This doesn't appear to do anything new at all or refine and polish what exists elsewhere today.
A neon flavored Tarkov with robots/aliens and mid UI. Do they think they will poach from those players?
I mean, it technically is doing something different than it's Tarkov counter-part.. it's closer to the competitors like Delta Force, Arena Breakout, and The Cycle; but actually far closer to CoD DMZ.. the easiest answer is casualizing/simplifying it.. Tarkov has an essential population bleed problem that stims from its 6+ month wipe period.. Most hardcore/no-lifers are "maxed" in less than a month, and every "casual" player has essentially blown their financial load and do not have the "grind" mindset and/or time to bring themselves back up because they're competiting against "meta" shit. Tarkov is one of those games that require almost 1000hrs to really grasp the game to a understandable point for many. It has a lot of developer debt and bloat that add characterization, and also frusteration to the game for many. Take the audio for example, if you listen to anywhere on the internet complain about tarkov.. audio is up there on the list, but they are persistent in wanting to make an incredibly complex audio system that involves interaction with the enviroment, such as occlusions and bounce back.. Right now, if you're walking next to a wall.. you can hear your footsteps bounce off that wall giving you audio that sounds like someone is walking next to you, and in an extent this happens to trees, sometimes hills, and rocks; buggy mess and incredibly annoying r/n.
Ontop of Tarkov has a lot of gear mechanics that are complex but also simple to the average tarkov player. Armors have different materials that have different durability burn, repair, and pentrating values.. ontop of 6 different classes of armor.. plus all the bugs that come along with that.. 50+ attachments where you could essentially catagorize their paper dolls into three different buckets.. but realistically they all fundamentally change the gun beyond the actual paper doll stats of recoil% and ergo. 15 Different headphones, like 8 different night visions, 30+ scopes and sights. Almost every calibur of ammunition minusing maybe .22, onto of different tiers of ammunition with pen value and velocity differences.. Shotgun ammo has variation on pellets, nades have variation on fuse time and shrapnel, 3 or 4 different variations of the same guns in the same caliber but micro differentials.. then you have bleed, light bleed, 9 different body parts that can all be affected by.. 20+ different healing items, 20+ different injectors, ect. No developer is tackling that, let alone in 5 years.. Tarkov has been in "beta" for almost 10 years now.
Also, load times is a huge problem with Tarkov. It's probably the most relatable to the BR rush, a lot of people gravitated out of PUBG for a number of reasons.. but one of the factors is a 2 minute lobby, a 1 minute plane ride, and if you died immediately, a 20+ minute waiting for friends; it took them almost 5 years to add a revive function.. Tarkov is the same. 10 minutes of inventory maintience, 5 minutes of putting a kit together(flea market captcha is awful), 6 minutes of waiting to get into a raid, and if you die immediately 20+ minutes of waiting for friends; ontop of horrible horrible horrible optimization.. Marathon is thinning that out, by making it where all the valuable loot sells back so you walk out with cash and attachments/gear(much like DMZ).. Getting into raid times are less than a minute(so far), and an entire raid is around the 20 minute mark.. Considering that 1-4 hours of work in Tarkov can be gone in less than 5 minutes, Marathon is tackling to minimize that.. the carrot on the stick is the attachments and augments that are supposedly more horizonal power than direct/vertical power; but thats the problem they will face depending on how balance plays out.
But it's also hard to innovate the base game loop of go in, loot some shit, get into some scuffles, and get out.. you throw cogs at it by increasing player interaction, boss fights, hordes of ai, and other interactive shit; I'll forever be sad that no one still hasn't tackled DMZ helicopter extract.
tldr, its lowering the overall time investment that something like Tarkov requires.. Very much trying to be the EQ to WoW, or PUBG to Apex/Warzone.
also iirc, The Division was a failure. Plagued with server issues in the beginning, and many people arguing repetitive gameplay.. ontop of bullet sponge pve encounters and I didn't know it had any sort of PvP until way later after Division 2 came out lol.
Holy fuck this looks awful. What the fuck were these people doing for 5 years? Protesting not having Milkers in the men's bathroom?
While the latter can probably be said the same to Riot, I guess.. but Valorant also took roughly 5 years or more to develop(Year 3ish we learned of "Project A") and it had far less "features" and a map pool by per square inch size less than half of Marathons.. not 100% on that, but Valorants maps are pretty small. Also its to be noted that a good majority of FPS players often play in low graphic settings, and 4:3 resolution; so having a focal point on graphic fidelity and high resolution probably isn't their first thought ontop of "competitive" performance when consoles is also a focal point. If I understand correctly, I believe the first three years was a lot of engineering and they didn't start onboarding what we see today uptil two years ago. I also don't know how much weight is being put into an Anti-Cheat, as this is something that plagues every FPS game currently.. Riot put out 80 million on their anticheat starting, who knows what was spent on it today. And while good(and invasive), they still have cheater problems.
It's quite literally Apex DMZ lol
