u/Illustrious-Ship-129

Imo Tarkov absolutely needed open world to be great. the game is alright how it is but can you imagine how much cooler it would have been if you had multiple hideouts across the zone with safezones and taxi services?

as someone who has played stalker its very easy to see how tarkov took inspiration from it, and stalker is a GREAT game but it wouldnt be great without its open world elements. tarkov is alot like stalker only differences is it excels in many things and lacks open world. if this game had open world it would have easily been the top game of 2026 and one of the greatest mmorpgs of all time and i dont think anything will ever change my mind. bsg strayed away from the idea after realizing it wouldnt work with how unoptimized and resource hungry this game is, and instead of just dividing segments with loading screens and safe zones and only loading the segment of the map the player is in they scrapped it entirely so they could push the 1.0 out the door since it wouldve taken a while to implement. this just screams incompetence to me, they shouldve known from the start that their vision wouldnt work, part of being a game developer is knowing your limits so that your not pushing out empty promises, because your playerbase is gonna expect to see anything and everything you imply. they shouldve either kept quiet about all the 'Broken Promises' or hired or teamed with more competent developers.

https://preview.redd.it/0bgjs7cd62bh1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=eded15c4d095d773b635f53fc2452b34547e03e4

this is a map i illustrated over

Red=Maps

blue = Possible safe zones

purple = pve only sections between maps that could either be trader hubs/bases with taxi services, or accesible hideout locations for the player between maps, adding incentive to travel and stay in certain locations depending on your needs

Imo the entire reserves location being abandoned is so comical considering throughout the game you find out there ARE infact valuable assets there the russian government would not just leave behind, i think reserves being manned (kinda like the water treatment plant) would make alot more sense, ruaf holding with raid events where it gets temporarily overrun and you can treat the map as usual. even if the base was lightly manned with troops who have low funding equipment, and a commander who grants the player access and cooperation via quests and thus turning d-2 into a safezone and hideout that allows easy access between shoreline and reserve for later on in the game

the way the game would play would be:

Start on ground zero, Main objective: find a way out of the area. you then encounter your first safezone trader hub ran mainly by therapist out of an armed hospital compound or wherever shes at

do stuff for her to find your way into streets and maybe encounter prapor who is rising in power capturing more territories

rest of the early gameflow would involve finding paths to other maps (this would be the tour segment of the story) until you find a good paper trail to work off of

there shouldve been several major different ending that all depend on who you worked with out of prapor, mechanic, jaeger,therapist vs peacekeeper, skier(basically the UN) and then kermin/lightkeeper.