Rainbow Six Siege update: Latest Ubisoft announcement brings range of new features to beloved game

The game was released in 2015 and has been gradually improved ever since

Host Aisha Tyler presents the game "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege" at the Ubisoft Media Briefing in Los Angeles (REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson)

Rainbow Six Siege has been out for three years. But it's still continuing to get major updates.

Developers Ubisoft have announced a whole host of new features for the shooter that are intended to keep its players – 27 million worldwide, and growing – happy and continuing to play the game.

Chief among those updates is a brand new Outbreak Mode, which adds zombies into the game. In line with other shooters such as Call of Duty, this mode allows people to switch into killing an undead horde rather than human characters, and rewards people for staying alive.

Other updates include new characters and changes to maps. Ubisoft showed off a major redesign for one map, for instance, and promised that further updates would be coming over the next year.

New maps will also be coming over the next year, the company said. Others will be updated to make them look more attractive.

For many, the rollout of Rainbow Six Siege has become a prime example of the value of "games as a service", where titles are released and then maintained for a long time, with new features gradually rolling out. When the game was first made available in 2015, it was vastly different and less advanced than its current state, but has been improved with a range of recent updates.

Ubisoft reiterated during its announcements that it would keep to that release schedule. It suggested that the game could be supported for as long as 10 years, during which time it will add new features, players and changes to the game's dynamics.

As such, the company is not thought to be working on a sequel to the hugely popular game. Instead, similar updates are likely to come out in the future, which are funded in part by encouraging players to complete in-app purchases within the game.