On average, it takes around nine months for a baby to be born.
The same can be said about operators in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, the ever-popular tactical shooter which recently announced it has over 55 million registered users playing the game. In their home quarters of Montreal, the nine-month process from brainstorming sessions to the launch of a new character -- known as an operator -- has become streamlined down to three de-facto trimesters for Ubisoft, the game's developer.
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For Siege game designer Emilen Lomet, the starting process for all characters begins with what is known as the "prototype phase".
"In the prototype phase, we explore a lot of ideas and implement a lot of prototypes," Lomet told ESPN. "Once we've identified the one that we like the most, we iterate on it, until we feel that we nailed down its design."
Unlike other games where certain characters are led by a single person, operators in Siege are a collaborative effort at Ubisoft. While teams can break out and have different levels of focus on each project, when an operator is officially released, endless departments and people have had a hand in the creation of what millions of players are picking up at home.
After countless conceptualization meetings comes the implementation stage of the nine-month odyssey. Here, it's about taking the one-dimensional being and transforming it into a fully-fleshed out character that can work inside the parameters of the Siege world. This is where operators get their own personalized style, from animations down to their sounds.
By the end of the sixth month, an operator should be ready to play. They have their kit, their own style and a soul to them, almost ready to get out there for the millions to try and master.
There's one more step remaining, however, and possibly the most important one -- the debugging phase.
This is where playtesters at Ubisoft do their very best to try and break the game. They are throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the operator and the game to see if it can hold up, going to the absolute limit to see if they can find even the smallest glitch that they can catch and sew up before sending it free into the wild. Along with the in-house testers, this is also the time where the esports sector of the Siege world comes into play, where Ubisoft holds a workshop for the pros to do their best to break the game and give feedback on the upcoming operators.
"During that [debugging] process we also have six Pro Workshops to help us nail the balancing of the operator, starting as early as the prototype phase," Lomet said. "We fly 10 pros in for three days, and they test everything we have and discuss with us [the] pros and cons, allowing us to iterate with their perception in mind."
If an operator can withstand the creativity and skill of the pro Siege players without breaking the game with no other bugs found, then they're finally allowed into the game. For the pros that tested the characters, though, they have to wait a little bit longer, a three-month period freeze on operatives before they can make their way into the pro scene. During that extra trimester after release, the developers can fine-tune the new elements inside the game so that when they're played in the esports scene, competitive integrity remains intact.
The latest operators to make it through the debugging stage and officially into the game are attacker Iana from the Netherlands and, for the defensive side, hulking brute Oryx from Jordan. On paper, the two characters couldn't be more different. Iana, slender and quick, uses holograms and the sleight of hand to get the upper hand on the enemy team. Next to her, Oryx seems like he is in an entirely different game, his icon of a battering ram personifying his playstyle, possessing the ability to literally vault through walls with nothing other than his body.
Though seemingly polar opposites, Lomet sees them as one and the same when it comes to playstyle. To the developer, they both prey on the mindsets of the opposing player, attacking the very essence of how they play Siege.
"Iain and Oryx have very different gadgets. One is a high tech, intel oriented device. The other is not even a device," Lomet said. "However, they both play on a similar level when it comes to the psychology of your opponent: they both mess with your mind. Iana with her decoy and Oryx because of the fact that he can be anywhere, at any time. An open hatch becomes a huge threat if Oryx is on the board."
Siege, while a game about gunplay and aggression, is at its core a chess-like match between two sides of five. Every time a new operator is shipped into the game, that chess game gains a new piece, smashing to bits the openings and strategies that came before it.
Siege is a never-ending game of strategy with the items on the board always being tinkered with. Imagine if you introduced a piece into chess that could barrel through multiple roadblocks on its way to attacking the king. In Siege, it's no different, with Oryx's Juggernaut-like approach to walls creating new ways to flank opponents and turn the game on its head.
"Oryx brings a lot of flexibility to defender setups with the amount of destruction he brings to the table," reigning world champion Troy "Canadian" Jaroslawski of Spacestation Gaming said to ESPN. "He also entirely changes how flank holding has to be treated in the game since he brings new flanking routes to the table. Overall I think Oryx is a good addition to the game from my initial reactions. He changes things up but doesn't seem too overwhelming, however that will be difficult to properly judge until we see how flanking plays out with him more often."
The trickster of the two in Iana, however, might be the one Ubisoft needs to keep an eye on, believes Canadian.
"Iana, on the other hand, I believe is probably too strong from my initial thoughts," he said. "She brings a game-changing style of attacker information to the table while still bringing strong utility in 'nades or smokes, meaning it isn't hard to fit her into a lineup. I think adding a max distance to her clone in place of or in addition to the timer she currently has would probably put her in a more reasonable place. As she is now I feel she can gain too much information for her team too quickly."
Although it takes nine months to come into the world, like babies themselves, the job isn't over when an operator goes live. For Lomet and the developing team, while the process of coming up with the idea of a character and bringing them to the game is difficult, balancing them and keeping them in harmony with the rest of the cast is even tougher. For every operator and map introduced into the game, the balancing act only becomes a more arduous act, not only needing to cater towards Canadian and the pro players of the world but the millions who make up the casual player base of the game.
Be it in real life or virtually, no one said bringing a new life into the world was easy.