Battlestate Games’Escape From Tarkovhas been riding the wave of its hardcore reputation ever since its early access release in 2017, but the father of all modern extraction shooters has gone the extra mile withpatch 0.16.8.0.
Dubbed the ‘hardcore wipe’, this season of Escape From Tarkov is marked by an aggressive difficulty spike thanks to restrictions to traders, spawn points, and more. The changes are part of a broader plan to stress-test some of these mechanics ofthe much-awaited version 1.0 release, after 8 years of early access.
It has now been a day since the hardcore wipe began, but that has been enough time for the community to beg for easing some of the changes to make the game playable.
Update:Battlestate Games hasdeployed a fix to the spawn location issue.
Have Gun, Will Travel
The most controversial issues in the Escape From Tarkov hardcore wipe right now surround the location transits, a mechanic introduced during the Marathon event with patch 0.15.0.0.
Players have been able to travel between the maps during a raid as an alternative to spawning directly in it, but the hardcore wipe has made map travel mandatory to access most of the game’s maps. The issue, however, is that the spawn locations were not rebalanced to account for this.
When using map travel, the Escape From Tarkov spawns are deterministic—if you’re entering the Streets of Tarkov map from Ground Zero, your Streets spawn point will be the one closest to Ground Zero.
When everyone entering a location is coming from the same place, the result is a gaggle of players dropping in on the same spot, leading to spawnbanging the likes we’ve never seen before.
Game director Nikita Buyanov has acknowledged the issue and said the team is “working on this”.
The requirement to use map transit has shaken up some of the player flows and led to more remote areas of the maps feeling more lively, but it has also significantly slowed player progression.
This issue is compounded by the lack of quests, a somewhat puzzling decision announced yesterday and backtracked within a day by Buyanov.
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No more ‘spawn, rush, die, repeat’.
In a social media post, he said that “there won’t be quests for some period of time (except for dailies and weeklies)”, but the experiment was short-lived. This morning, Buyanov stated, “quests will return[…] like today”.
According to the official Escape From Tarkov social media page,a small update rebalanced the mechanics based on community feedback.
On top of restoring trader quests, the price of item insurance has been lowered, and the cooldown for scav raids has been rebalanced to match the transit dynamics.The postgoes on to acknowledge the spawn issue, with a solution said to be deployed “in the nearest future”.
A Design For Life
The aggressive changes introduced with the hardcore wipe may seem arbitrary for those who have gotten used to a certain gameplay flow over almost a decade, but they make sense given the developers' vision for the game’s 1.0 release.
Rather than access traders via a menu window that’s automatically unlocked (with the exception of Jaeger), the finished version of Escape From Tarkov will require players to physically travel to a trader’s location to unlock and interact with them.
The mandatory map travel and lack of quests tie into this design goal, but it requires the kind of stress test provided by events like the hardcore wipe.
Time will tell how many of these mechanics actually make it to the finished game, and there is no guarantee that the 1.0 version won’t be continuously tweaked as well. For now, just watch your back when popping into a new map, and you should be good.
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New information about Escape from Tarkov’s hardcore wipe and 1.0 release date.
