Siege the Opportunity
Tales of tension and manipulation from Ubisoft’s stellar multiplayer shooter
That one round, I was Thatcher. Kafe Dostoyevsky, attacking side.
Alongside me was three friends, and a random player picked from the seemingly endless pool of European players wanting to get their regular dose of Siege’s palpable suspense.
One of my friends was playing Hibana, a Japanese operator who uses a launcher that spits out sticky explosives. Useful for destroying walls. My job as a Thatcher — an old, grumpy SAS veteran with EMP grenades — was to help Hibana with her job, disabling any electronic devices that could hinder those explosives from being set off. The rest of my pals were playing Fuze, a Spetsnaz with wall-mounting gadgets that spit grenades on the other side, and IQ, a GSG operator who screens for electronic devices from afar through walls and obstacles using a wristband sensor.
We scouted the cafe — a three-story neoclassical building located somewhere deep in central Moscow — with our small, twin wheeled, remote controlled land drones. Via those roving electronic rats, we managed to pinpoint one of the enemy bombs we were tasked to defuse in a so-called train room, a small locomotive museum within the cafe.
Nimble as my drone was, it got spotted and destroyed by a quick-witted defender before I even reached the objective. Fortunately, one of my friends had successfully infiltrated the reinforced stronghold from another approach, placing his drone in a tricky spot where it was hard to detect but the views were clear. His would work as a camera that could be used by our entire team to gather intelligence during the round.
Preparation time was about to run out. Everyone had placed their pawns; the defending side had set up their defenses, and we had gathered our intel. Not long until the radio comms kicked in.
“Seek the bomb location and defuse it.”
In recent years, multiplayer shooters have seen a somewhat marked shift in trends that is especially apparent in 2018 for someone who has paid close attention to the genre. Priorities have changed, and new or unexplored ideas are getting more ground in both visual and game design, after all th. The status quo of bleak, nihilistic war-torn lands have lost ground to the aspirational and vivid likes of Overwatch and Splatoon, while the battle royale subgenre keeps driving the masses with its unpredictable style that has the power to keep any chat by the coffee table going, with every player having their unique and sometimes rather bizarre stories that they want to share with their friends.
Multiple reasons exist for this shift, player exhaustion being the most obvious for the majority of industry on-lookers. There could be more to it however. I suspect that the way people consume not just games but the media around them has played a part in marking this shift.
What I mean by this is that Call of Duty didn’t lose its relevance in the larger discourse just to franchise fatigue, but to the fact its gameplay loop of frantic kill-die-repeat didn’t prove to be exciting enough to form a scene beyond casual play and mastering tricks, jetpacks be damned (the disposable nature of yearly releases only works in detriment to this).
And out of all the current trends, being spectator-friendly is the one that most concretizes the shift in how competitive online games and the media around them is consumed. The rise of Twitch streaming and its larger implications for games’ marketing and long-term success might have played a role in shifting priorities in how games are designed. Now, they shouldn’t be just engaging to play; they should hook passive viewers, which presents a whole new set of challenges for developers.
Does the game really have enough depth — for spectators to be interested? Are the rounds or entire matches paced well enough — so that spectators would stay interested? No doubt these questions have lingered in minds of many game developers, who have lately started experimenting with things like asymmetrical design and combined PvP and PvE elements.
The almost institutional strategies of CS: GO may still drive the competitive scene, and flagship franchises such as Battlefield still remain the main driving force behind what is arguably one of gaming’s most saturated markets. However, as online games have for better or worse transformed into services, standards have surpassed demand. Not only does it take more to nudge audiences away from their comfort zone to commit to a new multiplayer title, but trends have shifted player expectations, and vice versa.
Now, online games live or die based on how successful they are for both streaming platforms and competitive play, and these games cannot be as enjoyable from both a player and a spectator standpoint, if they’re not offering little narratives of their own, with emergent tension with clear highs and lows or fostering unconventional play.
No other game epitomizes these principles as well as Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege does.
On the outside, French publisher Ubisoft’s first in-house foray into the highly competitive field of multiplayer-only shooters plays by the rules both new and old, of staple modern military themes and high-tech gadgetry, but also varied characters with special abilities akin to Overwatch. By design, Siege also works as an antithesis to the thematically identical titles that had come before it. It may be the least “Tom Clancy” game in the franchise so far, but it does carry the legacy of approaching shooters differently, as games under that belt once did few decades ago. Namely, it carves its own path by focusing on a pace that’s both meditative in structure yet menacing in play.
