So for context i have been playing EFT since 2017, I'm a senior game programmer and i have released a few titles during my career

I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions that I have seen repeated a lot, especially on this subreddit regarding the state of the game, the development pace and BSG approach to this particular game development. These are again just my thoughts and things i can see from an outside perspective knowing how game development can be

Problem 1: EFT is a very complex game, that's why we always have new / old bugs constantly and why BSG takes a long time to fix them!

EFT from a Mechanical perspective is not really a complex game the attention to DETAIL of the game is pretty unique but in terms of feature complexity there is nothing that tarkov is doing any different or "unique" from other games out there , Yet EFT is the only game where bugs marked as fixed in patch notes are still present in the game, or where patches that don't touch a particular feature end up breaking a bunch of things along the way, it is also the only game to my knowledge that has a sizeable team behind it , Yet they are extremely slow to release updates (both big and small for the game )

To put it bluntly, BSG has honestly bitten way more than they expected with EFT and while i respect nikita vision for the game and the scope he has in mind most likely said scope will be severely cut-down or greatly scaled back (Streets coming soon!, wait. next year for sure! , Armor hitboxes coming soon!, Wait no. next year! )

EFT at its core is a looter shooter and the series of features that make up EFT ( Modular Weapons, AI,Loot Generation, Player Movement, Networking, Hideout Management, Backend etc ) Arent again incredibly complex systems that would justify the current (in my humble opinion snail-slow ) pace of the development, or why bugs that have been present in the game for years are still happening

(Scavs being incredibly cracked / landing shots that no player could ever do, Seeing through foliage, Making no sounds on the player end, One taps, Shooting through cover etc (I don't consider these bugs, more like issues with their current systems )

Its pretty clear at this point that BSG Foundation for the game is not scaling as well as they would had hoped (Specially since they chose client-side netcode for an FPS which is a BIG no) so in a nutshell, they are now paying their "tech-debt" where adding new features and modifying existing ones is extremely complicated since one simple change can have a cascading effect that ends up breaking a bunch of other systems As a quick example, Imagine building a house on a very shaky foundation. the more you add to this foundation the more the cracks and the issues start to show. Sure it would had been great if you used a proper foundation in the first place but now its impossible to tear the whole house down and build it again as it should had properly been done This is essentially what i can see as an outside developer on tarkov Their foundation is a mess and now they are forced to keep working on it and try to fix whatever is possible

Problem 2:If tarkov was done in a different engine other than Unity it would be great!

An engine is just the tools that you are using, If anything Unity is a great engine for any kind of game because you have direct access to the entire engine and it comes pretty lightweight by default

If instead they were to develop Tarkov on say Unreal Engine, sure you get a lot more industry-tested systems by default (Lightning, Path-finding, Occlusion ,etc ) HOWEVER just because you have more it doesn't mean it's better by default. As a developer you always want to have as much control over the engine as possible so you can fit it to your game needs, and at this Unity excels since again it's so lightweight by default which means its very open for modification

(Unreal Engine is also open source however you have a much bigger and complex code base that you have to get used first which takes both time and effort )

Plus there are a MULTITUDE of other Multiplayer FPS games done using Unity that don't have issues as severe as Tarkov (Cheating, Hit Reg, Very low performance even on High End Rigs , to name a few )

So yeah again an engine is just tools to an end, What you make with said tools is up to you even if BSG had chosen a better engine for tarkov i'm very sure we would end up in the same situation since most if not all of tarkov issues stem from BSG lack of experience / taking on more than what they were prepared for

Problem 3: It's a BETA, things will be fixed in the Final Release!

So At least in my experience BETA is the game period where your content is fully locked in, you have all your main systems completed and running and you are merely TESTING for bugs, possibly balancing the game based on player feedback. Also BETAS ten to be pretty short-lived. Tarkov is not a game in beta. it's a full game that happens to have the "beta" sticker on it, there's no difference between the current version you have and whatever BSG had on their servers as of their latest update

What i'm trying to say is what you are playing "is" the game, there's no magical 1.0 tag that will suddenly make all the issues go away or a secret patch that will fix everything that's wrong with the game

Going down into performance, EFT again is one of the games that from my humble experience has horrendous scaling of performance, you can have incredibly diverse experiences on both high end and low end machines (sometimes low end machines tend to run even better than high end machines which makes zero sense ) Plus the game hunger for RAM (Getting 32 GBs of ram to play a SINGLE game is NOT a solution by the way )

