Rainbow Six Extraction ping mechanic explained and how to mark targets

Understanding the Rainbow Six Extraction ping mechanic is vital to successful missions, as keeping track of Archaeans, nests, and objectives will help you form game-saving strategies along the way. But how do you actually mark enemies, targets, and objects with the ping mechanic in Rainbow Six Extraction, and what are the limitations of this ability? We'll lay out the basics simply below for you to make use of and help master the alien menace. Read on to find out how to ping enemies in Rainbow Six Extraction.

Pinging Mechanic in Rainbow Six Extraction explained

Rainbow Six Extraction ping mark — (Image credit: Ubisoft)

To ping in Rainbow Six Extraction, players simply need to hit Up on the D-Pad of their controller, which marks whatever they're looking at and makes it permanently highlighted if it's an enemy or object of relevance, allowing you and your teammates to see it through walls at all times. This makes it a hugely useful ability when coordinating with other players, especially in stealth situations - mark a target, a nest, or an objective to help coordinate your allies towards it. You can even ping things that you can't see, such as if you're using the x-ray abilities of Pulse or Lion, two of the Rainbow Six Extraction best operators.

However, there are limitations to this power. Mainly that, as far as we can work out, each individual player can only ping and mark one NPC or object at a time - if you ping a second, the first one deselects.

This stops you from highlighting whole enemy factions in one go and keeps you on your toes, though there are ways around it. Special items like the starting drone can "scan" enemies, which is different (apparently) from pinging them and seems to mark them permanently, allowing you to see them through walls and keep them in your sightlines for a while.

It's also worth mentioning that holding the ping button down opens up the chat wheel in standard controls, so make sure that your ping trigger is brief, otherwise you might end up trying to mark a rampaging monster and only giving it a confirmatory thumbs-up.

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Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and Very Tired Man with a BA from Brunel University, a Masters from Sussex University and a decade working in games journalism, often focused on guides coverage but also in reviews, features and news. His love of games is strongest when it comes to groundbreaking narratives like Disco Elysium, UnderTale and Baldur's Gate 3, as well as innovative or refined gameplay experiences like XCOM, Sifu, Arkham Asylum or Slay the Spire. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at Eurogamer, Gfinity, USgamer, SFX Magazine, RPS, Dicebreaker, VG247, and more.