Lightkeeper is Still Useless and I Wish He Wasn't

It pains me to talk about Lightkeeper in this manner, but to be brutally frank, the fact he still isn’t a vendor in the game, is a huge wasted opportunity. Yes, he has quests to give you should you take the time to go through his grueling requirements to even have the chance of speaking to him, but this wasn’t, at least to our knowledge, his main purpose of being in the game. I can only imagine the amount of work that has already gone into making him an NPC that can move around and be spoken to, while a live raid is being played out. I am not downplaying what has been achieved here, not by any means. But until Lightkeeper becomes a vendor of some sorts, his purpose in Tarkov is ultimately useless to us as players, for the foreseeable future.

When he was originally proposed to us a long time ago, the impression I at least took from it was that he was this sort of elusive, all-seeing eye. Someone who basically knows everything going on around us already, and might be the one pulling the strings and seeing what works and what doesn’t. And to an extent, that impression was right. He is elusive; you must bust your ass to even see the guy. And the fact he is in cahoots with the cultists is anything but good. I mean lore wise; it’s fascinating that he works with them, and his right-hand man, Zryachiy, being deeply ensnared with the cult as well really asks a lot of questions. Just who are these people? What are their motivations? What do they want with Tarkov after setting off the EMP? The only little bits we know about Zryachiy is that he is ex-military and shacked up with Lightkeeper to make the connections between him and the cult. He is even buddy with some of the rouges. Other than that, he’s just a weirdo with white eyes who’s an excellent sniper. But back to Lightkeeper, it was honestly kind of incredible seeing him be a character in the world, in the game, actually talking to you, and having dialogue options when speaking to him. Granted, they are kind of a non-factor and all choices pretty much lead to the same conclusion, but still seeing this added into Tarkov really made my head turn. If they can do this, what are the other vendors going to be like? Because we know, eventually, in ten years (I’m joking), all the vendors we’ve come to know and love will be injected into the world, and we will need to go to physical locations to speak to them and exchange wares. Just like Lightkeeper. Only for now, he has no wares, just missions to send us on our way. And right now, that’s the part that sucks the most.

The idea of having a vendor in the world, on a map, having access to whatever he sells, and then trying to find a way off the map with all the goodies you purchased, was easily the most enticing aspect to Lightkeeper upon his initial reveal from BSG. It created so many questions about the game and how we could engage with this new wrench in the normal formula of Tarkov. Now, instead of just looting the map, AI and other players, we could make purchases from a vendor; just like we normally do. But, do the things we buy go straight to our stash? Do we need to actually extract with the items in tow, otherwise they are lost upon death? This alone would’ve shaken the gameplay loop that we spoke about recently to its core. Now, people have more of a reason to play Lighthouse and hang out around the bridge that leads out to Lightkeeper. Now, your immediate thought would be, camping the bridge, and while I didn’t say it out loud, you might be right. That bridge, would single-handedly become the most dangerous spot in the entire game. Even more so than anywhere on Labs, D-2 on Reserve; nothing would even come close. People would want whatever Lightkeeper sold, and those without access would do anything they can to try and take out those who can make the journey across the bridge. But that raised another question: what would Lightkeeper sell to us? We don’t have any clue to this answer. Some say it would be insanely rare items in the game at a marked-up price. Others have speculated it might be some interesting technology-based gear. Because in the questline that leads up to Lightkeeper, you end up doing a lot of communication-based quests to set up the initial connection, so that’s plausible as well. And I’ve also heard people rumor he would sell anything that was removed from the vendors again, at a marked-up price. Honestly, any of these ideas are solid, and could very well be the reality once he does become a vendor. But what will be the case, we will sadly just have to wait and see.

Seeing Lightkeeper in the physical game was something I honestly had doubts BSG could ever implement, properly, if at all. But, to everyone’s surprise, they managed to get him in. And he looks and sounds fantastic. But he’s lacking. At least right now. Because he isn’t complete with being a full-fledged vendor, it’s hard to justify the sheer amount of work needed to even see him face to face. I understand this is just one step towards the end result, which is to have not only him, but all the vendors be at physical locations that you need to travel to and figure out what you want from them, before packing up your things and having to work your way out of the map to your hideout. It’s very similar to the idea of having Labs be harder to get to; where you need to go into a map where it would be accessible through a secret passage, go into Labs, do whatever you want in there, then leave Labs back into the map where you entered, and then leave that map back to your hideout. It’s super convoluted with the way I explained it, I know and I’m sorry. But to make it simpler, the route would be for example, Streets, then into Labs, then back onto Streets, and then extract. They want that to become the hook and loop for getting into Labs, and getting loot from the vendors would follow a similar pattern. Maybe with the PC in the hideout you could get stuff there, I’m not sure how they want to handle it, but regardless, Lightkeeper is cool. His character is interesting; it would be more interesting if he was a trader, but alas, we haven’t gotten there yet. Once he is one, however, I feel as though more people will be inclined to take up the challenge of unlocking him. But for right now, I can’t see myself at the very least taking and real interest in trying to complete the quests needed to visit him. If we knew for a fact, this wipe cycle was going to go for another couple months, then maybe, but we are potentially on the cusp of starting over once more, so I don’t feel as though it’s worth trying. But what are your thoughts on Lightkeeper and how he has been handled since his introduction? Be sure to leave your thoughts. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to watch this video, and be sure to subscribe for more videos about interesting mechanics in Tarkov that are either not fully implemented, or didn’t live up to our expectations. I hope to see you in future ones.