Optimization is a process that's done right at the start The longer you take to start optimization the worse it's gonna be and in some cases it will be impossible cause at this point you have systems upon systems that rely on specific behavior or that were built with certain assumptions (again think of the house foundation as an example ). So modifying these systems now turns into a very time-consuming and prone to bugs task

Problem 4: The Netcode

So as everyone knows EFT uses a client-side model for its Networking. What this means is that the client ( you as the player ) tends to have the final authority on whatever say, a shot you did land or not, or whatever it should deal damage or not. The problem with this is that its extremely exploitable

What's stopping me from hacking my game client and telling the game "Oh yeah i totally hit this player in the head from 500m away without him being visible to me " ?, Since the client has the final say the server will just take that for granted and not bother checking if the client was wrong (Again, client is Authority )Pretty much every single FPS made in the past 10 years or so uses a Server-Client model where the Server is the authority / has the final say and the client just communicates / passes information to the server, which the server checks to make sure it's valid. Now this is harder to hack ( not impossible ,but certainly harder ) since if you tell the game for example that You just shot this player that's on the other end of the map, The server can validate this check before processing any damage or creating any shots ("I.e, from the server perspective Player B isn't even visible from Player A perspective so there's no way the shot landed, Deny the claim ")

This is just a very rough example to get the point across

Cheating will never be fully stopped in EFT since it's using a client side networking model . Sure they can add more checks and change their logic but this fundamental problem means EFT is much more prone and easier to hack, hence why you see an abundance of radar and "Ghost" looting hacks, all the information is available to the client

Also reducing the ping limit to something very small ( say 100 ms) is the most ham-fisted and band-aid solution you could possibly apply to this problem, Its worse in tarkov becouse again, client side code and all however. reduce it too much and people with unstable internet connections , or living in third world countries ( or even first world countries with really bad ISPs) will essentially not be able of playing the game (this alredy happened with the very first implementation of the ping limit ), And guess what paying 60$ for a "beta" only to essentially be locked out of your legit purchase becouse of a stupid design decision isnt a nice thing to do to your audience (Most if not all FPS games out there have a reasonable ping range (up to 300-400 ) becouse their netcode favors the person with the lowest ping which is a far more acceptable implementation , So having high ping will give you no advantages whatsoever, if anything it gives you MORE disadvantages but at least you can continue to play the game

Problem 5:Why doesn't an AAA studio make a Tarkov competitor!?

AAA Studios prefer to play it safe on tested ideas and make as much money as possible back on their investment, Tarkov is a niche genre that happened to hit an idea that hasn't really been exploited before, So the chances of any AAA studio making an actual tarkov-like game with no compromises is pretty low (Plus the potential for actual pay-to-win monetization is pretty high ). However since the genre is raising in popularity we are seeing more from the indie side, games like The Cycle and Marauders while not completely in the same style as Tarkov all share the same idea of a Raid based looter shooter where you enter a map, engage in PvP/PvE, Acquire loot, and then leave with said loot so given enough time i'm pretty sure we will start to see more and more Tarkov-Like games

My final two cents

I love EFT and I was very excited for the game. as the years passed on and the game state remained mainly the same ( if not worse thanks to all the RMT changes ). My hype for the game has completely died down and now it's very obvious to me that BSG has a grand vision for a game that they will never be able to fully deliver on. If anything we are already seeing the effects of them having to cut-back on the scope of the game and on promised features With the most visible examples being Streets from Tarkov which is coming out "soon" for the past few years or so. Or where promised features are shuffled back and forth from coming soon, to nobody knows when they are coming out. I really loved my time with Tarkov, however it's frustrating to me to see the current state of the game and the lack of will from BSG to actually fix the fundamental problems with their game. They have a great team of artists, level designers and animators. however its plain obvious that their mechanical - technical foundation is falling apart and there's not a lot that they are willing to do to fix it

If you were to ask for my opinion on what to do if i was part of BSG honestly it would be to just change focus on new features and take as much time as needed to rebuild what parts of the game can be rebuilt (Exception being netcode, this late into development its very much impossible to change that )

The game desperately needs a proper cleanup on its foundation and even the well known "band aid" fixes are doing very little to alleviate these problems