To illuminate, here’s how Siege’s structure works:
There are attacking and defending teams, both sides having their unique characters or “operators” with abilities that promote the position of their team. Like in Counter-Strike, death equals being out until the round ends. The rounds itself are based around a shifting objective, whether it be a bomb, a hostage, or an area. Maps are centralized locations, usually a whole building — which is the territory of defenders — surrounded by an outside area — the territory of attackers — which explains the game’s title: attackers sieging defending territory. The objectives are more of an incentive rather than an obligation, as most rounds end on the other team being eliminated without the objectives ever doing more than tie the action towards a certain part of a map.
The overall structure may be basic, but it’s the arc of the rounds that separates it from the competition.
Before every round there’s a 30 second period where all players pick their operators. Teammates’ loadouts can be examined, and players have time to plan roles and approaches beforehand.
Then, a preparation phase lasting 45 seconds follows; defenders reinforce and prepare the area around their objectives, setting up any defenses and traps utilizing the specialties of their operators. Meanwhile, attackers survey the site using small land drones, pinpointing objective locations and finding out who they’re against with. Only after this does the actual round begin, which takes four minutes on casual, three if you’re on ranked play.
All of this sounds like Counter-Strike, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for making that comparison. Siege, however, manages to distance itself from other shooters with its round lengths alone.
While a round of competitive CS: GO takes a minute and a half on average from prep time to outcome, Siege reserves about the same interval entirely for pre-round tactical preparations, while giving enough time for the actual magic to happen that in many cases, attackers would often stay still outside, droning targets in relative safety of their own territory so they could determine their approach beforehand. Rarely is there ever a need for rushing or hasty decision making, unless things go south.
Siege triumphs in grabbing the attention of players and spectators in spite of that deliberate pace, as its complexity and depth is compensated by its dramatic momentum that is easy-to-follow. Viewers glancing away for a few seconds won’t usually miss anything crucial, and players won’t get overloaded by information. During Overwatch matches I would often feel stressed because of the fast respawn timers and blunt round lengths that give hardly any room to breathe. In Siege, none of that is a problem when upper hand has a fluid definition and time passes with accounts to contemplate or prepare.
But the passing of time has somewhat of a tendency to creep in the back of your mind.
Round 1. 5 vs 5. Four minutes left.
The train room where the defending side waited for our arrival was located in the second floor. I rappelled to the windows overlooking the site with my friends, IQ and Fuze, the latter of whom carried the defuser with him. The windows were sealed with wooden boards, and although few swings of a gun butt could do the job, we were aiming for something bit more exciting, something that startles and sends a message blazing. I placed a breach charge on one of the window frames and squeezed the trigger in my left hand, blowing up the basic barricade into mere dust. The siege had begun.
From the window there was a small corridor that would lead to the train room, with stairs to the floors above and below on the left. I threw my spare drone in, wishing to scout for any would-be stalking enemies that could gun me with my pants down in case I entered through the window. Sadly, there was a jammer that disabled my electronic pal almost immediately thereafter.
We played the waiting game for the time being, expecting other teammates to take position from another angle of the building, which could divert attention away from us.
In the meanwhile, one of our adversaries killed our defuser-carrying Fuze, who had tried peeking the other window, next to the one I broke. Snatching the defuser he dropped, I took the risk and entered the building from the window I had broken without hesitation, only preparing myself with a few peeks into the stairs. We weren’t in a hurry. In truth, we had all the time we needed as we had already pinned down what we could call our “point of interest”.
Nevertheless, I had the mindset of a pioneer, a soldier who paves and secures the way for his allies to follow — not to mention we could lend more pressure towards our adversaries if we took point from inside. With my first steps in the building I stepped on a Gu, a cloaked poison mine deployed by Lesion, a defending operator from Hong Kong; a particularly aggravating trap since it’s almost impossible to notice one. I took shelter in the stairs and removed the toxic spike from my foot manually before it would gnaw my health pool entirely.
With the Gu out of the way, my teammates had killed two enemies, while our random teammate from the public matchmaking pool had succumbed to his own demise. It would be an even three versus three from that point onward. All actions made from here on out would determine the outcome of this round.
The stakes have been raised.
