Escape from Tarkov is dying

The one thing about Escape from Tarkov that doesn’t change is change. It was the recent changes in the games loot distribution that seem to have caused some of the biggest uproars. Among the chorus of displeasure that can be found in places like Reddit and Twitter has led some to decree that Tarkov is simply a dead game.

ow it’s been known that Tarkov’s success is far beyond what Battlestate Games and it’s top man Nikita Buyanov had ever imagined. For them the idea was this was always going to be a niche game with a modest audience. In the hands of Twitch streamers this game has gained  massive popularity. The advantage of popularity was a lot of financial backing that they simply didn’t have before. Meaning that development could move forward faster than they had anticipated. The downside was a game that went from being made in Nakita’s vision to one that’s being directed to be a “design by comity”, where the community itself is desiring to control the direction of the games design.

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Thankfully Nikita has made clear that the direction of the game is going to be as they as a company envisioned, if that meant losing players, then so be it. The latest change to moving to dynamic looting has long been a wish list of players, though it wasn’t done smoothly. Sadly, moving to a dynamic loot system, one that controls and distributes the loose spawn loot, meant items behind locked doors could spawn in other areas not locked away. Keys have long been valuable because the inside was always higher than in non-locked areas. Keys have lost a large amount of their value as a result. Compounded by this issue is that loot felt less than before, mostly due to players not knowing where the new loot spawns were located. Also, this move was used to spread out players, avoiding bottlenecks and players dying to early in the raid.

Players feeling like their loot has become less and citing the lack of pvp, have begun to claim that people are leaving in droves. It’s true that many streamers have gone to play different games, like New World, for instance; it still has over 3.6 million followers on Twitch, averaging about 15k viewers at any point in time. For the creators, many have said their desire to play other games is based on lack of new content, like new maps, for instance, inclusion of a storyline, or they have done so much already there was nothing left to accomplish.

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Players then began to point to the number of issues plaguing the game and that changing mechanics should not be the priority. Despite the rolling out of the new Unity engine that will help in easing many of Tarkov’s current pains, players are focusing more on the games negatives then it’s formidable positives. Players who have grown comfortable with it’s current design complain now because they are being forced to adjust to a game whose development hasn’t yet been completed.

It’s impossible to make everyone happy and in-game development trying to make everyone happy normally has disastrous consequences. Nikita’s decision to stay true to the vision that this game was born from is not just refreshing but much needed in a genre of games that’s been short on new ideas. Escape from Tarkov will be successful, even if it doesn’t carry the largest audience, for BSG and Nikita, that’s okay with them.