Way before it was trendy to comment ‘not another extraction shooter‘ at every announcement, there was Escape From Tarkov. The spiritual successor of browser game Contract Wars, this is a project that has spent about a decade in development until its 1.0 launch.
Tarkov is commonly associated with stress, frustration, cheaters, and the kind of hardcore feel that inevitably creates elitism. More than one casual shooter session with Tarkov buddies has inevitably developed into crushing the lobby while shouting ‘welcome to Tarkov’ every time we drop someone. That’ll show the gamer dad chasing a quick game of Fortnite.
Thanks to its often uncompromising nature and obtuse design, Escape From Tarkov has morphed into the gaming equivalent of an Iron Man triathlon. Is it healthy? Not in the slightest, but doing it lets you clearly signal to others that you can handle what they cannot.
After years of beta testing Escape From Tarkov for BSG, we are now in the era of Tarkov as a finished product. No more meaningless grind, wipes, or paradigm shifts due to updates. Can Escape From Tarkov stand on its two legs now that you can, in fact, escape from Tarkov?
The Road So Far
My Tarkov journey starts in 2023, around update 0.13. I have since crossed the 3000-hour mark on this game, and though a decent chunk of that includes menu time with the game minimized, it is nonetheless an unhealthy amount for any game. And yet, this is not just any game.
I got into Escape From Tarkov because I needed something that had the grit of Metro Exodus and the freedom of STALKER games, but I had grown tired of just replaying both and their mods. After even the hardcore GAMMA modpack for STALKER Anomaly had me feeling blasé, Tarkov seemed like the last chance to chase that high. Boy, did it deliver.
In the days before Ground Zero, tutorials, and PvE mode, I plunged headfirst into the Shoreline map and got lost and shot in more ways than I ever thought possible. To this day, my self-esteem about shooters has not healed from the string of deaths Tarkov unleashed upon me. The problem is, I loved every bit of it.
Psychological Warfare
Dying in Tarkov means you lose what you found in the raid and what you took into it. Sure, insurance often means you get some of it back, but that’s only if your killer decides your junk is not worth lifting, or you get lucky and karma strikes them before they can take your good home.
The psychological effect from this fear of loss is what sends you hugging a wall at the sign of the first unfamiliar footsteps, reaching for the fire selector to set it on automatic, silently praying that the click doesn’t give you away.
Escape From Tarkov has morphed into the gaming equivalent of an Iron Man triathlon.
As the stranger grows louder, you start ruing every decision made in this raid up until now, while contemplating whether you should do a Rambo swing, sit quiet, or try to talk your way out.
Whatever your choice, its outcome influences how you act later. If an experienced player spared you and helped you find the exit, maybe you’ll take mercy on the newbie you spot through the scope of your sniper rifle. Or maybe you were put down like a rabid dog, and will return the favor. Sometimes, you come to regret those choices.
It’s this flow of action and reacting to others that makes Tarkov so unique, because despite all the scarcity and the violence, the main danger in Escape From Tarkov is the unpredictability of your fellow PMCs.
Water is Wet
Before its release, the quest design in Escape From Tarkov was its main weakness. The entire affair could be summarised into either fetch quests or arbitrary kill ones, and while that’s not inherently a problem, the justification was nonsensical.
The bad news is that the same old quest structure is still there, and there is no escaping Jaeger’s nonsense or the strain it puts on PvP dynamics.
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However, these bad quests that used to be the main game have been rightfully relegated to the ‘Side Quest’ tab. Not feeling like you have to complete an especially annoying task now no longer stops your game progression altogether.
The all-new story mode still inherits some quirks from its predecessor, but those get much less annoying because you actually get to converse with the characters and properly understand why you’re doing all of that. Tarkov suddenly has a purpose beyond chasing a masochistic high.
[…] maybe you were put down like a rabid dog, and will return the favor. Sometimes, you come to regret those choices.
Getting the most out of that was a bit of a challenge on PvP, and that’s a design issue I don’t think can be easily fixed.
Completing any quest on Factory is still a living nightmare because you’re dealing with all flavours of pistol Timmies, bolt-action spammers, and the occasional late-game monster just chasing a high.
A story quest is no different, with the added ‘bonus’ that you get the immersion-breaking experience of dying twelve times trying to reach that one quest area because everyone else is either also doing it, or is using that location as bait to complete some other task. Shoutout to my Sooter Born in Heaven homies sniping Timmy from 200 meters out.
The solution I found is to simply play the story mode on the PvE mode (included in some editions, but $25.49 on Steam otherwise), which itself presents some problems.
Misery Loves Company
PvE Tarkov is a much more immersive game as a hardcore survival shooter, and it plays out like a much-improved version of the STALKER Anomaly full-conversion mod.
Without having to worry about rats camping every relevant area or people wearing those silly face masks that should never stop a bullet, I got to enjoy the game to its fullest here, doing a little bit of LARP with my new legionnaire USEC character for this wipe.
Meta items are no longer a necessity since you’re not under as much of a disadvantage when rocking certain equipment for the drip alone. My life has improved by about 60% just by going into a raid with an M16A2 in an Iraq ’04 setup.
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That said, if the story becomes a lot more interesting, the inherent predictability of AI enemies significantly tones down the psychological thrill that makes PvP Tarkov so unique.