There is a wicked sense of emotionality deep within Rainbow Six Siege in which the game loves to revel in, but it isn’t by coincidence that the core systems and ideas — like environmental destruction and one life per round — make people feel uneasy. One of the recurring elements of the early single-player Rainbow Six games is putting the player under pressure, in volatile situations where pre-planned routes had to be laid out for AI-controlled teams to systematically clear out buildings room by room.
Back in those games, every corner had to be taken into account. Bullets had real world weight, and their deadliness went both ways. As enemy positions were randomized, cheesing by pure memorization was seldom a good idea. A great responsibility would be laid on the player’s shoulders, as dead team members were permanently gone, and reserve officers were finite.
This design philosophy was revolutionary back when the first game was released in 1998, and it lent to the franchise having a reputation for tense, nerve-wracking close quarters combat in urban settings
(This was in contrast to Ghost Recon, another Tom Clancy series that was akin to Operation Flashpoint, with long-range firefights, carefully controlled rifle bursts and large natural environments).
Siege is a whole another ballgame compared to its ancestors, but the core ideas remain. The focused close quarters combat is now translated into a multiplayer setting where both parties are now flexible, decision-making emotional beings. The result is that the rigidness of old games is gone, and preplanning is more about everyone’s approach on an individual and collective level: who should team up with whom, what gadgets should everyone bring, who proceeds from which direction. The rest is made up on the go. The lack of rigid AI also gives wider emotional spectrum to its moment-to-moment gameplay.
From its quietest to its most intense moments, feelings can shift from a fleeting sense of anticipation to preparation, to insecurity, and at best, to paranoia. Spurts of rush get balanced by long periods of serene quiet time, defenders hunkering down on their objective or hiding somewhere else. Given the circumstances of roaming enemies, rooms are still cleared on the way to the objective like in the old games. There is a difference however. In the old games, you had to take everything into account. Now in Siege, it isn’t simply possible to take everything into account. Not with the humans you’re up against, and not with all those frail, breakable walls in place.
The environmental destruction is undeniably the crown jewel of Siege:
both a technical achievement in how such a detailed system could be implemented in a multiplayer game (the one found in contemporary Battlefields is rougher, mind you) and how it elevates tactical maneuvering and influences player behavior from a design perspective.
To clarify, in Siege, any weak material — primarily wood, but also plaster and tile — can be procedurally modified (see: demolished) in response to different caliber types and explosives; rifles create small murder-holes, shotguns blast away peepholes, explosives obliterate them altogether. The fact players aren’t strictly confined to the pre-defined layouts the level designers brainstormed of gives a whole another dimension to how tactics play out.
Defenders can reinforce walls and hatches on ceilings to a limited extent, making them indestructible for all but a couple breaching-specialized attackers. In contrast, the same defenders can also choose to tear down those walls or ceilings instead to leave behind passageways as alternate routes. This way, controlling objective from other areas is possible with a simple repositioning. Attackers, on the other hand, can bulldoze those walls and floors to debris so only their framework is left standing, leaving anyone visible to the naked eye.
When you get used to it, you don’t see rooms as arbitrary layouts anymore, but as living space that can be used to your advantage or detriment. Some objectives could be blown up into an imminent danger zone where visual contact can be made from beneath or above. In the blink of an eye, anyone inside could get exposed, which in this game is an idea that sparks dread.
Exposure is one of the main driving forces of suspense in Rainbow Six Siege, since both teams aim to expose their enemies before they try to go for the kill. If a wall is breached or a window goes down, it’s an open signal that the room is going to get cleared. Consequently, the safety of sitting defenders is determined by a ratio of one guarded point of exposure to every other possible point of exposure from which you could be shot at. This means, when every window in the room is broken open, the ceiling above in pieces and the door to your right is unsecured, you’ll be playing Russian roulette where every angle could be the one leading to your demise.
And when that happens, you will hold to whatever cover you may have, feeling insecure, naked. You want to reposition yourself to anywhere else, yet then you’d be giving yourself away. Everything about your current position feels uncomfortable, wrong. Do they know I’m laying down here? I don’t know, I just have to deal with it, lay down, listen and pray.
Not all want to have the luxury of hunkering down on the objective, as balancing out sitting defenders are roaming defenders: high-speed, low-armor (equals low sound) operators who patrol places far outside the objective. They hide in unexpected places, strike at the most inconvenient times, and when they do that, it’s usually when you’re not looking in their general direction. In short, P.I.T.A.
