Rainbow Six Siege Operation North Star is now live on the main server

Rainbow Six Siege Operation North Star Thunderbird

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

The second season of the sixth year of Rainbow Six Siege is now officially live with Operation North Star. It features a new defending operator named Thunderbird, coming from the Nakoda nation, a North American First Nation.

Besides this, the new update comes with a completely reworked Favela map for the Casual mode along with some major balancing changes to operators and quality of life changes that will be affecting gameplay a lot.

The new update will have a download size of 4GB for Steam and 6GB for Ubisoft Connect on PC, 4GB for Xbox One and 5GB for Xbox Series X and 4GB for both PS4 and PS5.

Operation North Star: Details

Thunderbird is the new operator joining Team Rainbow for this new season. She is a three-speed and one armor defending operator who is designed as a roaming healer. Thunderbird's special gadget is a Kona Healing Station which are stationary turrets that Thunderbird can place which shoots healing pellets to operators within range.

Thunderbird loadout has an option of either the Spear.308 Assault Rifle or the Spas-15 Semi-Automatic Shotgun for primary weapons along with either the Bearing 9 Machine Pistol or the Q-929 handgun as secondaries. She has options for either Impact Grenades or a C4 Nitro Cell for additional gadgets.

Favela which was part of the roster of maps in the Casual Mode of the game now has received a serious rework with fewer destructible walls on the outside, bigger rooms, and a very different general layout of the insides. It is still going to be a part of the Casual roster and is not being transitioned into the Ranked roster.

In terms of balancing changes, Ubisoft is making changes to some operators to make the game more balanced. To start off Melusi's gadget, the Banshee is being nerfed where once the gadget is placed it will remain closed and will open up to produce the sound and slowing effect. Once open attackers can shoot it to destroy it.

Mira windows, Maestro cams as well as bulletproof cameras now have glass that can shatter to nullify visibility when meleed by attackers. Smoke's canisters are also being reworked with a new VFX and the smoke will no longer penetrate solid walls to affect players on the other side.

Some quality of life changes includes bullet holes no longer peepable. Ubsioft decided to remove dead bodies from the game and will be replacing them with the dead operator's icon.

Operators will now have the armor added to the health for more specific representation. Besides this there are some changes to the weapons firing reactions to different barrel styles as well.