Tarkov

A city destroyed by urban warfare, driven by greed. Described by Nikita Buyanov, the lead designer, as a "hazardous combat environment simulator", fun is not the objective, but a side effect. This game was intended to be akin to movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey in that the audience is immersed in a way they feel like they themselves are present. What better way to do that than always put everything on the line, and practically a sneeze away from losing it all?

See their website to preorder and get access to the closed Beta!

Escape From Tarkov is a game better experienced personally, if that is what you want. It is quite fun to watch other people play though. Many people will say its more fun to watch people play Tarkov than play themselves! That just atests to the game's success at its one claim to fame: brutal, hardcore, slow paced shooter action, smashed with the meat tenderizer of realistic gun play.

Tarkov gained its fame, really, from its popularity among Twitch Streamers and creators on YouTube. Arguably one of the best players of the game is Pestily, a retired soldier from Australia's armed forces who makes his living off of streaming primarily Tarkov. And while Pestily displays phenomonal success each raid (a "raid" being equivalent to a match in counter-strike), other creators focus more on telling stories, or making humorous videos, such as fairTX and AquaFPS.

An excellently produced mini-series was produced by the game's developers, Battle State Games, and put on YouTube, dubbed the Raid series. Here is the first episode. A movie-length compilation of every episode in order, with new transitional scenes, is planned for the near future.

Of course, my personal experience with the game is anything but epic and successful. I fall into a category of playstyle known as "rats", players who play as sneaky and dirty as the game allows, without cheating, inorder to maximize profit from raids on the infamous Fleamarket.

As a full time student, and someone who has trouble making up for lost ground, I can hardly bring myself to play the game often. So what I do is play the market as much as I can without actually playing the game. Pretty ratty huh?

Here's the short: there is a mechanic called found in raid status which allows items to be sold on the Fleamarket. There is a crafting system in the game that produces found in raid items without going into raids. You can craft with any item, found in raid or not. Hence, I have invented my own wire-stripping scheme.

The table below will show the prices involved in the process, as well as some other transactions in terms of Russian Rubles, the primary currency of the game.

Given the crafting recipe of 2 Powercords yields 8 Wires, selling the output leads to ₽63960 in net profit. A relatively modest sum, even ignoring the fact that the whole process takes 20 hours to make the fuel costs negligible (for the generator unit).

To be fair though, the ₽63960 made wasn't earned so much as fleeced on the Fleamarket. This doesn't even take into account the Fleamarket offer-posting fee, which for the wires is ~₽9000 per-listing.

A meme placing the face of late Spanish comedian El Risitas over Prapor, one of the traders in Escape From Tarkov.

Not Recommended

I think, personally, Escape From Tarkov is a pretty cool game. It is honestly brutal though, and isn't what is normally considered fun. Also, being a game still in beta, it has a lot of work to be done before it can be fairly considered finished. It needs to overcome both a combination of technical issues, and the hurdle of balancing the lead designer's vision and what qualifies as a good game, fun aside.

The red thumbs down symbol is a property owned by Valve, the owners of the Steam store. It is used here in parody.