This forgotten Rainbow Six spinoff would have thrived in a post-ARC Raiders world
Rainbow Six Extraction, Ubisoft's 2022 PvE spinoff of Rainbow Six Siege, is being reassessed in light of the recent success of extraction shooters such as ARC Raiders. The game pitted Siege operators against zombie-like bioweapons called Archaeans but never fully embraced core extraction-shooter mechanics like looting or base-building, leaving it feeling shallow despite solid gunplay. Ubisoft stopped developing the title roughly a year after launch, and the article argues it arrived too early, in a "liminal" period before the genre had settled into its now-familiar conventions.
The piece traces Extraction's roots to a limited-time Siege mode and notes it was originally named Rainbow Six Quarantine before being rebranded because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its 20-operator roster and reasonably well-designed progression and cosmetic systems, the game lacked the higher stakes and depth that define modern entries in the genre. The author suggests that, had it launched today, Extraction could have been built out with more ambitious systems inspired by titles like ARC Raiders and Marathon, but concedes a sequel now would risk simply chasing a trend rather than innovating.
- Rainbow Six Extraction is reassessed after ARC Raiders' extraction-shooter success
- The 2022 Ubisoft spinoff lacked looting and base-building depth
- Originally called Rainbow Six Quarantine, renamed due to COVID-19
New here? Start with this
Rainbow Six Extraction is a video game released by Ubisoft in 2022, spun off from the popular multiplayer shooter Rainbow Six Siege. Rather than pitting players against each other, it had small teams fighting computer-controlled enemies called Archaeans, a mutated alien threat. The game drew on Siege's established cast of "operators" but was discontinued by Ubisoft about a year after launch.
The wider context is the recent rise of "extraction shooters", a genre of games where players venture into dangerous areas to loot valuable items and must then escape, or "extract", before losing everything they have gathered. ARC Raiders, a newer game built around these ideas, has proven popular, prompting renewed interest in earlier titles that explored similar territory.
This piece looks back at Rainbow Six Extraction with that success in mind, considering how it fits into the evolution of the genre and whether its ideas were ahead of their time.