Not feeling like you have to complete an especially annoying task now no longer stops your game progression altogether.
The bots do behave more like actual abandoned PMCs, but the chance encounters are not as random, so you feel more in control. I don’t play Tarkov to feel that; I do it to cause myself significant psychological harm.
As the PvP and PvE zones and their respective accounts are currently fully segregated, anyone who doesn’t have 12 hours a day to have parallel playthroughs needs to pick whether they want intense multiplayer or a coherent story experience.
It would have been nice here to have a system akin to Gray Zone Warfare, where the same character can switch between PvP and PvE zones at will, if only to get those pesky quests done without too much player intervention. The problem with Tarkov is that the economy is primarily player-run, so any such solution would need some barrier, like restricting the trading of items found during PvE raids on the PvP flea market.
Shooters Shoot
Regardless of which mode you play this game, the standout feature of Escape From Tarkov is how good it feels to shoot and how realistic they made the weapon handling and customisation.
At times, you spend so much time tinkering with your firearms that this feels like the actual game, while everything else is just a little distraction or a means to finding money to buy more guns.
Weapons have true-to-life ballistics, and their interactions with targets are also fairly well-modelled, with one major exception.
I am still disappointed that the game moved away from the previous realistic iteration of body armor coverage, which left a lot more skin exposed, as I firmly believe that made fights much more entertaining, especially against scavs. BSG, if you’re reading this, throw this guy a bone and bring it back for PvE at least, pretty please.
This realistic approach also helps offset the creation of a meta, no matter how much streamers try to force one. A tactically adept player can make short work of a tryhard carrying 60kg of gear with a simple Mosin-Nagant rifle and one round. The proliferation of face masks and shields waters this down a little, but the principle remains.
Take Me Out
As it exists now, the two main things keeping Escape From Tarkov from truly reaching immersion are the animations and the bosses. Let’s start with the minor one.
Although the game has pioneered many mechanics and is a modern title through and through, all characters still move around like your cousin’s sketchy Counter-Strike bots. That is to say, weapons shouldered and pointed forward, moving about at the same jog in stiff routes.
Bots and players alike are bound to this clunky movement, and it is a shame because it does nothing to disguise the guts of Tarkov (and most first-person shooters) as walking muzzles from which bullets come out.
[…] everything else is just a little distraction or a means to finding money to buy more guns.
I had hoped that 1.0 would bring some variation, especially for scavs and other AI-only factions, where they would walk around at a more leisurely pace with guns lowered or resting on their shoulders.
Bots in guard duties like the Lighthouse rogues shouldn’t always be ready to shoot, but instead lounge around in their posts, only going into the current state when alerted to an enemy’s presence. It would also be nice to have a low-ready state for the player to make the downtime between fights more immersive.
If the animations are mildly annoying, the boss mechanics are just infuriating, not least because of how close it comes to greatness before fumbling it.
Take Killa, for example: a violent and arrogant gopnik that roams the ULTRA mall dishing out insults and tracer bullets in his totally-not-Adidas outfit. He looks and sounds fantastic, and the backstory goes hard when you account for his dumb sibling who huffed too many chemicals at Polikhim, but the implementation makes it so that it does not matter.
From a gameplay perspective, unless you dedicate your raid exclusively to finding and killing him, Killa is just an annoyance that spoils visits to Interchange. He spots you from across the map, takes a knee, then unloads a perfectly-aimed burst of machine gun fire that always finds your thorax or head, and then you’re dead.
A tactically adept player can make short work of a tryhard carrying 60kg of gear with a simple Mosin-Nagant rifle and one round.
When you survive long enough to actually fight him, the engagement typically goes like this: you unload all your ammunition into him, but because he has both level 6 armor and a ridiculously inflated health pool, you just tickle Killa while he proceeds to take that knee and delete you in half a second flat.
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The same problem plagues most other bosses, whose target acquisition, accuracy, and in some cases health, make them unsatisfying aimbot affairs. Shoutout to my man Partizan for shaking things up by fighting with tripwires and setting up ambushes, while dying from a relatively normal amount of bullets.
An increase in bullet spread, and a debuff to the health pools to more closely match scav and PMC levels would solve all of this, but in classic Tarkov fashion, you would have the same no-lifers whining that other people are suddenly able to enjoy the game better.
Escaping From Tarkov
One of the things many a character likes to tell you in this game is that you will never escape from Tarkov. And honestly, they’re right.
Although this game has plenty of flaws and at times is downright hostile to the player, all the copycats in the world have yet to come anywhere close to that Tarkov experience.
My days of playing this from three to six hours a day may be long gone, but a raid or two a day keeps Therapist away. And if she comes, well, I’ll pay her off with a Salewa or two. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to Tarkov.
Closing Comments:
Escape From Tarkov has changed significantly on its road to release, but there’s little doubt over this being the best that Tarkov has always been. The story mode adds depth and meaning to the game in ways that were sorely missing before, making its standout environment and gameplay actually matter. It may not be the prettiest or the most approachable game, but Escape From Tarkov looks set to remain the premier post-apocalyptic first-person shooter in the market for the foreseeable future.
Conclusion & Closing Comments
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Author: 360 Technology Group
