Ubisoft has laid out Operation Split Fire, the third season of Rainbow Six Siege's eleventh year, and it arrives September 1, 2026. The headline is a new Egyptian Defender named Noor whose gadget exists for one reason: to make holding a ballistic shield a genuinely bad idea.
Noor and the Horus Lance Launcher
Noor - real name Ahmed Murad - is a two-speed, two-armour Defender carrying the Horus Lance Launcher. It fires up to five projectiles that attach to a surface, burrow in, and then ignite. The interaction Ubisoft is clearly most pleased with is the shield one: hit an Attacker's shield with a Horus Lance and it drills into the shield itself before spouting flames back at whoever is holding it. The fire kills in a few seconds, so the shield operator's only out is to swing the shield aside and physically remove the lance - which means dropping their protection in a doorway, in front of a defending team.
That is a targeted answer to a specific problem. Shield Attackers have spent several seasons as a reliable, low-skill way to eat entry space, and Siege's existing counters mostly ask you to shoot around the shield rather than punish the shield itself. Noor punishes the shield.
The lances are not shield-only, though. They penetrate destructible surfaces and work through floors, ceilings and adjacent rooms, and they stick to reinforced walls and to gadgets - Castle's Armor Panels and Azami's Kiba Barriers included. That turns them into area denial as much as anti-shield tech, and it gives Noor real synergy with the operators who create those surfaces in the first place.
Her loadout is a Commando-9 assault rifle or the Alda 5.56 LMG, with the 1911 TACOPS or Bailiff 410 as secondaries, and a choice of barbed wire or a deployable shield.
Villa's bomb site moves to the basement
The map work is the part competitive players will feel hardest. Villa's Living Room and Library bomb site is being relocated from the first floor down into the basement, with substantial renovation around it - new rotations, new approach angles, and a completely different set of default plans for a map that has been in the competitive pool for years. Anyone with muscle memory on Villa is starting over on that site.
Elsewhere, Stadium Alpha, Stadium Bravo, House, the Shooting Range and the tutorial maps are all getting visual modernisation passes with upgraded destructible elements.
Kali and Dokkaebi get reworked
Kali's scopes drop from 5x and 12x to 3.5x and 8x, but she cycles shots faster, carries more ammunition, and swaps to her gadget more smoothly - a trade of extreme range for practical usability. Dokkaebi loses her EMP grenades entirely in favour of breach charges, and her hack now has real counterplay: Mute jammers can interrupt it, and she has to keep her tablet out while the payload uploads. Lion, Echo and Kapkan are also touched, along with the AR 15.50, MK 14 EBR and SMG 12.
Legends Division, 3v3 and drone racing
Split Fire adds Legends Division, a solo-queue ranked playlist restricted to Champion-ranked players, with extra anti-cheat measures, a visible leaderboard and its own rewards. It is a direct answer to the long-running complaint that the very top of Siege's ladder is where stacking and cheating hurt most.
Two limited-time modes bracket the season. A 3v3 arcade mode runs September 8 to 21, cutting team size down to force tighter coordination and different site priorities. Then the Wasteland Circuit event runs September 23 to October 12 - a dieselpunk drone-racing event with obstacle courses and a cosmetic collection, which is roughly as far from tactical FPS as Siege's seasonal events have ever wandered, and exactly the sort of thing that keeps a decade-old shooter's population from calcifying.
