Latest news with #Tarkov
Forbes
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Escape From Tarkov' Players Angry After AI Art Found In New Map
The new Iceberg map is proving controversial. Earlier this week a new map launched in Escape From Tarkov Arena called Iceberg, however fans have since discovered that it features AI generated artwork, and as you might expect, a lot of them are not happy. Yesterday, patch 0.3.1 for Escape From Tarkov Arena was launched, and the headline new addition was a new map for the Blast Gang and CheckPoint game modes called Iceberg, which is set in a luxury hotel that is now being used for the combat arena sport. By most accounts, it's a decent map, with a lot of players seeming to have fun in the first day of action. However, fans have now discovered some AI generated artwork on the map, and quite a few are angry and disappointed about its inclusion. The top thread on the Escape From Tarkov sub-Reddit is currently highlighting some of the AI art, and asking the developers to not use it again in either Arena or the main Tarkov game. Throughout the Iceberg map, there are posters on the walls that parody other games. Some examples include parodies of the iconic Dark Souls graphic of a character next to a bonfire, the key art of the recently released Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and artwork that appears to be referencing Steam hit Lethal Company. Many fans on the sub-Reddit theorised these images were made with AI, and now a member of the Escape From Tarkov PR team has confirmed to me that that is the case and these images were made with AI. As is the case with a lot of AI work, there has been somewhat of a backlash from areas of the Tarkov community, with some fans calling the use of AI lazy and many sharing their disappointment that developers Battlestate Games has chosen to use this technology instead of commissioning human artists. However, others are arguing that this is a good use of AI, with features of the map that are inconsequential to gameplay and something that will barely be noticed by most players. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Had these images not been made by AI these would have been some very cool Easter eggs for players to discover on the new map, but now they are creating somewhat of a negative storm, which is a common occurrence in the world of Tarkov. It's only been a year or so since the extremely controversial Unheard Edition of Tarkov that saw a lot of fans pledge to never come back to it. If you want to see the AI artwork on the Iceberg map yourself, then you are in luck, as Escape From Tarkov Arena is having a free weekend right now. You can play the game for free until 6:00 PM MSK on June 2, and there is a new task chain and double XP to enjoy when you do. If you want to purchase Arena after trying it, there is also a 20% discount for the duration of the weekend. If you would rather watch, then Twitch Drops for Tarkov Arena are currently live as well, so you can get some in game rewards to watching the action.
Forbes
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
It's Just Over For ‘Marathon'
Marathon I've tried to put this off for a while now, giving Marathon the benefit of the doubt in terms of fixing what ails it, and maybe snagging an audience that's large enough to make it at least sustainable. But no, it's over. I can't dispute this anymore. This has probably always been true, but the events of the past week have cemented it. I will get into the livestream and plagiarism and all that later, but this is a long, long list of what's gone wrong in the past, what's currently going wrong, and a future that does not look any brighter. The entire idea of this game was a mistake. Bungie has said that this came from a bunch of them playing Tarkov a while ago, and I heard that among that group, it was one 'good old boy' in leadership who pushed to make this Bungie's biggest non-Destiny project, and hopefully the birth (well, rebirth) of a strong IP for the studio, now under Sony which assumed it would produce another hit like this. The game attempts to split the difference between casual players who may be new to extraction shooters and existing, hardcore extraction players it would like to pilfer from games like Tarkov. It will do neither. You are never going to make an extraction shooter that is casual enough, because the concept of being able to lose your loot, potentially your entire vault if you go on bad runs, is exhausting as you try to give the game and genre a chance. Add onto that losing all that gear and all the upgrades you've gotten in a season no matter what, and that may be how this genre is, but it's just not going to be attractive to many players that have not already played this genre. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder It's probably even worse on the hardcore player end, with Tarkov players scoffing at how 'easy' they've made Marathon, everything from gear looting to time-to-kill to double revives on combat. I've seen almost no established extraction shooter players that are eager to jump over to Marathon for anything but a trial run based on what they've seen and played. Marathon And what we've seen and played is the next point. Neither are good. Either you've been an outside observer watching gameplay trailers and Twitch streams, or you got into the Closed Alpha and played for yourself. The game feels uninspired. Shooting is…fine, but considering this is Bungie, a studio that gave us some of the best-feeling shooters of all time, this is not close to comparing to that. It feels like a slower version of Apex Legends with maybe one teamfight per round, and in between, battling with UESC bots (which I do think can actually be fun in some instances). The idea that this is an extraction shooter that should use a hero model has not landed well at all. It seems woefully unbalanced with full invisibility and wallhacks and things that should just not be in this genre. And it destroys the idea of making a fully custom character like other games, something most players like. It feels like a solution where a problem did not exist. An experiment to make the game stand out, but it's just made it worse. None of this was helped that at the exact same time, Marathon's Alpha was interrupted by an ARK Raiders Alpha, a much more traditional extraction shooter and a much better one, by all