The escape from Tarkov in Oculus Rift VR Tri Def 3D mod gameplay 2017
13Escape From Tarkov to the PC gaming's most hardcore FPS
Lured by hints of Stalker, Metro, and DayZ, we go hands-on with the alpha.
Tarkov is having a bad year. Constant war has dragged the whole city into total chaos, and I'm a military contractor trying to get out of Dodge. Spawning inside a dense forest, I see a huge eyeball pressed right up against my face. I yelp and step back. It's my first contact with another player, but I do not know what to do. His eyes are vacant and frozen, the empty character shell loaded by the server while a player joins the game.
I do not want to spawn the guy. "Do unto others," and all that. Be the change you want to see in the server. Instead, I run, putting distance between us so we can have a fair chance to have fun.
Hearing a handgun rack, I turn and see the newly-spawned player join the game with a pistol in hand. He's taking his first baby-bird steps into the world. He turns to face me, child-like, and I shoot him right in the eyes. It was him or me. Welcome to Tarkov, I guess.
The survival genre has been exploded since 2012, when DayZ was a humble Arma 2 mod. The rush came so fast that we were already exhausted and hoping for a swift death to the trend by 2015.
Tarkov has skipped the zombies, but is not DayZ on steroids. There's no HUD whatsoever. If I want to know how many bullets I have in my magazine, I eject it and count the brass. Fortunately, the art and animation are gorgeous and detailed enough that I can tell if my gun is in semi-auto mode by looking. Instead of the old Arma 2, Tarkov is smooth and detailed, full of crepuscular rays and dense vegetation.
Instead of full-on permadeath, Tarkov have skills up abilities that level up over time.
Unlike DayZ's single map, the world of Tarkov is divided into neighborhoods. This gives the game an MMORPG end-game raid structure. Players drop into a section of the ruined city and make their way from the starting point to an extraction point somewhere in the heart of the map. Like in DayZ, these neighborhoods are sprawling, open, and full of other players trying to make it out of the instance with more gear than they started with. Abandoned buildings and destroyed military checkpoints are everywhere, and cigarettes, cell phones, cash, and weapons are thick on the ground.
For every gun you can swap out receivers, barrels, grips, stocks, and a dozen other bits of kit.
There are no quests. The longer you spend looting, the greater your risk of running into another player who wants to take all your stuff. Players run through levels killing anything that moves and looting everything that does not. If the team survives, they bring their loot out into the meta-game, where they can gear up and modify their guns. If they get killed, though, they lose everything they were carrying.
Servers also have a night / night cycle and are not fun. Gear like nightvision goggles is so out of reach for new players it might well be fictional. Once, I spawned into the woods in the middle of a roof-shattering midnight thunderstorm. Lighting across a violent sky was graphically impressive, but it was also so dark I could not see my hands or find anything to loot. I did not want to quit because I had a decent pistol with me, so after a few minutes of migraine-inducing eye strain I found a wall, went prone, and left my keyboard to go somewhere else.
I checked back every few minutes to see if the sun had come up. Eventually someone shot me, but at the time I was in the other room drinking a beer, so I did not care. Now I see that the servers are in the middle of their night cycle, I play something else instead. When I think about my complete avoidance of Tarkov's nighttime setting, I think about how the tension and terror of DayZ or PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds adds teeth to a thrilling hardcore challenge. At its best, Escape from Tarkov can nail that same thrill. It has some serious design talent behind it, but at it's worst, it's hardcore for the sake of being hardcore.
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