Ela’s Grzmot mines.
Again, Zofia and Ela are sisters. They both have a fair bit of training when it comes to being concussed, so they recover 50% faster from each other’s concussion blasts than other Operators do. The Bosak sisters are tough, but Zofia is so tough that once per round she can pick herself back up from a downed-but-not-out state. She only has one health point when she gets up, but by God, she gets up.
Rainbow fans will have a chance to check out Operation White Noise when it hits the technical test servers on November 20. Rainbow Six Siege is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.