More than an hour of play from a Rainbow Six: Parasite technical test has leaked. It is the first time that we have seen the game running in any way.
The gameplay, detected by VGC, was broadcast live on Facebook Gaming by someone who claimed to have recently received an invitation to play a technical test of Rainbow Six: Parasite on the PC. Clearly, they didn’t seem to pay much attention to Ubisoft’s nondisclosure agreement.
The same gameplay was later uploaded to YouTube, although I suspect it won’t last long in this world:
Parasite is the code name for what was once called the Rainbow Six Quarantine. Last month, Ubisoft said the original name would change as a result of the ongoing pandemic.
“Although we recently announced that we are going to change the name of Rainbow Six Quarantine, ‘Parasite’ is just a placeholder that our internal teams use,” a Ubisoft spokesman told Eurogamer at the time.
“We recently did an internal test for the game and some of its details have been made public. We can confirm that this is a glimpse of the next game and we will share more details, including the official name, soon.”
Rainbow Six: Parasite is a squad-based first-person shooter. From the leaked gameplay, we see the tutorial, or the “simulator”, as it is called. The player chooses an operator to play among a handful of options, confuses them with their payload (the weapons have stats and accessories and all the cons of the modern sniper) and then ventures into the tutorial.
Zombie-like enemies are called “archaeans”, and there’s the Rainbow Six Siege-style weapon that fans are familiar with. The vibe here seems to be a scary zombie shooter. The game encourages the player to kill one of these archaeans with a silent felling to avoid alerting other enemies to his presence. The dubbing tutorial is clearly a placeholder.
The leaker’s identity is clearly visible in the footage – and at the end of the video we see that they were suspended for 24 hours for cheating, but can still play in training mode. It’s a damaging leak for Ubisoft – I imagine the publisher will be furious with Parasite or whatever it is that ended up being called made his game debut this way.
Ubisoft originally announced Quarantine at E3 2019 with some brave videos. Last October, with little more revealed about the game or its development progress, Ubisoft delayed Quarantine and several other projects due to the impact of Covid.
The quarantine was originally announced for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. Scheduled for launch in 2020, it will now arrive sometime this year, although the final release date has not yet been confirmed.