As a gameplay concept, roaming ensures that every round of Siege has unpredictability, as the road towards approaching the objective can be as dangerous as attacking the objective itself. The existence of roamers punishes those who are not careful or expecting the worst, and their constant presence forces every player to grow a sense of spatial awareness. That awareness will come handy, or else a clever defender— at the wrong place at the right time —might catch the entire attacking team off-guard and put them down.
These dynamics lay out three constants. One, no one is safe, and no one is ever truly secure. Two, defenders get exposed and attackers get backstabbed. Three, calm demeanor and patience are virtues of those who succeed.
On the other hand, Siege might be easy for the players’ time, but same can’t be said for their minds.
3 vs 3. Two and a half minutes left.
Taking point in the haphazardly secured hallway, I aimed down my sights to prepare for a preliminary peek at the enemy fortification around the train room. Between the hallway and the train room was a connecting engine room that was essentially no man’s land, giving us and our foes much needed distance that would have otherwise been too close for comfort.
I noticed one of the wooden walls between the engine and train room was left unsecured. Right next to it was a reinforced wall that had a window installed by a Spanish operator, Mira. The window we’re talking about is a one-way mirror; those that are reflective on one side and transparent on the other, those that are on display in every interrogation room featured in the most common crime TV series. We weren’t on the all-seeing side of things.
In case of Siege, these one-way mirrors are particularly deadly since defenders can get a drop on attackers without exposing themselves, especially if there’s a wooden wall that can penetrate bullets. I retreated and broke the jammer that stopped my drone dead on its tracks. Taking my electronic rat back up to speed, I made it sprint through the engine room, straight towards the train room.
From there I saw Lesion and Mira hunkering down behind their reinforced walls, divided by a large doorway between them. Noticing my drone, they took blind shots at it without giving a chase. Clearly, they were worried they would expose themselves if they moved more than a few feet away from their safe havens. If only our Hibana was here, we could breach them and drive them away from the doorway.
I placed my drone to rest inside one of the old locomotives that were left for cafe visitors to see. Control back in my character, I took a second peek at the unsecured wall, flaunting my appearance for a moment and instantly retreating to draw their attention. Right after Mira busted out a large hole in the wooden wall with her shotgun. She had taken notice, and now she wanted me out.
I took a third peek, this time lining my sight towards the newly torn space without giving my position away.
Could they see me peeking in there? I wasn’t sure, most of my attempts at tactical positioning are left for guesswork. Apparently I wasn’t seen from Mira’s one-way mirror, as she seemed to only realize my existence after taking a gander at the hole that she had left in her wake. She wasn’t prepared to see me sitting there, seeing from the split-second delay between exposing herself and spraying a barrage from that Vector SMG of hers in distress.
Yet in this game, a split-second is all it takes to get the upper hand on a foe. We both exchanged shots; her bullets whizzed by my head, but mine managed to hit the recipient. In the blink of an eye, Mira was out and dealt with. It was 3 vs 2 — then I realized, our Hibana, who had taken position from another angle of the map, died in the hands of Lesion at the same time Mira did in mine. Perhaps I was foolish not to have joined her, since my job was to assist her in the first place. Now we couldn’t take out those reinforced walls where our foes snuggled against in comfort. IQ, my only ally left, barely held onto the 1/4th of the health they had left, while I barely lost any to the single Gu mine I stepped on earlier.
In the fleeting outcome our abilities were nullified. My EMP grenades were no good use without a breacher, and IQ’s electronic sensor was becoming useless at this point. Pushing the frontline was to have suicidal thoughts in mind. We had to improvise. It was me and IQ, versus Lesion and Mute, the latter of whose whereabouts was unknown to both of us.
We took stairs to the floor above.
Both sides of Siege’s make-play conflict have their own advantages. Attackers have more powerful gadgets on average, which most defenders try to nullify with their own. Think rock-paper-scissors. In addition to their preventative methods, defenders get to enjoy both a home advantage and a campers’ advantage. The sharpest aim cannot necessarily win a well-placed, well-prepared opponent, after all. It is thanks to these dynamics that most actions players try to inflict on the other side are indirect and even psychological to a degree, as I argued previously on how attackers can force defenders into a corner both in literal and mental terms.
