Ubisoft has announced their new “Operation Health” initiative for Rainbow Six: Siege, pushing back a whole season’s worth of additional DLC content to focus on improving the core game’s performance through technical fixes and reworks.

Operation Health will be a hard push towards tech improvements and bug fixes, described through the three pillars pictured above.  Pillar one will conquer the pressing technological issues facing the game, prioritizing improving the server quality for the game to fix issues with ping/lag and hitreg, as well as streamlining the matchmaking process.  Pillar two of the health initiative will be the game’s new three-step deployment process for new improvements, with additions arriving first on the game’s Technical Test Server, then on PC, and then on consoles.  This pillar also includes a new on/off switch that will allow the game to quickly revert to a previous status, like a savepoint, in case any new additions end up doing more harm than good and need to be quickly reversed.  Pillar three will be the fixing of bugs, as reported by the community, allowing for the prioritization of fixes based on the level of need communicated by players.

While this change will ultimately likely have a positive effect on the overall Rainbow Six: Siege player experience, Operation Health is going to have a serious delaying effect in the short term, majorly delaying a large amount of planned expansion content for the game, and even eliminating some planned content entirely.  To give you an idea of the changes, compare these two “roadmaps” for Year Two of Rainbow Six: Siege.

Here’s the initial roadmap, as announced months ago before the start of Year Two:

And here’s the new roadmap, released as part of the announcement of Operation Health this week:

With Operation Health dominating the Rainbow Six: Siege team’s time and energy for the next three months, the planned Hong Kong season will be pushed back to Season Three, with South Korea remaining in Season Four and Poland losing its own season slot.  Since each season usually introduces two new operators and a new map, things have been reshuffled: one Polish operator will be released in each of Seasons Three and Four, meaning that players will still get all eight promised operators, albeit a bit later than expected.  The Polish map, however, is gone for good, lost as a result of sacrifices made for Operation Health.

You can read more on Operation Health, including a rather extensive FAQ section, at the UbiBlog.