Playing Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield in 2020 and beyond

Obtaining the Game

Raven Shield, released March 18 2003, is frequently on sale for under $5 on Steam. This edition contains the Athena Sword expansion but not Iron Wrath, which can be downloaded separately (see EXPANSIONS.md).

For novelty purposes, there are also single-player and multi-player demos still available for download, also released in 2003.

Community Resources

• Discord

Playing the Game

Essential Improvements

1. Borderless Gaming will run the game in a fullscreen window, allowing you to instantly alt-tab. You can download it from Github for free.
   1. Edit <YourGameDir>\system\RavenShield.ini and set StartupFullscreen to False
   2. Launch Borderless Gaming
   3. Launch Raven Shield
   4. Add Raven Shield to "Favorites" in Borderless Gaming by selecting it in the left-side list and clicking the > button
   5. Close and relaunch Raven Shield to use it with Borderless Gaming
2. Check the PC Gaming Wiki for any tweaks you might want to perform.
3. Rebind the controls as desired. For example:
   1. Bind Run to Shift
   2. Bind Reload to R
   3. Bind Zoom to RMB
4. If you plan to play online, set your name in the Multiplayer Options.

Single-Player

You can now play the campaign, a custom mission, or a training scenario. To unlock all maps in custom missions, press ~ at the main menu and enter the command unlockall.

Multi-Player

On September 4 2016, Ubisoft shut down the authentication servers for Raven Shield. We use OpenRVS to point our clients at a new set of servers so we can still play the game together.

1. Download the latest version of OpenRVS from RVSGaming.org.
2. Copy openrvs.ini, OpenRVS.u, R6ClassDefines.ini, and Servers.list to <YourGameDir>\system\.
3. You will need to update system/R6GameService.dll in order to remove another place where the game makes outbound calls to Ubisoft servers. Either run Chriswak's R6GameService_Patcher (source) or use the prebuilt copy from this repo. If unpatched, the game will hang any time it tries to reach Ubisoft servers during regular gameplay.
4. Launch the game and set your Internet connection speed to T3 in the settings menu to avoid throttling your connection.
5. Join a server and party like it's 2003!

Note: Since we are using a fixed list of servers, some features will no longer work. The list cannot be filtered (using the bottom menu) or sorted, and latency will always be displayed as 1000.

Players can edit Servers.list to choose which servers are displayed when RVSGaming servers cannot be reached. You can force the usage of this file by editing openrvs.ini and changing the value of ServerListURL to an invalid URL, such as http://127.0.0.1/servers.

Expansions

See EXPANSIONS.md

Mods and Custom Content

See CUSTOM.md

Hosting a Server

See SERVERS.md