This is where the flexible environmental space and a variety of abilities coalesce into something greater. Behind the scenes of coordinating team efforts and making use of all the intertwining game systems, psychological warfare occurs. Sometimes it’s beknown, but not always. As players combine tactical approaches, abilities, and other tools together, the opposing side has to interpret those actions in some way; and since the game has tactical flexibility in how those abilities are used, the interpretation may lead to confusion, distraction, or unneeded delays: anything that hinders players and opens up their weaknesses.
Suffice to say, all games try to influence their players to a certain degree. Game designers often aim at making the player act in a way in which they could, for instance, possibly learn of game mechanics or systems without explicit explanation (“Show, don’t tell” is an important mantra of modern game design, as players may consider direct addressing as patronizing).
The magic in case of Siege (and many other online games that may give such opportunities) is the fact that the influence doesn’t arise from strictly pre-designed scenarios but spontaneously from player interactions and the interpretation of those actions. Sometimes players seek that influence on purpose, other times a small detail may spur a chain of reactions that would otherwise be unexpected.
Take for instance one of the basic tools of every defender: blocking a doorway with a wooden barricade. Barricading almost every passage around an objective is self-evident, but there are hidden implications in attackers facing that barricade somewhere it isn’t expected. Why is it there, far from the objective but suspiciously close to a chokepoint?
Our urge to find rational causes would lead us to two conclusions: that barricade is either a ruse, or someone is on the other side of it. The possibility of the latter is grave enough to make most attackers check the room. It could be a clever trap since destroying barricades leaves players vulnerable, or it could be a safety method for a hiding roamer to alert about intruders with the sound cues of splitting wood.
The simple existence of a barricade in the most unexpected places can mean a lot of things, and having the opponents interpret that information and the possibilities can menace them.
Then there are the attacker drones and defender cameras (preplaced around their territory for them to monitor), which also work to manipulate enemies. Players can mark enemies’ position with them, and those who get marked are notified about it. Several reactions may occur: it has a distracting side effect, players might try to look around to find the culprit gadget, they may get panicked if they get exposed in heat, and they may want to reposition themselves. These are all reactions that leave players out in the open, or in other words, the kind of reactions the opposing team wants to inflict to serve themselves.
Misinforming enemies and influencing their actions are not just the core tenets of psychological warfare; they have become integral parts to the meta play of Siege. ‘Become’ is the keyword, as the game itself was not even seemingly designed around those ideas, in fact they emerge as a side effect from the varied interaction between players. Yet a direction this ambitious cannot be perfectly executed, which has left Siege open to wounds of its own.
As the game enjoys the rare privilege of constant updates and non-stop streams of feedback, the developer team has felt the pressure to up their game. As is the case with all multiplayer games, the designers can’t fully comprehend the scale at which different tools or abilities could influence players, as that would require months of playtime from an active fanbase that’d scurry out for outsmarting tactics. Only after that can the developers better understand the impact of their design choices. With the game’s surprising popularity, the team behind it has faced an unprecedented demand for expansion of the game’s content and systems. A hefty goal for any multiplayer game out there already, but an extraordinary one for the likes of Siege that barely have any points of reference regarding design.
Ever since Operation Dust Line, the second major content update from spring 2016, new operators have had an increase in abilities that inflict indirect, yet mentally affecting responses. The game is at a state where presence of operators like the silent roamer Caveira can change the entire way the enemy team is going to behave. While this is not really a bad thing — Caveira’s existence in the current roster is a net positive for highlighting Siege’s strengths — other operators with same goals in mind have left yours truly wondering where the Rainbow team at Ubisoft is heading towards with their design philosophy.
Lately, a somewhat sour taste has been left on the community with newly added operators Lion and Dokkaebi, whose abilities serve to mainly harass the entire enemy team at the simple press of a button. One tracks all enemies unless they stay still, the other hacks cameras and rings phones.
Some have said say they play out to generate a feeling of resistance even when direct contact is not being made. Others deride them for killing momentum with easily countered abilities, that serve more to frustrate than influence the opposition.
Operators like these two have not carried the same level of weight in how the game is played, especially when compared to other post-launch operators such as Mira. The concern lies in whether it bears fruit to have operators with one-button triggers to bother enemies from anywhere, compared to abilities that can act as an instrument for wide variety of tactics, including psychological ones. Right now, Lion and Dokkaebi are too predictable for that goal to be realized, and we can only expect more future operators to have such scattershot design — after all, experimentation is required when your game is unique enough to lack points of reference.