accounts. More polished, more fun, more expected features found in extraction shooters. All you have to do is look at the fact that ARK Raiders' playercount went up every single day of its Alpha where Marathon's almost always went down. By the end, it was sub-20% of what it started with. Twitch viewers were even worse, going from 150,000 at launch as big streamers tried it, crashing to 1-3,000 a few days later near the end, where big chunks of that might even be one or two Destiny streamers alone. Marathon It's not just how the game currently feels and plays, it's what it's apparently planning for the future. This was half the problem with the recent livestream where sure, the vibes were bad with the recent plagiarism from the start, but hearing game director Joe Ziegler and others talk about it, the constant refrain was 'we're looking about that, we're thinking about that.' The bulk of the talk was about minor balance changes. Shield health, backpack spawns, stack size, faction differentiation. Asked to name the biggest issue they found coming out of the Alpha, Ziegler rattled off a list of impossibly small issues. Hugely requested things like proximity chat and Solos were handwaved away and relegated to some possible future plan. It is absolutely insane that Bungie has not taken to heart the feedback about how this game feels to play Solo. It feels like the only way to play is stacked with friends on comms, as playing with randoms is at best a coinflip whether it's awful or fine. Going in Solo and skulking around like a rat avoiding all combat is boring as hell. Because the game ignores Solos, that means you need to convince two friends to buy it, likely at an upcoming $40 price point. It is too late in development to switch to free-to-play, not that this genre is built for that anyway, but painfully few people have played this game and thought it was worth that price. Without a delay, at launch, it will have two more heroes and 1-2 more maps and that's it. It's a tiny amount of content for that price, on top of a game that as of yet, is not very fun for most players. Now we arrive at the massive controversy of art theft, the revelation that a supposed ex-Bungie artist outright stole a large amount of art from ANTIREAL, an artist with a portfolio extremely similar to Marathon's vibes. And we're not talking 'inspired by,' these pieces of art are 1:1 rips to the point where Bungie has to audit its entire game to see how many of these there might be. During the livestream they couldn't even show the game because it was being ripped apart internally for this process. The Marathon comparison The narrative spread as players realized that a number of Bungie artists, including Art Director Joseph Cross, followed ANTIREAL for years. It's likely true that Marathon's overall style came from any number of sources from years or decades past, though this fact + the direct lifting from ANTIREAL exploded into theorizing that this was a larger problem (on my end too, for a time). But even if the entire 'soul' of Marathon wasn't taken from one artist, art director Joe Cross and members of his team allowed this massive portfolio of plagiarism to make it through from being stolen allegedly five years ago to being plastered all over the current build of the game. Mass incompetence. This has slit the throat of Marathon. The one thing Marathon had going for it was its unique art style and cool vibes, and now it will be impossible to bring that up without the plagiarism being referenced. Memes were instantly born during the apology portion of the livestream including 'PLAGIARISM WILL MAKE ME GOD' and a renaming of Marathon to 'ART Raiders.' That's going to stick forever. There is no escaping this now. Not that vibes were good before, but they are dismal now with Marathon a laughing stock after this happened or even worse, outright anger that this was allowed to take place in the game, and players refusing to play and support the game as a result. Marathon will not fundamentally change enough to be attractive to most players. Community sentiment will not change enough to turn things around on that end. A delay does not significantly change any of this, but it may be the only option. It would be impressively stupid to actually release this game in four months given both these recent events and that we're only seeing a small amount of new content and some balance and visual polishing for launch. But you simply cannot cancel this game at this point after 5+ years of work, even if it should have died ages ago. Sony alone would never allow that. A delay is the only real option but I don't think it changes enough to be useful. It will create distance from the current awfulness, but I have seen nothing to indicate this is going to be some transformative rebirth. The core concept of a hero shooter extraction game will not change. It will not erase the plagiarism that happened. Marathon I've previously said that Marathon will not be Concord 2.0. While I still technically believe that, it's more a matter of just how brutally this will fail, not whether it will fail at all. I do not expect it to get 700 concurrent Steam players like Concord, nor be scrapped in two weeks by Sony. But it will not do well. That is set in stone right now barring some sort of miracle from the heavens. This will hurt Bungie and its actual healthy child, Destiny. There will be layoffs. There will be Sony takeover of leadership as they bail out with millions in vested cash. The only thing I don't believe will happen is the complete dissolution of Bungie as that would be a bridge too far in terms of Sony being embarrassed a storied brand has collapsed under its tenure, one they paid $3.6 billion for. And I also think it would be a horrible look to immediately kill another game like they did with Concord, and Marathon will be given some time to fix and improve things. I don't think any amount of time will be enough. I realize this is an utterly brutal article. It's the longest one I've written in ages. But at this point there is no doubt the writing is on the wall and it is disingenuous to ignore that. I will continue to cover the game. If good things happen, I will write about that. If bad things keep happening, I will write about that. But I think it's overwhelmingly bad things from here. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The ‘ARC Raiders' Alpha Gained Players Nearly Every Single Day
