Rainbow Six Quarantine entered development as a very different game to its near completed project. According to game director Alex Hutchinson, Ubisoft’s latest addition into the Tom Clancy-verse was once a zero-gravity space exploration game.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Hutchinson spoke about the creative process behind developing “Pioneer” – as it was called during its infancy – when he was the game’s director. Hutchinson had just completed Far Cry 4 before setting his sights on space exploration. The game director admitted that he couldn’t speak too much on the subject, but originally conceptualized the project around space station problem solving. The team at Ubisoft wanted to produce a “non-violent, player-driven, zero-g space exploration game”.
Intended to be set within a 3D representation of space, Pioneer was shelved by Ubisoft who decided to venture down a different path. However, despite Hutchinson’s positivity on the game's progression, he carried a lot of its qualities into Typhoon Studios’ Journey to the Savage Planet.
Pioneer’s demo also appeared as a cameo in Watch Dogs 2. Included in one of DedSec’s missions, the collective infiltrated Ubisoft’s San Francisco division to reveal a Pioneer trailer. It included footage from Hutchinson's demo, featured in the video above. The cameo appeared in Watch Dogs 2 as Pioneer’s future became uncertain, where Kotaku reported on the internal strain between Hutchinson and other team members. Ubisoft eventually replaced the project's leads in 2016, before abandoning the project completely.
In current news, Rainbow Six Quarantine, along with Far Cry 6, has been delayed until next year. The news came via a financial report released by Ubisoft, which projected both games to release between 2021 and 2022. Niko Partners' senior analyst Daniel Ahmad gave the gaming community a projected window of release between April 2021 and March 2022. While we don’t have a lot of facts about Quarantine, Ubisoft will be wanting to polish its latest Tom Clancy title after Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s poor sales.
Source: PC Gamer