Ubisoft revealed the third season of Rainbow Six Siege’s Year 8, Operation Heavy Mettle, will launch on August 29. This season kicks into high gear with Ram, a new South Korean Operator, a new commendation system, and important gameplay updates including a Quick Match rework.

Operation Heavy Mettle amps up the anticipation with the new Attacker Ram and her BU-GI Auto-Breacher gadget. With an automated tank, Ram can take on the competition by destroying walls, floors, and other elements to offer new vantage points. One tank can shake up players’ strategies by destroying their gadgets and any soft surfaces in its path. Ram is a one-speed, three-health Operator, and her loadout features an R4C or an LMG-E as a primary weapon and an MK1 or an ITA12S as a secondary weapon.

This season, player protection efforts will bring the brand-new Commendation System: an appreciation system allowing players to rate other players on the experience they had playing together. This system will be monitored to ensure it will be fair for everyone. Highly commended players will also receive rewards. Player protection remains a priority for Rainbow Six Siege, and anti-toxicity measures have already shown good results: 50% of players who received a warning for toxicity changed their behavior after the warning and avoided a penalty. For more details, please visit https://rainbow6.com/classified_July23.

Game modes receive several updates this season, including a Quick Match rework, a redesign of Unranked (now called Standard), and a brand-new Arcade game mode. Quick Match is faster than ever, with reduced round timers, objective locations automatically revealed, and bomb sites come set up with reinforcements to let Defenders focus on strategic defenses. For Attackers, 10-second invulnerability at the start of the Action Phase will prevent spawn peeking, giving them time to approach the building. The redesigned Standard playlist offers the core Siege experience without Operator or map ban phases and will offer another option for players besides the competitive Ranked mode. Also being introduced is Weapons Roulette, an all-new fast action game mode coming to the Arcade playlist, which lets all players start with the same weapon that automatically swaps to a new one after a set amount of time.

Other updates for this season include the second part of balancing for Operator Grim and major improvements to the in-game shotgun ecosystem. In addition, Fuze is now able to deploy Cluster Charges on Deployable Shields and Osa’s Talon-8 Shields, aiming to create a new synergy. Finally, a rework of Operator Frost will be released later during the season with new Operator mechanics around her ability following the TS Lab and players’ feedback.

Operation Heavy Mettle will also add Tutorials, an onboarding tool that aims to make newcomers more comfortable before their first PVP experience. Following the launch of free cam last season in Match Replay, players can now remove the HUD to capture perfect moments and use them in their content, even in spectator mode.