Escape From Tarkov: Arena gets a release date, but the community is skeptical

destructoid.com:

Ever since one Escape From Tarkov player publicly revealed their findings that up to 60% of Tarkov matches might play host to cheaters, the community has taken a more negative stance towards the developer, Battlestate Games. Now, Battlestate Games has announced that its more focused and hectic Escape From Tarkov: Arena title will be coming out sometime in December 2023, and the players are highly suspicious of this claim.

The news broke when Forbes covered a recent interview with the Battlestate Games CEO, Nikita Buyanov, stating that “Early December is a good period of time that we want to release [Arena].” This soon made its way onto the r/pcgaming subreddit, where Tarkov players flocked to share their takes on what’s actually bound to happen with Arena.

“For anyone uninitiated,” said Reddit user bauN7, “Battle State Games has been late on every single timeline they’ve ever given for Tarkov. Literally every. Single. One.” Aside from the matters of release date windows, the players are also cynical about the value that Arena may or may not be adding to Tarkov as a whole.

The situation is similarly dire on the official Tarkov subreddit, where players are admittedly being more technical in their critique at least. TheJigglyfat highlighted a situation in which Tarkov‘s emblematic desync issues caused massive differences between what two different players were seeing, which means that the match was effectively decided by lag live on stream.

It’s not a great look, then, but the community’s jadedness isn’t necessarily a sign that BSG will have trouble managing Arena as well. In the end, if push comes to shove, at least the single-player offline version of Tarkov seems to be prospering well enough.