Badges bring a new way of challenge, system mastery and player expression into Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege in Year 9 Season 4 of the game’s live service model.
The main goal of the feature is to give players a tangible grind inside of the game, reflecting different play-styles as well as mastery over the various game systems.
For the release of the feature, we are adding 22 unique badges into the game, next to the existing Elite badges that players unlock when purchasing an Elite operator bundle.
Each badge can be equipped to the already existing operator card, and up to 3 badges can be equipped at once in order to customize one’s operator card and make it unique.
Additionally, a badge is not just a one-off badge. Most of the badges start off on tier 1 – in a bronze look. Once the tier 1 challenge has been completed, the player will be faced with the second tier of the challenge – each time increasingly more challenging. Tier 2 has a silver look, tier 3 a golden look and tier 4 has a very special chromatic/chrome look.
If you see a player with their card full of chrome badges – you know you’re in the right hands!
Since badges were not a fully defined mandate, a ui artist and I started looking into concepts for the feature early on on the side next to our work on the Locker.
The ui artist came up with some great first concepts for badges and what they could entail, so I immediately started working on screens in which they would be showcased, equipped, etc.
Originally, I was the first and only main ux designer assigned to the Badges feature, while the other ux designer on the team started their work on Career.
My responsibilities included everything from initial greyboxing and layout explorations, to higher-fidelity mockups in cooperation with ui art. I also worked on most of the feature documentation, as well as supporting implementation all the way to release.
I also collaborated constantly with ui art in order to find fitting graphics for the badges themselves, as well as work on the growing pattern for them (including the ui/icon representation of their tier-based progression).
Reward
Self-Express
Challenge
Although I mainly worked on the user experience for this feature, I was also heavily involved in the conception of the visual appearance of the badge items themselves.
It was important for our team to produce assets of high visual fidelity and appeal, making them desirable to unlock, equip and show off.
Especially for tier 4, the highest one that some badges can unlock, we wanted to ensure that they are clearly distinguishable from the other tiers and making player feel rewarded for unlocking them.
I can only share the final in-game version of this feature.
In the video above, I will navigate the badges-section of multiple operators in a live build of the game, showing my personal unlocked badges. Due to the newness of the feature, I have not yet unlocked any challenge-based badges. Please consult the shared screenshots above to see badge visuals.
I think it'll bring a grindability to the game that is much needed. (...) I think this is a great element that the game needed.
Poxonlox
It's a cool thing and something to really just work on getting, so I'm looking forward to that getting added in.
coreross
I think this is cool. (...) It keeps people more engaged!
