Rainbow Six Extraction has been delayed again. The next installment in what has become a wide-ranging series based on a Tom Clancy IP was supposed to be just two months away from launch. Late last week, Ubisoft announced that Rainbow Six Extraction isn't officially arriving until sometime in 2022. While the game's developer didn't pinpoint an exact day, Ubisoft did say that it would be in January of next year. Unfortunately, there is some reason to wonder whether or not that's just the latest target date, considering its history of delays since it was first announced.

With the new launch date push back, Rainbow Six Extraction will be launching almost exactly two years from its very first "official" date. The big question these days is whether or not pushing back launch another four months is a way for Ubisoft to make sure that it doesn't have to delay it anymore. The alternative might mean January of 2022 is going to turn into yet a later date as the calendar moves closer to that day.

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Rainbow Six Extraction's First Appearance

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Rainbow Six Extraction was first announced in June 2019 at Ubisoft's E3 Showcase. The latest online installment of the Rainbow Six universe was revealed to be a three-player cooperative shooter from Ubisoft that included some features none of the previous games offered. The company originally said it was shooting for a launch in February of 2020. However, it didn't take long for the company to change its mind and the first delay came.

Ubisoft bumped back Rainbow Six Extraction until the "next fiscal year" but didn't offer anything concrete beyond that for quite some time. Ubisoft cited the coronavirus pandemic as the reason it needed more time to work on the game. That was certainly not an unfair rationale for wanting to wait a bit to release the game. There was also the fact that its original name was more than a little problematic considering the state of the world at the time.

Rainbow Six Quarantine to Rainbow Six Extraction

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Before Rainbow Six Extraction got its new name and showed off some gameplay earlier this summer, it was known as Rainbow Six Quarantine. While the original name still seems to loosely fit with what players are supposed to do when they pick it up and play it, Ubisoft apparently decided the title needed tweaking. Considering the game was going to get a release while there was still a pandemic circling the globe, not evoking COVID-19 seemed like a pretty good idea.

Thus the game was publicly rebranded Rainbow Six Extraction and Ubisoft announced a September of 2021 launch. That announcement came in the middle of June. Sneak peeks at how Rainbow Six Extraction plays, including a return to the squad-based combat the series is known for started arriving shortly after. However, as it turned out, Ubisoft was apparently not all that confident all the things it had planned for its latest shooter was going to be ready by this fall. Just a little over a month after it was scheduled for September, the developers decided January of next year was the new target.

Rainbow Six Extraction is scheduled to release in January of 2022 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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