Jordan got to spend 6 hours of hands on time with Rainbow Six Extraction playing two maps located in San Francisco and New York. One stand out note is that the maps are substantially larger than their Rainbow Six Siege predecessors but they are way more horizontal compared to those found in Siege, where verticality plays a larger role in both map design and navigation. This is only based on the two maps listed above.
In Extraction, several of Rainbow's operators are recruited to join a special team tasked with combating the parasitic alien Archaeon threat that's spread throughout North America. That mission takes you to four different zones, each of which are divided into three maps, and each of those maps in turn are cut into three separate regions. So, for example, the San Francisco zone is split into the Tenderloin, Enterprise Space Foundation, and Apollo Casino & Resort maps.
Rainbow Six Extraction creative director Patrik Méthé told me that each zone of the game has "its own flavor," and pointed to Alaska as an example where the maps feature a little bit more verticality. "In Alaska, there's some old barns where you can have line-of-sight and have a good vantage point that you can exploit to either scan the area or to just down enemies," Méthé said.
And granted, the scenes of Alaska's three maps do seem to be a bit more open than the enclosed spaces found in New York and San Francisco, with opportunities to shoot down on enemies from a higher vantage point. But navigating those vertical spaces seems to be limited to staircases and ladders just like in New York and San Francisco. The grapple gear that Siege attack operators can utilize to scale walls and swing through windows isn't present in Extraction, and the game (at least at launch) doesn't feature any of the operators that can use their unique gadgets to navigate vertical spaces, such as Amaru.