Escape From Tarkov Hardcore Wipe Changes...

Battlestate Games is attempting to make their vision for Escape from Tarkov 1.0 a reality, but the changes they introduced in the hardcore wipe didn’t go over well with Tarkov players. One of the biggest gripes Tarkov fans expressed was that many of the game’s maps were now only accessible through map travel, which resulted in multiple issues.

EFT is loved and respected for its gritty, unforgiving gameplay, and these changes are meant to build on the challenging aspects of the game and make it more of a grind, but it appears some quality of life tweaks need to be made before fans are willing to accept it.

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.

—Jaime Tugayev, DualShockers

The change to make many of Tarkov’s maps only accessible through map travel has led to excruciatingly long queue times and players spawning in the same area.

As explained by Morgan Park of PCGamer, “many seem to agree that maps only accessible through other maps is, conceptually, a neat idea for a hardcore mode, but Tarkov’s excruciatingly long load times throw cold water on the whole thing.”

Reddit user Synchrotr0n on r/EscapeFromTarkov said that “Even if we ignore the crashes and spawn bugs, the only way forced transit would work is if the servers automatically loaded empty raid instances without a game client having to request one first. That way we would skip some good 3-5 minutes out of every queue because the map would already have been loaded in the server.”

Fortunately for Tarkov fans, Battlestate Games has been attentive to the community’s backlash, and has since rolled back some of the changes.

Battlestate Games is actively working on balancing the hardcore wipe and has made all maps available for selection, and also addressed the issue of spawning locations.

“Additional adjustments has been made to the spawn system on transition locations to reduce the number of situations where several player groups spawned too close to each other.”

Here are the other balancing changes Battlestate Games has made to the Hardcore Wipe:

• In-game tasks are now available from traders
• Reduced the cost of item insurance
• Reduced the Scav cooldown.

While the community’s initial reaction to Escape from Tarkov’s hardcore wipe is that it only made the game more tedious, instead of building on its challenging nature, EFT developers are making changes based on feedback, as they previously stated they would. After eight long years of early access and a fanbase that refuses to let the game die, they want to see Escape from Tarkov 1.0 done the right way.