Escape From Tarkov Is Launching After a Decade, But is it Really Ready?

The journey of Escape from Tarkov began with an announcement trailer in 2015, followed by an alpha playtest in 2016. However, its roots date back to 2010, when it was a browser game and a direct inspiration from the Contract Wars game.

That’s more than a decade of development. You would think that the game should’ve been released years ago, but quips like “Escape from Tarkov is in a forever beta stage” or “Only true believers will understand” still echoes in Tarkov’s community, making players curious about what is really happening in Escape from Tarkov.

Players are more skeptical than excited for launch, but why? We all want the game to be good, but what are players afraid of? To know why some or most players feel that way, let’s look back at the events that led up to the launch and the vision of what Escape from Tarkov should be.

A Quick Rundown of How Tarkov Wipes or Updates Before the Official Launch

Escape from Tarkov has announced its planned release for 2025, which means the game will have spent almost exactly 10 years in early access or beta stage. Throughout the years, the game has continuously improved, focusing on content depth and gameplay features.

The game undergoes massive changes and resets its economy with each major update, which has been dubbed a “wipe.” This reset essentially makes every player start from scratch.

There have been 16 wipes in total, but there was no specific date or trend for them. Some wipes took over a year to happen, while others took only four months.

These updates or wipes only occur when massive changes or additions to the game warrant an economic reset. Sometimes, they add a small section to a map, like Factory, Lighthouse, or Customs, and pair it with features like Scav Karma, raid transits, or BTRs to justify a wipe.

Each wipe brings big changes and additions, but there’s also one common factor: bugs. While minor bugs can be overlooked, game-breaking bugs are a staple of Escape from Tarkov wipes. You might encounter two or three different ones at the start of a wipe, such as hitbox registry issues, AI Scavs phasing through doors before opening them, looting through walls (without cheats), and many others.

Some of these bugs have been in the game for years, which is mind-blowing. There are even memes about these bugs, such as:

• BSG: Sees and confirms an issue.
  Also BSG: Okay, let’s add a new AK and snow.

Despite this, the game updates are mostly well-received because the game’s content and gameplay are unique, fun, and offers unlimited replayability. Every raid is different, even if you do the same quests, wipe after wipe. If all technical issues are fixed, Escape from Tarkov could be the “perfect game,” which is their exact plan going forward with every patch leading up to the release.

However, apart from optimization and bug fixes, Escape from Tarkov’s launch should bring something different from any other wipe, so what should the game look like after launch?

Escape from Tarkov’s 2025 Roadmap for Launch

Escape from Tarkov’s 2025 roadmap looks like a repolishing of the game, which is going to be amazing. There are only four patches planned before launch: 16.6, 16.7, 16.8, and 16.9. Each patch aims to improve optimizations on separate maps, including audio optimizations.

There are also “balancing changes and improvements” on each patch, but it’s safe to assume these will be minor changes. They might balance ammo statistics or add more ammo types. However, it doesn’t look like we’ll see big changes, and most of the exciting content will come from in-game events.

If these optimizations fix most of the problems or bugs Escape from Tarkov has, every critical point mentioned before would be moot.

Again, that’s a big “if,” and Escape from Tarkov veterans should know by now that nothing is set in stone until you literally see it in the game.

Is Escape from Tarkov going to be ready for launch? Well, if all goes to plan, the optimization updates should be good enough for 1.0. However, there’s still one more massive talking point to bring up.

Escape from Tarkov’s Preliminary Vision

As Escape from Tarkov players may know, before queuing up for a game, you get to choose the map you want to run from a bird’s eye view of Tarkov, which has every planned map in the game.

All the maps have been listed even before they came out. Lighthouse or Streets of Tarkov have always been visible in the raid selection screen, but you couldn’t play them. There are updated trailers featuring these maps as the next big thing in the wipe. Two of them have not been introduced or released yet – Suburbs and Terminal.

Apart from unreleased sections of Tarkov, the vision of Escape from Tarkov hinged on every map being released and players being able to access each part of Tarkov in real-time. Think of an MMORPG where you can log in to the game and do whatever you want in Tarkov until you die or log out.

It feels as if they strayed farther away from this vision from the most recent wipes. It could be because seasonal wipes were very successful for Escape from Tarkov, or the game wouldn’t feel right with that plan in mind.

The gap between players who play mechanically better and casual players will be even wider. The same goes for players who have more time to play and players who can barely play a few hours a week.

The game would undergo extreme changes, where it is highly plausible that it would go completely bust. The old “vision” wouldn’t make sense, but it also makes players wonder what exactly entails a launch for Escape from Tarkov.

It has been noted that the Suburbs map will be an upcoming DLC, and Terminal could come out in 1.0 or another patch or update. Battlestate Games has been making a lot of moves lately, especially when players spotted Escape from Tarkov Arena in the Epic Games Store as well as the first-ever battle pass in Escape from Tarkov Arena.

2025 is going to be a crucial year for Battlestate Games and Escape from Tarkov, and we can only hope that we see improvements all around, or at least them being decisive and transparent with the updates or changes, unlike the Unheard edition fiasco.