![]() Matt Elliott - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order It’s certainly not the most honourable way to make a living in Tarkov, but I’m so flush with rubles I don’t even care. Just as the timer begins to run low is when players drop all semblance of caution and sprint for the exit, and just as they’re so close-30 minutes of effort well rewarded-I pop them in the skull and take everything. ![]() Tucked behind a tree, sights pointed on the doors that open towards the exfiltration zone. Players get in, clean it out, and then only have a 30-foot jog to the exit. Here, players can pay 7,000 rubles to exfiltrate to safety, which is a hell of a deal considering the dorms are one of the best loot spots on the map. Just behind the three-story dorms on Customs is my favourite spot. I’m a bit of a diabolical asshole, but the sheer joy of letting someone else do all the looting only for me just to take it from them at the last possible moment is too sublime not to indulge in. But in Tarkov, one of my favourite things to do is camp in the exfiltration zones and ambush players just as they think they’re so close to safety. It’s a playstyle that would never work in DayZ or PUBG, where the map is either too large to reliably find other players or the main objective is to be the last man standing, so I might as well be aggressive about it. I stick to the shadows, letting players kill one another off and take the best loot, and then I make my move. Often I don’t.īut when I do it’s almost always because I channelled my inner rat. It reminds me a bit of EVE Online, where I’m constantly gambling my best equipment and hoping I live to fight another day. If you make it out alive, you get to keep everything you found to use in the next round. I still slink through bushes, intently listening for the sound of nearby players who will certainly try to kill me and take all my gear, but instead of taking place in a persistent open world, Tarkov drops you into smaller maps and gives you a time limit to reach the opposite side. Though Escape From Tarkov has much in common with both survival games like DayZ and battle royales such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, it manages to feel like some kind of mutant hybrid between the two. I am a rat, feasting on the remains left behind by more skilled players. In the grand food chain of Escape From Tarkov, a hardcore mil-sim survival shooter about looting gear in a post-apocalyptic Russian city, I am not a bear or a tiger. Where Escape From Tarkov’s battle-hardened veterans will actively look for a fight, I fl inch at even the most distant sounding gunshots, scurrying from bush to bush and outright avoiding the most well-trafficked areas unless I absolutely have no choice. Given the choice of learning the backstory behind yet another war between the forces of light and darkness, or figuring out the correct wife-tobuzzard-beak exchange rate, I know where I want to spend my time. So while I am struggling to get to grips with it, I’m also intrigued. Shooting zombies, chopping up orcs… repetition has made the fantastical bland. For a medium so steeped in sci-fi and fantasy, and where the impossible takes no more effort to represent than the real, it’s disappointing to me how much time we spend stuck with tired old tropes. To my mind, videogames are in dire need of more strangeness. But at the same time, such a commitment to its weird world is refreshing. AGE APPROPRIATE What’s the least embarrassing way to disperse a fl ock of magical birds that keep whispering in your shaman’s ear? Is a polished buzzard beak an appropriate bride-price? How many cows is a fair exchange for the spirit of a sabre-toothed tiger? Fair questions. Far from being familiar moral decisions, they frequently revolve around the clan’s very specific customs and traditions, and how they apply to often bizarre situations. Events are triggered as I play, in which something happens and I’m invited to make a choice about it. I scrape together crumbs of lore as I go – gods are very real, their power can be invoked by physically reenacting old myths, but most of them are asleep I think? And my clan’s patron deity is the god of a specific species of beetle used to make red clothing dye?Īs I get into the game proper, it becomes clear that more than being a challenge of farming, building, and the rest, it’s an ongoing test of how well I can understand and work within a culture totally unlike my own. These choices are largely baffl ing, steeped heavily in the game’s unique setting. But almost immediately, it reveals itself to be much stranger than that implies.īefore you even begin, you have to choose an origin story for your clan, picking from multiple options at different points in their history. Superficially, it’s a game about managing a settlement in a fantasy land, making sure all of your citizens are safe, warm and well-fed. From the very first moments, this largely text-based game puts me on the back foot.
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