The StunLock

I have consistently toyed with the idea of sticking my neck out by making the public declaration that Escape From Tarkov is the greatest shooter ever made. The game has an extraordinarily unique audio system, art style,
OSRS-like resource management loop, ultra-dangerous AI, and a risk-to-reward ratio that takes more years from its player-base than it gives back.

Also, as some might be curious to know, its gun-play is what some might call perfection. I realize that might seem more important than the other points when trying to figure out how EFT ranks as a first-person shooter, but frankly I believe the other aspects to the game matter just as much in that rating as does the point at which the player finally gets to let loose some rounds at a distant opponent who may or may not have been wearing tier four armor.

Season One

To those of you who have been out of the loop for a while, Season one just released for EFT. Alongside it, a seasonal, temporary game mode with alternate characters with reset skills, a fresh inventory, and a collection of new rules for everyone to abide (and rage at.) This new season is not to be confused with the ever-maligned 1.0 release of EFT, which is wholly different. It is, in fact, likely that EFT developers Battlestate Games wants to rebrand the 1.0 launch through this season one as a way to “try again”, but this is beyond the scope of this article.

In truth, all I really think about when I look at the new ruleset for season one is: do I even want to play Escape From Tarkov right now?

EFT doesn’t just have a selection of S-tier facets to showcase for its player-base, it also has a box-car’s worth of, shall we say, unfortunate aspects to its buy-in that turns most would-be faithfuls away right from the get-go; the cheater problem is essentially just accepted as an unsolvable tax on the honest player-base, the server performance is dog water at best, the loading times for getting into a raid that you might be sniped out of within thirty seconds of entry can take anywhere between twenty seconds to ten minutes (and this assumes you actually spawn in at the right time), and the game does little to remedy the fact that new players with no access to decent equipment cannot reliably take on geared chads who are essentially immune to early-game ammunition.

All of this is to say nothing about the fact that certain functions of the game simply… don’t function. I just mentioned early game ammo, so let’s take a look at some as an example: 7.62 x 39mm U.S. GZH rounds. New players who are limited on access to armor penetration ammunition might take a look at this ammunition and decide that it would make a good self defense round for a number of reasons;

• It has nearly thirty armor penetration, which is very good for a fresh account.
• It smacks opponents for over fifty damage, which allows it to two tap a thorax, even at distance.
• It reduces recoil from the weapon that fires it by a flat value of thirty. This fantastic for new players since they don’t have high skills nor late-game attachments to reduce recoil naturally.
• Importantly, the U.S. GZH rounds are subsonic, which means that they don’t produce a loud crack after being fired since the round coming out of the rifle doesn’t travel faster than the speed of sound.

Pay close attention to that last point; a new player would be given information about the round which includes the fact that it is subsonic. Lower sound output would allow players to fight scavs and other players without giving their position away, making U.S. GZH a round often reached for by unsuspecting players.

The problem is that these rounds don’t actually have a subsonic mechanic to reduce that sound. They travel slower than other rounds, have worse penetration than other rounds of a higher tier, have mediocre damage, but the player might opt for them anyway because, at the very least, they have access to decent early game pen and lower sound output to avoid player-combat.

The game does nothing to inform the player that there is no audible difference between subsonic ammunition and regular ammunition. This has been an issue for the entire game’s lifespan despite the information given about the rounds indicating otherwise.

Between information being wrongly listed and unfixed for over a decade, cheaters infesting the raids, servers performance, and simply not knowing if something in-game is functioning like it should, EFT finds itself at a particularly strange position in the gaming world; it’s almost the greatest shooter ever made, and yet I simply don’t want to take part in its first season.

GLHF,
-E