Yet subjective concerns have little to distract from the unprecedented success that Rainbow Six Siege has been enjoying in ever-growing numbers, in no small part due to its phenomenal design. It plays by the expectations of modern multiplayer design trends while also setting itself apart. It builds flexible systems and clever mechanics on top of an inventive technical framework that makes it a logical evolution, a meaningful step up from the military shooter craze of early 2010s. It’s an antithesis to the static, controlled map designs and an ode to the creative problem-solving that make many of our most memorable moments in online games.
It’s complex, but not complicated. Fresh, yet comfortably familiar. Tense, as well as deliberate. Playable, and watchable.
Rainbow Six Siege is one of the defining games of the Twitch generation.
2 vs 2. One-minute remaining.
Following IQ’s lead, we ascended to the uppermost floor. We were at the top both in a literal and a hierarchical sense. Compared to the cold hallway we were in, the top floor was warmly lit, saturating the deep red mahogany door frames and furniture to a fever-like hue. A brown-red fitted carpet with elaborate Persian ornaments complimented the already luxurious nature of this floor furthermore.
A hunting trophy of a wild boar hanged from the wall, next to a glass counter displaying a variety of opulent jewelry. Above the counter, attached to a wall, next to large door frame read a brass sign titling the room we were heading towards. “Cigar Lounge”. It was a large parlor that emanated this oddly relaxed mood with its old-fashioned cushion sofas and chandeliers, which finely contrasted our haste and ever-increasing temerity.
It was clear: this floor, with its adjacent bar overlooking the rest of the cafe from a balcony, it all was for the pompous, the affluent elite socialites who gathered for weekend evenings. We weren’t here for a dry martini, however.
We discussed over on voice chat with IQ how to proceed from here. We had to get some holes above the objective to stir the pot; to kick the hornet’s nest where the hornets were ever so reluctant to sting until we’d gather the courage to reach our hands upon it. Our friend marked a spot somewhere near A point, in between the cushion sofas and the door frame. In mutual understanding I placed one of my spare breach charges on the deck, then backed off to squeeze the trigger. Shame about that beautiful polished mahogany deck. It got obliterated, revealing the floor below through the steel foundations that kept it all intact.
IQ took overwatch on the point. We argued. Argued about what to do next. Should we blow up more of the deck or the nearby hatch? The hatch. It would give us swift access to the floor below, we could take on our enemy head-on on the objective, where they couldn’t run away. On voice comms, IQ and Hibana insisted on taking down more floor. I had one breach charge left. We had no time for arguing.
30 seconds.
Hibana hesitated and took back his words, paused for a split-second, then concluded that hatch would be better. Lucky for him, I had already placed my charge on it. We had to get both a view and an entry point in case no one would be in our sights, regardless of any disagreements. Squeeze the trigger. There goes the hatch. Sweaty palms. Heartbeat somewhere in the “plunging in the unknown” territory. Quick glance into a hallway. No one’s following us. Just in case.
Suddenly, IQ took out Mute. I wasn’t sure how, but it didn’t matter. We had exactly one guy left and around twenty seconds to do something about it. I peek from the hatch. Startled, I shoot Mira. The corpse of Mira, of my doing. It rested against the wall. Looked human, looked like Lesion. It could have been him. I swore I saw Lesion there. But he was not. He was hiding from our sights, afraid. He would’ve been glad to know the feeling was mutual.
Wait, it’s fifteen seconds now? Oh bummer, here we go.
I dropped from the hatch without saying a word. Plunged to the floor. Next to a large, unlit locomotive. IQ stayed behind with the meager health they had left. I would have to take on Lesion alone unless my friend got a clear shot on him from above, yet I doubt our adversary would be that foolish. I took aim, took shelter in the locomotive.
And lo and behold.
There he was.
And there was I.
Both of us, face to face.
Two gunslingers, duel at noon.
A rock, a hard place and we in between.
Under the judging eyes of spectators.
The eyes of teammates who wish for us to right their wrongs.
In that sense, we were both in equal terms.
Only difference, I was inside the locomotive.
Inside the hornet’s nest.
Their territory, their rules.
Their traps, our tools.
And we were out of tools.
And this was the only option I could find.
Yet I paid no mind.
Draw.
BLUE TEAM
ROUND 1 WON
ENEMIES ELIMINATED
Written by Filippus, with love, for Ludic Dream.
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