Tarkov's Arena is Still Problematic (And Might Always Be)

Arena recently got a relatively large update that also coincided with a wipe; resetting everyone’s rank and preset progress back to pretty much zero. And with the update came some large changes to the presets, how you unlock them, and how they are divided up between themselves. While I won’t be going into the specific details of the patch notes, I’ll leave a link in the description if you want to read them yourself, after playing the new version of Arena, things don’t feel like they are headed in the right direction for some elements of this game mode. There are plenty of changes that were positive: removing grenades from pretty much all the classes and adding them to the world level. Allowing players to funnel their experience towards a specific preset they want to unlock and being able to use any preset within that respective class. Standardizing the medication each preset has so at the very least everyone has painkillers. These were important changes to help reign in the power of each preset. But the problems with Arena go deeper than just number tweaks and adjusting the equipment on offer for a particular present. As badly as I want Arena to be successful and a fun, faster-paced alternative to regular Tarkov, I fear as though that Tarkov was never truly meant to be an arena style shooter. Some people might immediately say, well no shit, of course the writing was on the wall. And you’re kind of right; but I had hopes deep down that BSG would find an interesting way to bring the slower more methodical gameplay of Tarkov to a faster paced environment. And so far, it doesn’t feel like they understand the root issues with trying to artificially speed up Tarkov. There’s still time to figure it out, and their roadmap is substantial enough that we might get there eventually, but let’s go over why fundamentally, Tarkov’s arena mode might never get where the player base as well as BSG hopes to get it.

At the core of both arena and normal Tarkov, both games suffer from the same problems; the ones that have perpetuated for years now. Those are net code, and sound. These two issues alone prevent either version of Tarkov from feeling like an actual videogame sometimes. They take you out of the experience and create nothing but confusion and frustration. On your screen you hit a guy 8 times with your gun, but when you watch the killcam you maybe hit them once or twice. What makes this worse is if you’re able to see both perspectives during the fight, the killcam ends up telling a third story. So, you have three different perspectives, none of which really line up correctly. It makes dying from something that wasn’t a one tap make you suspicious of the whole game. And not in the cheater way of being suspicious. You begin to question everything about the game, and it is usually just a downward spiral into loathing the existence of the thing you once loved and enjoyed. BSG have had plenty of time to isolate, adjust, and hopefully fix these problems. I don’t know how difficult it would be to do so, but obviously it isn’t a walk in the park. But we are coming up on almost 8 years of actual development time for this game. Something needs to change for the better; enough that every player can feel the difference. We’ve gone up and down and up and down, but if we don’t stay up in terms of overall game feel, people are not going to want to play it. I mean that’s kind of the case right now. Yes, we got some valuable changes, but at the same time, this reset was one step forward and two maybe three steps back.

Presets are another example of this idea. On paper, dividing the presets into tiers makes sense. Now with basically levels one, two and three for presets, there is less ambiguity about where they might sit in terms of how powerful they are. The number value for each preset makes more sense, even if it’s still arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. My guess is once you have higher tiers unlocked, you might be able to queue into certain tiers specifically. So, if you only want to use tier 2 kits you can queue up just for those. I don’t know for certain if this is how it actually works, this is just a guess and a hope. However, there is a nasty side effect to this new tiered system. Now, if you want to use tier two kits, you need to unlock five tier two presets under a certain class. So, five assault, five CQB, five scout, or five marksmen. Again, this is how I think it works. It could be five across all the classes, but I doubt that because another new caveat is that there are no duplicates of the same preset on one team. So, if you are working your way down the assault tree, and someone takes the kit you normally use, well screw you go use something else. This also blows my mind; the lack of foresight in the early game where everyone is trying to use the same thing because we have nothing unlocked yet because we just started playing. At the very least, allow duplicates of tier one kits because it’s tier one; the presets are usually garbage so who cares if we get the same preset? It also raises the amount of time to grind out all the requirements to go up a tier. It doesn’t feel like that because EXP requirements have been lowered initially, but then level out to something that’s similar to what it was before this most recent reset. And you need to do this for every class. So, the grind for good assault, scout, CQB, and marksmen presets have gotten so much longer.

My hope since day one of knowing Tarkov was going to create an arena shooter, was to hopefully see some innovation with the idea of round-based gameplay with the ability to purchase weapons and equipment ala CSGO of Valorant. I genuinely believe in the deepest parts of my soul that Tarkov could make this gameplay loop work. With how much they offer for weapons, grenades, armor, helmets and everything else. The cost of items would be probably the part that would get adjusted the most but that’s fine. Starting with pistols, earning money and then working your way up the weapon power creep. Shotguns, SMGs, rifles, and everything in between. They would have to do something similar to CSGO 2 where you get a weapon wheel and are allowed to select a certain number of guns instead of just having access to everything because Tarkov has too many guns for that to work effectively. Having an economy to earn and spend money on attachments too, it would be killer. Again, the sheer number of items could make it a little messy, but that’s why you have people select a certain number of weapons and then those weapons have specific attachments available to them. Let’s say one of the guns you want to choose is the MP5. The MP5 isn’t going to have something like the Vudu on offer. It’s going to have a few red dots, a couple foregrips, maybe a suppressor and that’s about it. But you get to choose from each of those what you want to buy while in the game, and assuming you either don’t die or drop that gun for something else. I suppose that’s another wrinkle in the equation; picking up a gun you don’t have in your weapon wheel so you can’t modify it. But in all honesty, I kind of like that idea. It’s similar to in-raid normal Tarkov, where you pick up a slain PMCs gun and try to get out with it using someone else’s setup. It shows a degree of adaptability, and being able to compromise with what someone else made even if you don’t like it. But this could just be me speaking, I’m sure others would hate this idea.

As a whole, Arena did some right and a lot wrong with this update. I have spent dramatically less time playing arena this go around versus when it initially released. The gameplay loop just doesn’t feel good to play anymore. It takes too long; people constantly don’t accept or dodge the queue, so you end up hearing that goddamn guitar rift three or four times before you get to load into a game. And then someone disconnects so now you get sent back, and it screws up your lobby, so you got to restart the game and invite your friends again.... sigh. It’s such a first world problem thing. It really is. But with how much BSG leaned into Arena and it working right out of the box, with this many problems and people leaving it to go play something else, I wonder if it was even worth it for Arena to exist in the first place. I’m glad it does, but damn... now we have two half-baked games. Yes, a different team and division of BSG worked on Arena, but even still, this isn’t where I expected things to be. And it sucks. I hope this roadmap can solve many of the issues players have with arena, but again on paper, if everything works correctly, it’s genuinely an awesome experience and a way to improve at combat for normal Tarkov. Thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to watch this video. Let me know in the comments your thoughts and impressions about the arena in general and be sure to subscribe for more videos about a game mode that hopefully isn’t abandoned and isn’t dead by the end of the year. I hope to see you in future ones.