Rainbow Six Siege dev breaks down new operator Brava

It's hard to believe that Rainbow Six: Siege has been around since 2015, but the game continues to evolve and expand with a quartet of seasonal content drops each year.

Kicking off Year 8 is Operation Commanding Force, which brings a suite of improvements across systems like reloading, more anti-cheat measures, and much more. As always, though, the headline addition is a new Operator.

This time round, it's Brazilian Attacker Brava of the in-game faction, Viperstrike. To learn more about Brava's origins, development, and deadly new KLUDGE drone, we spoke to Rainbow Six Siege's Creative Director, Alex Karpazis.

Rainbow Six Siege dev shares Brava insights

Siege already has a couple of Brazilian Operators in Capitão and Caveira, so what made the dev team return -- and on a year when the Brazil region of Six esports has split off from the remainder of the LATAM region?

"There is intention behind it," Karpazis explains. "We always love revisiting places because we have history there.

"We can create new stories that we haven't told before that have these links already."

"Brazil is an absolutely amazing and supportive community for Siege. They're one of the most populous, they're one of the most passionate. It's been really fun kind of working on a bit of a Brazilian Renaissance within Siege."

Brava's new gadget is the Kludge drone, which can hack enemy gadgets and turn them on their owners. It's similar to Mozzie's existing gadget, and the two feel like two sides of the same coin. That's something Karpazis says is intentional.

"We already played a little bit with Mozzie on the defence side and having him take control of attacker gadgets," Karpazis says.

"Now that defenders have this plethora of gadgetry at their disposal, we thought it was about time where we can actually turn that on them as well.

"Brava really came about in the stories that you can tell just by using her gadget," he reveals, before citing Kapkan's explosive tripwires as an ideal example.

"The idea that you can turn a Kapkan trap and then all of a sudden defenders are running into their own Kapkan traps is hilarious, or capture a drone that Mozzie has already captured.

"As soon as we started playing with it, our minds were kind of racing with the opportunities, that's really rewarding. That's just creative play that we can give to our players, and, for us, that's kind of what we want them to expect from us as well."

Brava in pro play

Ahead of the Six Invitational, the biggest Rainbow Six: Siege competition of all, Karpazis says pro players testing Brava have already begun adapting.

"There is definitely the potential of turning an entire round on its head. With the use of Brava, we've already had pro-player playtesting sessions, seeing how they would use the Kludge.

"At that high skill ceiling, you kind of see them begin to anticipate what the drone can do, and it's a fragile device, so you do have to protect it.

"You do have to create noise to distract while you're actually using the device because defenders at that level will immediately spot it or hear it and try to take it out."

Newcomers, on the other hand, may have more opportunities to bamboozle defenders with the KLUDGE drone.

"For beginners, maybe they won't be able to use it as impactfully, but maybe the defenders will sometimes be a little bit slower to reacting when a gadget's been taken over."

For more on Brava in Operation Commanding Force, be sure to check out our guide to using the Operator, and our hub for all things Y8S1.