The other way to look at this is: Why do characters in a shooter need a listed date of birth?
Is there a secret dating sim rolled into it?
Lore. Siege comes from a time where mobas, online shooters and other multiplayer games were big on building a “universe”. Every single one of the operators had full bios, and some also had videos about them. They also had videos explaining in-universe events, such as the alien virus that introduced the two agents from CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Threat Unit), Finka and Lion, and had an entire special pve game mode made for it, that eventually became its own spin-off game.
It’s a holdover from the early days of Rainbow Six would be my guess. You had like a dozen or so operatives with mild differentiations in stats and traits. Each guy had a “service record” of sorts, which gave a little more context for what was, in essence, the games’ lives system. If I remember right, some of these names were either pulled from or incorporated into the Tom Clancy Universe of novels and adaptations. It was a practically free way to inject some story and character into games that were pretty light on those details otherwise.
Of course, modern Rainbow Six has no need for these things, but inertia is a bitch, and you can be sure some grognards would piss and moan about a “feature” being removed if they stopped including these details.
Lore maybe?
There are often a lot of communities that love reading into the lore of characters, even shooters. Overwatch is a good example of this.
The birthday paradox comes to mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Unless someone can prove some malicious intent, I think it is just as valid of a birthday as any other day.
So… I’m completely outsider to this game (and series), and… is there actually much lore/story to these characters - or better yet, lore/story that anyone cares for or matters for the game?
I get that the date is a bit unfortunate all things considered, but… why do the character need to have a stated birthday anyway? Are there in-game birthday parties or what?
There is a bunch of lore for the characters, and lore for world events. Some years ago they even made an entire animated series with 5 or 6 short videos explaining how the Rainbow 6 team changed directors. There are explanations for the game modes, and also for the enemy factions that show up in the pve modes. Back when I played, most players knew quite a bit about the lore and the characters.
tbh, that’s quite a bit more than what I would have expected - especially for a game what I thought was more or less a counter-strike variant where the whole point is the pvp experience.
Again ? They did the same with the next AC release date and the metro bombing in Tokyo.
18 000 employees and not one to run a “check dates on google” department?
As much as I dislike Ubisoft, it’s nitpicky as hell.
The Year only has 365 days. Billions of people have inhabited the planet and screwed over each other for thousands of years in various terrible ways. Add in shitty natural causes like plagues and such, And well…
Good luck finding a date something shitty didn’t happen.
I agree but it’s also a heavily scrutinized company with money and tons of employees.
They often get roasted for various reasons and they know it, so it’s not that hard to cross check our recent past, specially with that number of employees across the world.
People won’t say shit if the date is from the death of Billy the bitch of Moncuq in 869.
But checking the last century is not that hard of a job when you spend billions in marketing and salaries. If you want to avoid the same trouble you always have with your PR of course, unless you consider bad publicity is publicity
I absolutely agree
It is hard to find a date where nothing bad has ever happened. Most devs just write a random date, because who cares.
But if you’re drawing attention to a certain country, it’s best to check the dates for that country first. No one would blink if the character was Russian and had the same birthday.
Yeah i agree but this is not a dev, this is a huge corporation with shit ton of money, tens of thousands of employees, probably plenty of non dev peoples in the list and an already growing PR issue.
They learned the hard way that some people care, it’s not their first time.
So what are they doing with all those resources in marketing and PR to not have a simple check over the last century?
A data scientist could do the software in python or R on a raspberry pi. You don’t have to look at the totality of human history, only the last century and Wikipedia will probably be 75% of the data source. So imagine what could do a multi million dollars company that loves jerking about blockchain and AI (they will, late as always but the management will want something AI).
Why does it even matter?
Most companies would prefer not to have a character accidentally associated with a terror attack?
Apparently it does for some (not me).
So as a company you’re supposed to be cautious about stuff that could degrade your image even more.
What do I know, I’m not a billionaire CEO.
18 000 employees and not one to run a “check dates on google” department?
To be fair, Google has been removing notable dates from their calendar.
They do this on purpose until someone notices. It’s a sick running joke at Ubisoft.
Must really suck for the irl people whose birthday is on that day.
They should apologize for their insensitivity
They should have considered the potential consequences of being born on that day smh
