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Thanks to completing my exams and only being assigned half hours at my job (a bunch of residents joined, so they're overstaffed), I've been no-lifing Escape From Tarkov.
Great game, albeit bad for your cardiovascular and mental health.
For the unacquainted, imagine if PUBG worked with you bringing your own gear into a match, and being able to take what you found out, or spend money to buy new gear. Far more hardcore in mechanics, map design and realism than anything else on the market, including loose copies like Warzone. If you die with that meta gun and armor worth a day's grinding, sucks to suck, you're not getting it back, unless you paid for "insurance", where a friendly neighborhood armed hobo combs the map for what's leftover and delivers the dregs for a fee.
It uses realistic ballistics, real guns and aftermarket equipment (for the most part), and a more in depth medical system than the overwhelming majority of non-modded games out there. A map can take days to learn to navigate. A single bullet can end your day, even if you're a sweaty Chad with 4000 hours in the game, lobbed by a panicked newbie who decided the correct thing to do when being confronted by the Terminator was to spray it with the equivalent of BBs. I don't play it solo these days, far too stressful, but I've made enough random Discord buddies that I can throw together a reasonably competent fireteam and apply some real world tactics. All those American soldiers stationed in Korea are good for something other than keeping NK at bay, eh?
Now, excuse me while I die from a stroke after seeing Amoxicillin used as a painkiller, or a simple vein transilluminator for IV cannulation exist as an item worth more in cash than some of the best guns money can buy.
And of course, some Total War Warhammer 3, for my Aztec Lizardmen fighting Rodents of Unusual Size fix.
Maybe some Arma 3, as the Zeus, so I can use real human beings as stand-ins for my childhood toy soldiers (it's pretty much DND with guns, or a COD campaign being built on the fly by a GM desperate to stop Arma 3's physics and AI from launching players into the stratosphere).
I am looking forward to a game called Grey Zone Warfare, which seems to be strongly inspired by Tarkov but far more intent on doing everything better, with less technical debt and Russian gamedev incompetence/jank. I am cautiously optimistic, and who knows, maybe I'll get my name in the credits for helping design their medical system, since the devs were kind enough to reach out to me when I made an enormous effort post on the tradeoffs between realism and gameplay when it comes to medical systems in hardcore FPS milsims like theirs.
Ah, Tarkov.
No, I'd rather play Hunt: Showdown, which forgoes the tacticool aesthetics in favor of emo cowboys, and where losing your gear just means that you need to buy it back with half a match's worth of earnings. Less gear fear, more Schofield revolvers.
One in 2-3 scav rounds you can go back with an SKS or some crappy AK. If the game is realistic, you don't really need anything else for most gameplay. AK is a perfectly serviceable weapon, SKS too.
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I have nothing against Hunt, but I refuse to use weapons antiquated by WW1, if it doesn't take picatinny rails or newer, I don't want it 🙏
(Is it obvious I have raging bloodthirst for Mosin users in Tarkov?)
Hunt players will never stop complaining about players who use the Dolch (really a Mauser broomhandle), since its just too modern and ruins the Western feeling of the game. Or so they say.
I for one have a burning hatred of those clowns who play with bows and arrows or crossbows and manage to 360° noscope me with that. Damn cavemen.
Praying they add a spear to the game so the crossbow players have something to complain about.
Ooops. I should have been more clear, it's the Sig MCX Spear, the civilian version of the XM5.
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Genuine question - what is the appeal of Tarkov? 3k hours of Dota burned me out on PVP forever but my entire IRL circle is completely addicted to it, every new wipe they sink a month or two into it uninterrupted. Is it the competitive aspect? The "ok ONE more raid" grinding/progression? The random loot? Losing your shit on death so you're forced to actually tryhard? Subjectively I noticed a big overlap of Tarkov with Path of Exile players so surely the repetitive autistic grinding must be part of the appeal, also the hate/love relationship with the game for most of them is almost 1:1 with Dota (I suppose that's what you mean by "bad for your health" too). Every single one of them hates the stupid janky-ass game but cannot stop playing it whenever available.
Tarkov accommodates a lot of different playstyles, but the main appeal can be summed up by:
You can snipe from hundreds of meters from a bush. You can take an SMG loaded with armor piercing bullets and bumrush anything you hear. You can play solo or as a team, and that doesn't change matchmaking. You can run into a single scared newbie, or a stampeding herd of 5 players more coordinated than SEAL Team 6 who brought ten grenades to a gunfight and prefer to clear rooms without ever stepping in.
You can be as brave and homicidal, or as cowardly and quiet as you like. Neither is a strictly dominant strategy, once you know the msps and rotations.
For me, it's the thrill of outsmarting other players and putting a bullet in their head, even if I'm average in a fight. It also lets me be a firearms nerd while stuck in countries where I can't own one I care about.
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