If You Could Change ONE Thing in Tarkov, What Would it Be?

If you were allowed to change one thing about Tarkov, what would that one thing be? It’s a loaded question I know, but this has been brewing in my mind for a couple of days now. Tarkov has so many different mechanics, ideas, and concepts thrown into it that asking someone to change one of those feels unfair. Over the years, BSG has only added more and more to their game, and while those additions are usually interesting once they get the implementation right, when you look at the game from a bird’s eye view, it can feel daunting with how much content is actually in the game. And from that angle, there is an overwhelming amount of possibilities and potential to change how Tarkov plays, in one area or another. You could completely adjust how weapons function with their ergonomics and recoil. You could change the medical system. You remove features you don’t like; maybe something akin to found in raid. The possibilities are truly endless. So today, I wanted to go over a handful of features or mechanics I would change within Tarkov and go over why I would change them. And then maybe at the end of the list, pick one that might have the most potential positive impact on the game.

It’s funny, I had so many ideas in my head that I never wrote down, and now sitting down to write this I am drawing a blank. I suppose I could start light and say I would like to change how the trader's work. And by that, I mean smooth out the progression curve in terms of how you acquire gear. Maybe this is removing stuff from them so their inventories aren’t as bloated. Maybe it’s adding a fifth loyalty level so we can space out the gear they do have. I’m not exactly sure what solution would be most effective, but something to make it so that hitting level 15 doesn’t just solve all our problems. Because once most of your traders are level two, the game gets so much easier.

The flea market to be honest, plays a huge factor in this role, so another idea to change the game would be to remove it outright and just see what happens. I’ve always been curious what modern Tarkov would feel like without the flea. With so many items and new ways to make money, by getting rid of that instant gratification, this too could also help smooth out the curve for people’s progression. Now, with getting rid of the flea, again, the traders would need a huge overhaul as well, but these changes kind of go hand in hand. You can’t really change one without the other, so I guess we could call it a blanket economy overhaul. Instead of splitting the changes between the vendors and the flea, bundle into one and work on them together. Because they are tied at the hip. And if one changes or is gone, the other needs to be looked at as well.

But besides economy changes, another issues I’d love to change is fix the AI. And by that, I mean make them intelligent, use call outs, have smoother difficulty scaling based on perhaps what map you are playing, the average level of PMCs in a raid, and just make fighting them more interesting. Instead of them standing out in the open, in only a few fixed locations, making encountering scavs, raiders, bosses, and the like much more of a dynamic experience. Some level of tactics and intelligence would just make exploring the maps so much more interesting. Because at this point, the AI are blips on the radar and not much more. But this also works in the opposite direction. Fixing the boss AI instead of them just being hacking aim bot users. The Goons are a good example: instead of them just beaming you from over 500 meters, let them actually use their radios like their flavor text suggests they do but in reality, isn’t a thing. Give them dynamic situations where they might begin an engagement but if they feel as though they can’t get you, they retreat to set up an ambush somewhere. Fights would be cool if guards really tried to cover their boss, even going so far as dying for them and getting in the way specifically just so their boss doesn’t die. The best example of this might be either Reshala or Glukhar, just because they have so many guards that it can sometimes feel like that in general. But throwing grenades, suppressing fire down hallways while a guard escorts the boss out the back of a building, it would be so interesting to witness and experience those more compelling and engaging fights where I need to think about how I approach and whether I should play aggressive or back up and go for a flank. So again, something I would personally love to improve if I had the chance and the knowledge to do so.

Another potential change would be to entice players to build weapons from scratch. This is a difficult one to explain because we can technically do that, but what I mean is having to find the parts in the world, making them common enough that people would be interested in having to find all the parts for an M4, or some of the rarer options in the game like the SIG Spear. There is no way to obtain that weapon’s lower receiver unless you just buy it and dismantle it. Make all the weapon lower receivers in the world, or even better, move some of the more interesting and sought after weapons to the workbench. It still baffles me that we have two different AK crafts but not a single M4 craft at the workbench. It could be as easy as an M4 handguard, buttstock and a bunch of weapon parts. Just a stock M4 ready to be modified to whatever your heart wants. Encouraging crafting weapons, or building them from the ground up is much more aligned to something like Stalker where you might find an awesome weapon of an enemy faction but because the durability is so low, you need to find compatible parts to rebuild the weapon and make it fully yours. It’s one of my favorite gameplay loops in those open sandbox games.

And maybe the final change I can immediately think of would be to drastically increase raid timers and allow for people join raids that are already in progress. It would be a herculean task to accomplish, but imagine raids being two hours long, and you join after forty-five minutes have passed. You don’t know where anyone is, if the loot around the map is still there or has it replenished. Is the boss dead, or has a AI faction rolled in to clean up the stragglers? That level of uneasiness and unfamiliarity is something that is lost to time the longer you play Tarkov. And not knowing for sure how many people are roaming around will always keep you on edge regardless of how close to an extract you are. It would also allow plenty of opportunities for world events if this is something BSG wants to pursue like airdrops but maybe even more serious ones like the mortar strikes that would require you to find shelter otherwise you risk dying to the explosion. Anything that gets people out of the funk of auto-piloting to gunshots because they are so deep into the wipe the only way they feel engaged with Tarkov is fighting other players, which don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking them because I can be the same way. But other mechanics built into the game to mitigate these feelings would go a long way.

Out of all these options I laid out in this video, I am unsure which one sounds the most enticing that I would want fully implemented into the game. I think in the short term, making massive improvements to the AI would make a lot of people happy that they finally feel like the scavs, raiders, rouges, bosses, and goons feel like a fair challenge instead of having to pixel perfect peek them so you don’t get instantly one-tapped but their gross aim. But any of these would make me happy and wanting to play Tarkov more than I currently do. Thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to watch this video. Let me know in the comments down below if any of these changes interest you, or if you have a change that you would like to see be implemented, please sound off and be sure to subscribe for more videos about a Wishlist of mechanics that will ultimately never be added into the game. I hope to see you in future ones.