If You're Not Excited for this Wipe, You're Not Alone.

I hope I’m not the only one who has these feelings. Melancholy, disinterested. I mean don’t get me wrong, a wipe will get me back into Tarkov heavily for a while. But to be honest, it’s been so long since we had a really solid patch and wipe, that I have the mentality of I’ll believe it when I see it. I really hope that this wipe knocks it out of the park. The last one we had, was rough to say the least. Basically, a couple new guns and the lighthouse expansion, which I have never visited once because of my disdain for lighthouse as a map. But I’ve seen people over there and it seems like a decent little spot. But my biggest disappointment was lightkeeper not showing up. I mean, let’s be real for a moment; we knew this was going to happen. The first time he got delayed that was the major clue that something has gone wrong with him internally. My concern is that it’s so bad that he was maybe pushed to the side for other major features, like streets finally becoming a reality.

Since day 1, we have been teased by this map. The largest one in the game, and only going to get bigger as time goes on. Something else I didn’t realize until very recently is that, as a veteran player, this might be the last time we get the goosebumps of playing on an actual brand-new map for the first time. That feel is genuinely euphoric and has only happened so many times. Interchange, The Lab, Reserve, and lighthouse have been the maps that evoke those feelings, at least for my experience. And each one of them resulted in different interpretations of overall feelings as to whether or not I want to play them. Shoreline can be fun when it’s popping, regardless if it’s at the resort or not. Overtime, I have grown to kind of enjoy Interchange, with the exception of how dark it is on the inside. Reserve is a difficult map, but a great concept, and lighthouse, well... not a fan. Sorry not sorry. But all of these maps had something in common on their release; no one had a clue as to how to navigate them or what to expect. And that’s the beauty of Tarkov as a whole, and what has been missing for what feels like the last year or so. The lack of knowledge.

We don’t get that feeling very often anymore for multiple reasons. Maps don’t come out very often which is understandable considering how complex they are and how well they are designed. But ultimately what happens is very shortly after a map is released, or a patch drops. The hunger for knowledge begins to move across the community, and with how dedicated people are with figuring things out, that critical information is provided to us in a very short amount of time. This isn’t to diss anyone who either engages in those activities or who genuinely wants to know the answers, it’s just a by-product of the community growing. More people means information will move around a lot faster. People get better at the game, leveling becomes easier, people play for longer and longer. Add data mining and all the likes, and the recipe gets discovered more quickly than you would probably expect. And again, not saying this is a bad thing. At this point, it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not. It just sucks when that feeling of the unknown is washed away by the answer being posted somewhere 12 hours after a patch. Or even less sometimes.

But the point of this was for me to express my current emotional state with Tarkov, how I hope it will go away, and to say that anyone else who maybe feels similarly to how I do, you are certainly not alone. Anyone who has played for even a fraction of the time, will express some of the same middling feelings that I have. Now, this isn’t the case for everyone obviously. If you’re still having fun, great. Enjoy it before the wipe. But for the rest of us, I think we are all just collectively crossing our fingers and hoping this wipe is cool. To have two wipes back-to-back that miss the mark would be, I don’t want to say catastrophic, cause that’s kind of being overdramatic, but the community would go into a frenzy. Do I think that’s going to happen? Unless one thing happens, I don’t think so. And that one thing is whether or not Streets is playable performance-wise.

It would be a damn shame, to release the map, get amped and excited at a new Tarkov experience for the first time in a year, load into the map, only to have it run like complete ass. Lighthouse still has some issues with rendering two screens from really far distances, but overall that map has become pretty stable. And even reserve was the same when it launched as well. It took some time but now the map is totally fine. But streets is different. At launch, it’s the be biggest map in the game. And overtime, it will only continue to get bigger. But it seems like BGS’s biggest concern is the performance and making sure it runs as smoothly as it can on launch. My actual expectations are maybe a little worse than lighthouse on launch. The map is large yes, but it is very dense being a city. Whereas lighthouse was very long and open, with the east and west parts of the map being separated by the main road. One can only hope though.

To say I am not excited at all for the new patch would be lying. I am more interested than excited, however. The map, the guns we know are coming (AUG, SR-2, and potentially underbarrel grenade launchers potentially according to Nikita’s twitter). As long as everything goes smoothly, we should be well on our way to a better wipe than the last. Because honestly, at the end of the day, even if the weapons they add are bad, or if the map isn’t what we are looking for, a wipe gives us a reason to go back and play more Tarkov. Which isn’t a bad thing in the slightest. But if you are someone who isn’t foaming at the mouth for this coming patch, I would say still give it a try when it releases, because it’s another opportunity to play the game fresh, where it’s the closest the game ever comes to being on an equal playing field. Bad weapons, ammo, armor, and everyone fighting tooth and nail for the scraps the game gives us in the early game. And that’s the reason we play Tarkov at the end of the day.