I wanna talk about the unique phenomenon that Escape From Tarkov has spawned, but I don't wanna pitch it, because then I wouldn't be able to highlight what I actually want. So it's time for another rant!
(This is long and scattershot first draft stuff, so I'm not mad if you skip it)
Through sheer perseverance, Escape From Tarkov has carved a new path. The game has been out for what feels like a million years, originally skating by on the battle royale craze. The timing for the extraction game was just right. Playerunknown's Battlegrounds had just catapulted to the top game of zeitgeist, so people wanted "hardcore" shooters any way they could get it. And Tarkov is the most hardcore of them all.
It's exactly that strange pinhole that I wanna address. See, Tarkov isn't for everyone. It's like playing DayZ blindfolded. In fact, for the longest time, only eSports chads were playing this game, where even one wrong peek wipes your progress. Anyone else need not apply. But that style of rough and tumble grit is like cocaine to older gamers, who wanted nothing more than for Battlefield and the like, back in the day, to be this stipulated on the smallest details. Military simulators work better on people who are still convinced that the military is good. That's a whole other rant. That strange relationship kept audiences for Tarkov high, from 2017 until now. Kinda crazy, when you think that the player base really only is those chads.
However, through this force of will, Tarkov has been able to now reattach itself to the battle royale genre as a peer. Since the rut of the big 4-5 games has settled in, more and more viewers are coming in, seeing Tarkov as a novelty, despite it not being new at all. A streamer falls off Apex and turns to Tarkov. Now that audience who previously only saw an arcade shooter is introduced to this genre. Another streamer falls off Warzone and turns to Tarkov. And so the cycle continues. This coalesces into Tarkov now being part of the conversation to the point that other games are implementing the extraction gameplay. Despite Escape From Tarkov doing nothing at all, except for providing a game for chads, it's now a frontrunner. That's absolutely crazy to me.
Fast forward to games like Warzone adding extraction; the onlooking crowd I mentioned initially has no more excuses. They can dive right in. And that's what I want to talk about. The above video shows a bunch of older veterans trying their hand at extraction games, like they've been waiting for. And, as expected, it turns out that they're suck-ass garbage pretty bad at playing it. That's the audience! That's your target audience; a bunch of people who are awful at the design you're offering. On paper, the subgenre sounds more appealing than a battle royale, since the focus is on loot and not survival, plus the maps are populated by robot players. All points to an easier time, were it not that the design philosophy of Tarkov is to be "hardcore" above all. One wrong move and you're done. And when you're a person who remembers playing Battlefield 1942 on your new DSL line, that 'wrong move' can be as much as needing to focus a single second longer to aim.
The added quirk here is that the amalgamation of games - and anything battle royale in general - has traced the success of Tarkov wholesale, like rubbing it over on graph paper. Games aren't even trying anymore, because there's very little reason to try. If a system works somewhere, just huck it over to your game and get that player base back as fast as you can. That ridiculous, unthinking copy paste method has led to every extraction game implementing mid-tier game development models.
Developers Battlestate Games is a Russian studio and if you've played any Eastern European game, you'll know they have certain priorities and none of them are in user interface or user experience (UI/UX). Limited resources need to cut corners somewhere and sensibilities or 'polish' are usually the first to get scrapped. As such, every extraction game has Tarkov's terribly gargantuan inventory, confusing mission structure, obtuse crafting; you name it. Those systems have nothing to do with being "hardcore." The developer just didn't give a fuck about perfecting it. No reason to. So now, games are just doing it because that other game is doing it. After all that work Apex did to declutter an interface, we're just going right back to square one.
It doesn't help that Battlestate also only listens to the most hardcore voices, spiraling that design further inward. Hell, even then the developer is prone to just introducing more arcane bullshit in their game. It's their game. Fuck you; you'll play it. What the company is definitely not doing is trying to get more people to play it. You're playing it our way or not at all; it's a hardcore gamer's wet dream.
And, of course, that further impacts the accessibility to that auxiliary audience; the older people who remember just switching weapons with their number pad and calling it a day. There's so much more to parse and little time to do it. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the game gets given to you for free, so you have to work extra hard to get it. If you don't devote your life to this one video game, like say a college student with sub-decimal twitch reactions could, you're falling behind. It won't matter if you're picking up The Cycle, Marauders or even the fantasy version, Dark and Darker. They're all molded from the same chad origin. Zero Sievert? Doesn't scratch that itch, does it?
It's all so tragic. You're a 40-something who finally gets the military shooter craze built for you - get your stuff and get out - but it's all built out of your reach. And it's kind of your own fault. You tuned in to Johnny Quickguns, who was bored of shouting at people in Warzone and decided to run around in this other gritty universe. You thought that this thing looked perfect for you and kept watching, spawning the genre to life with your viewer numbers. There are bots, there are missions; you don't even need to complete a round to the last man standing. Your time is worth something! But you simply can't keep up. And it will take so much time for you to get to a similar level that you might not even try. You could, but you're gonna die.
Maybe, just maybe Call of Duty will become that slightly more lenient place, which is great, but you know that growing feeling that you're missing something is gonna set in. And even then, Johnny Quickguns might decide to log back on. Then you're truly fucked. Enjoy? I do hope people get to enjoy the genre; it's a good genre. Titanfall had artificial players running around and batteries to pick up too. And Titanfall is one of the best shooters ever made. What I'm saying is that maybe a Titanfall extraction game will save us, like Apex once did.
Sorry for rambling, but thanks for reading.
