The slow, steady rollout of the next season of Rainbow Six Siege, entitled Operation Grim Sky, continued today with a teaser introducing one of the game's two new operators: Morowa "Clash" Evans, a defender who bears an uncanny resemblance—at least for a brief, flashing second—to Shodan, the infamous AI villain of System Shock.

Clash, a Scotland Yard crowd control specialist, is the first Rainbow Six defender with a shield. And not just a shield, but a massive, transparent, person-height shield with a built-in taser. And not just a taser, but a howling Tesla coil, basically, that looks like it's cranking out enough juice to drop six men and the elephant they rode in on.

A native of England, Clash served with the Territorial Support Group during the 2011 riots, before earning a spot in Specialist Firearms Command, the branch of London's Metropolitan Police Service that provides armed response capability. Her shield, the Crowd Control Electro Shield, is actually a DIY rig put together by Twitch and Mira. 

"Clash is the perfect Operator to handle this new gadget and weapon because she understands mob behavior and she pioneered snatch squad tactics, not to mention her experience as a riot officer," Ubisoft said in her character announcement. "She knows exactly when and where to deploy this shield to deny entry and slow down her opponents." 

Clash, and all of Operation Grim Sky including the reworked Hereford Base map that we checked into last week, will be fully revealed on August 19 during the Six Major in Paris. And in case you missed it, this weekend is a fine time to find out what Rainbow Six Siege is all about: From August 16-20 it'll be free to play on Steam. 

And in case you thought I was kidding:

Ubisoft is offering another free weekend for its wildly successful tactical FPS Rainbow Six Siege.

In a slightly unusual interpretation of the word “weekend”, Siege will be freely available to play from Thursday 16th of August, continuing through until Monday 20th. According to Ubisoft, this will offer full access to all maps, modes and operators.

On PC, the free weekend commences from 6pm, while console players will receive access to it earlier in the day. PC players can pre-load the game as early as tomorrow, however, enabling you to blast a hole in your evening plans as soon as the game becomes available to play.

The free weekend coincides with the first ever Rainbow Six Major championship in Paris, where sixteen teams will compete for a share of a prize pot worth $350,000. Starting on the 17th, the event will also reveal Operation Grim Sky, a new content update that will introduce two new pperators to the game.

The specifics regarding these operators are still under wraps, but Ubisoft has offered a broad sketch of the new characters. According to Ubisoft’s announcement of Grim Sky, the first is a “tough police officer” from the UK specialising in “mob behaviour and snatch-squad tactics”, while the second is an American attacking operator who “remains an enigma within Rainbow Six”. You know you’re black ops when your own team doesn’t know anything about you.

Grim Sky will also see the first reworking of a Siege map, as the Hereford Base gets a remodelling. A teaser trailer for the altered map is below. Full details of the update will be unveiled at the Paris event, assuming you’re not too busy playing Siege at the time of the reveal.

The new Hereford looks fantastic, with the old, bland concrete blocks being scrapped in favour of a WWII aesthetic that gives the map a far more distinct visual style, full of fighter planes, antique cars and crumbling brickwork. The map will still feature plenty of nods to the old Hereford however, something that the developers hope will retain the “soul” of the map, while making it far more visually interesting.

The rework will overhaul more than just the skin of the map. Hereford Base was the first map ever prototyped for Siege, and since then the game has shifted significantly, leaving Hereford behind. Nowadays, it feels clunky and bland to play on, in stark contrast to newer maps like Villa or Theme Park. Compared to the rest of Siege’s maps Hereford is tiny, leaving defenders very few options in terms of objective locations, and it’s far too easy for attackers to lock down the central staircase, preventing rotations and bottling defenders into the site, where they can easily be picked off. 

Changing this imbalance is the main focus of this rework. The map has been made bigger, opening up the cramped interior spaces to allow for more free-form firefights, and new rotation paths have been added, including a new set of interior stairs, which should make the map far easier to defend, with roamers now having far more options to set up flanks and ambushes. Overall, these changes are so significant that it looks like the new Hereford base will feel like a totally new map. It’s not yet confirmed whether or not the map will be heading straight into the ranked rotation like Villa did last season, but based on the confidence expressed in the blog post I would imagine it will be.

Also interesting is what this new map rework might mean for Siege in the long term. Ubisoft has differentiated this full rework from the “map buff” that Clubhouse got last season, which added some new passageways but left the map relatively in tact. These map buffs are expected to come every season from now on, but the rework clearly involves much more work than the buff, so it’s unclear when we can expect to see another one, especially if Ubisoft wants to return to the one new map a season format we’ve seen in the past. Many of Siege’s maps could benefit from major changes, especially maps that have been relegated to casual, like Yacht, Tower and Presidential Plane, or ones removed from matchmaking entirely, like Favela. These maps are some of the most interesting available in Siege, so making them more viable by adding new objective sites and rotation lanes for defenders, or by adding extra protection against spawn peeking and entry locations for attackers, could really help in making these old maps fun again.

The next season of Rainbow Six Siege officially has a name: Operation Grim Sky. Ubisoft shared the first details for the season on the Siege blog, reminding players to tune in to the full reveal during the Paris Major from August 17 to 19.

While Ubi didn’t reveal the names of the next two operators, it did share a short description for them and teased their appearance. The two operators have joined Team Rainbow as part of its Urban Tactical Response Team, codenamed Grim Sky. The post describes the British defending operator as “a tough police officer who’s an expert on mob behavior and snatch-squad tactics. She knows she belongs on the front line and she won’t tolerate any nonsense.”

We also got a brief teaser about the new American attacking operator, a “specialist with a remarkably sharp mind when it comes to tactical operations. He has seen the worst in Kabul. Despite it all, he fell in love with the city. Legendary for his surgical precision, he remains an enigma within Rainbow Six.”

We can unpack a few things from these sparse descriptions. First, our defender is an expert in snatch-squad tactics. This refers to a police formation meant to quickly penetrate a crowd of people and apprehend a single target, similar to a kidnapping. Operator backgrounds don’t always give us hints to their gadget, but the reveal image above and her riot control experience may point to her wearing the heavy armor of a 1-speed defender. Her gadget appears to be some sort of deployable tool with electricity, but it’s hard to tell. Leaks from May do refer to “hole blocker” and “audio alarm” gadgets that have been in the game’s code for a while, so it’s possible that’s what we’re seeing here.

Thanks to the same leak, we knew there was a strong possibility that the attacker would be a new hard breacher that uses some sort of blow torch. The attacker in the Grim Sky image is clearly wielding a blow torch, so it’s safe to confirm that much. Perhaps they'll be able to cut asymmetrical holes in reinforced walls? That sort of utility would distinguish them from Hibana and Thermite.

The description mentions the operator’s love for Kabul, Afghanistan. This might not be good news for fans hoping Ghost Recon Wildlands’ Nomad would be joining the team. Nomad’s biography does mention that he has worked all over the world, but the connection here is looking less likely. You can’t make out too many details in the image, but the mystery operator doesn’t look much like his default look from the game.

Grim Sky will also bring a complete map rework for one of Siege’s old classics: Hereford Base. This will rebuild the structure and layout of Siege's cube-shaped base and shift the art style of the map to a WWII theme. 

A new recoil system that has been in testing since last year will also finally be implemented with the hope of fixing the game’s aim misalignment issues. More teasers will inevitably be dropped by Ubi in the next week leading up to the finals streamed live on Twitch, so stay tuned.