ARC Raiders The second Closed Alpha test of ARC Raiders got a lot of attention this week as word spread about the new extraction shooter. That positive word of mouth led to a significant achievement, an increase in the number of players every day minus a tiny tick down last night, reflecting glowing sentiments about the game and also more codes being issued over time. ARC Raiders will be a new entry in the extraction genre releasing some time this year, it's claimed. But after experiencing the Alpha it seems pretty close to ready at this point, and many are predicting developer Embark may pull off another shadow drop this summer like they did with The Finals, their other PvP game that you may not realize has in fact maintained a solidly consistent playercount over time. Arc Raiders Pretty quickly, ARC Raiders demonstrated how it was a somewhat less hardcore, but appealing version of Tarkov with traditional extraction elements ranging from crafting to home base upgrades. The game itself features harrowing robotic PvE enemies, including one hulking boss that was only defeated 58 times total as tens of thousands of players played the Alpha. And of course, there are plenty of PvP fights as well, the core of the experience and there have been some pretty funny clips already from the test. What stood out most to me as I played was the sound design, relying more heavily than most other games I've ever played on footsteps, gunfire and often looting, prying open extremely loud containers or setting off blaring alarms when looting big drops. Yes, other games have this but it's also how it sounds. I've never been so terrified of cracking gunfire nearby or grit my teeth as hard as when I'm jamming a crowbar into a screaming rusted box. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Yes, all this is inevitably leading to the performance of the game versus Marathon, another high profile extraction shooter that has been running a Closed Alpha simultaneously, though a game that is obviously far less finished than ARC. It was a stark contrast in reception, and Bungie's new shooter lacked many of the extraction elements fans of that genre want, Alpha or not, while also feeling somewhat inaccessible to new players, especially those hoping to play solo. More than ARC, anyway. As such, the Marathon Closed Alpha lost PC players every day, the inverse of ARC, though some of that may be due to the somewhat inexplicable decision to barely give out new codes despite always promising more. There are still too many unknowns to know what will happen with Marathon, but ARC? ARC seems destined to be at least some level of genre hit. I am not expecting insane numbers or the ability to dethrone Tarkov. But if it settles into a Finals cadence, I think Embark would be just fine with that. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
New ‘Escape From Tarkov' Roadmap Shows Full Release Coming This Year
Tarkov will launch this year. A new roadmap has been released for Escape From Tarkov, which reveals the upcoming patch schedule and confirms that the full 1.0 official release of Escape From Tarkov is still coming this year. The new roadmap was revealed on the TarkovTV live stream earlier today, and revealed that there will be at least four major patches in the coming months, and seemingly before the next wipe, then Tarkov will launch into 1.0 in 2025. There was no specific release date given, but it is seemingly official confirmation that Tarkov is on track to launch this year. Of course, release dates have been teased before, with late 2024 being the first date teased many years ago. That has obviously come and gone, and it looks like late 2025 is now going to be the main release window for Tarkov. The somewhat worrying part of this roadmap is that there doesn't appear to be any kind of wipe within it. The roadmap details patches until August, which is usually the latest we would expect a summer wipe, but the patch title is listed as 0.16.9, suggesting that it will not include a wipe. This question was asked by a fan, however no concrete answer was given by the devs, and it seemed they did not know the answer. Given this is usually a very straightforward question they tend to answer, my gut is saying there will be no wipe before launch. The stream ended with a very brief look at the upcoming Terminal map, showing a few of the locations we have seen in screenshots but in video form. And we got our first look at what cut scenes will look like in Tarkov and on the Terminal map, with a couple of screenshots being shown of NPCs. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Outside of the launch speculation, we got a lot of news about upcoming optimisations, including improvements to almost every map. There is also an expansion of Interchange listed for the August patch, which better include some reworked extraction points, otherwise I may never play that awful map again. A big audio rework is promised, yet again, and should arrive with the June patch. We've obviously seen countless audio reworks come and go with mixed results, but the short clip we saw of this in action did look impressive. There's also some teased new weapons, updated animations for AK weapons, and a lot of the usual changes you would expect to see with Tarkov patches, along with more than a few very cool quality of life improvements that should remove some of the smaller annoying issues Tarkov still has. There isn't the massive amount of new content we are used to, but we know almost all of that is being saved for the launch patch, so it should not come as too much of a surprise that these are more focused on optimisation and improvements before the release. While no concrete info was given, it was also announced that Escape From Tarkov: Arena will be coming to Steam sometime soon, following its recent launch on the Epic Games Store. Nikita also confirmed that the main Tarkov game will eventually come to Steam, but don't expect that to happen anytime soon. During the TarkovTV live stream, a number of promo codes were also released, which will give you some free in game items if you redeem them in game. You'll need to activate these codes in the Tarkov launcher, and when they have been activated you will get the items delivered to you using the in game mail system. However, you'll need to be quick as these promo codes tend to only last for a few hours.
