3) An art style which oozes typical Woke as fuck cringe.
4) Horrible art style with the world itself, characters, and world building - relates to 1, 2, 3 above.
I can concede to majority of the points, and fully accept that this could very well be that this is slop to be consumed; esp the track record of bungie setting norms to mtx's and live service gaming that has been relatively toxic for consumers over the last 10 years. Even seeing that while DEI is more or less out the door due to copious amounts of failure, the ghosts of it will still be systematically present for the foreseeable future..
But the art style being dei? maybe the characters because of their androgyny and essential low-effort base design; personally I took that for MTX cashgrab. In route of The Finals, customize every fascet of your character from hat to shoes.
The art style is just a 2006's GTA:Vice City's take on 1980's Miami(tho not as good).. another nostalgia-grab for an era that existed ethereally in the realm of marketing, for Marathon; it was when the world moved into the internet and 3d graphics age, an imagined future if you will.. its information-driven vectors influenced by corpo sponsorship. Honestly wouldn't be surprised if Sony wasn't more or less headstrong in the art direction as they were one of the main pillars to the product design of this era.
It's no Beskinski or Frazetta, and it's definitely some sort of amalgamation of acid techno mess.. but definitely sits up there around my personal favorite design era, next to brutalism; I was like 10-13yrold running to bookstores to copy down cheatcodes for video games.. before they were even on the web, or atleast I had web access.
Also, why is the "not for everyone" argument so damning? I definitely cannot recommend Tarkov to everyone, but I love it. As far as that video above, the Cycle was great.. the thing that shot themselves in the foot was balancing.. if you were high tier, low tier stood ZERO chance at winning.. I could do ketr runs in Tarkov, and win against Altyns but not because of headshots.. and then there were MMR "buckets" based off of currency gain rather than skill; so cheaters ultimately rose to the top, and any top player would face cheaters in 100% of their games. Which in turn bled their game of any creator advertisements via streamers, and content creators because they simply just left due to cheater problems.