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The Optimist's Case For Bungie's ‘Marathon'
Marathon Ever since the debut of Marathon's gameplay this past weekend, 'discourse' has been swirling about how the game looks, and it's a bit burying your head in the sand to say most chatter wasn't majority negative. This ranges from very pointless 'the clones are woke' debates to actual criticism of how it seems to play, and how it might perform in the larger competitive PvP industry at a higher price point and a somewhat content-bare launch. I've participated in that myself quite a bit. So, can I look on the bright side today? I'll try to make an optimist's case for Marathon here, and even if all of this doesn't pan out, if anyone can break into a crowded market, it's Bungie. It's Bungie – That's my first point here. This is a studio that made Halo and Destiny, meaning they have not worked on a failed franchise in 25 years. They have some of the best-feeling gunplay in the business, and I know you're about to say 'almost all the old Bungie people are gone,' but well, Bungie is still pumping out great-feeling guns and sandbox changes in Destiny to this day, so that is clearly still in their skill set. And is a game that blends the hugely popular Apex legends with the hugely popular Tarkov and Destiny-feeling gunplay really that bad? I'd argue it's likely to be the opposite. Marathon AAA, More Accessible Extraction Shooting – There just isn't a wide-ranging extraction shooter on the market at this scale. Especially one that will take aim at the console market in a way few have attempted so far. We're all saying 'well I don't want to play an extraction shooter,' but we're largely basing that on the hardcore ones like Tarkov which are pretty much inaccessible on purpose. Bungie could change minds about that, and this idea may be better than simply doing another arena shooter or battle royale in the end, even if aspects of it may feel somewhat derivative. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Dedicated Servers, Less Cheating – Bungie is finally pulling the trigger on dedicated servers for a PvP game, something fans always want in this genre. And if there is one advantage to a mid-range price point for the game it's that it will cut down on cheating at the very least, whether it makes the game a harder sell or not. Sony Support – No matter how Marathon launches, I do not think Sony has it in them to pull the plug super early on another game like this, not after Concord. Sinking more resources into Marathon development to make it better and better in time is probably more worth it than confirming something as yet another giant failure, cementing the idea that they truly have no idea what they're doing in this genre. Marathon will see continued investment, I'm almost sure of it. Marathon A Unique Aesthetic that May Still Improve – Concord never looked good. Not once. It was clearly banking on a quasi-Guardians of the Galaxy vibe, plus 70s-inspired character designs. It just looked terrible. You simply cannot say that with Marathon with a straight face, at least in terms of overall design and the vibe this entire aesthetic has. There have been some complaints about how that translates into onscreen play, but I think that may change once people are playing in 4K, and Bungie has reminded us that some of this footage is older builds in pre-alpha, so there is still room for more improvement. The Fourth Map - Bungie and some player testers have been constantly hyping up some fourth map that is not launching with the game, but is supposed to be the unique twist on the extraction concept in a way we haven't seen before. Why on earth we're not seeing this now, I have no idea, nor why the game isn't waiting to release with it, but if this delivers, that could be very good news. Of course, the opposite of all of this could be true: It depends what you want to choose to believe. In the end, I have more concerns than I have a glass overflowing with optimism, but we just cannot dictate what will or will not happen based on a single showcase. The biggest tests will be the vibes that come out of the closed alpha, but more importantly the open beta. If it doesn't impress there, that's when the serious problems begin. But if it does? Everyone may start shifting their view the other direction. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Bluesky Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
