With Gray Zone Warfare, Hunt Showdown, The Forever Winter, and Zero Sievert, the extraction FPS world is getting pretty full. But Escape From Tarkov remains the biggest and best known, the game that kickstarted the entire genre. Eight years since its initial launch, EFT is still going strong and still getting better. But if you’ve been having problems with Raiders, Scavs, and Rogues lately, Battlestate has just made the AI enemies easier to take on with a new Escape From Tarkov patch.
This isn’t a big, immediately detectable nerf – BSG has made some smart, subtle tweaks to how AI enemies respond to the player and communicate with one another, which, in combination, should make your firefights against them a little more survivable. The new Escape From Tarkov update also changes the in-game season to spring, granting the FPS game a welcome helping of sunshine as we head into the warmer months. But it’s the AI changes that make the biggest difference here.
First up, detection has been overhauled. If an AI enemy sees you but you’re moving away from them, they will now lose sight of you gradually – from now on, you don’t just cross an invisible threshold and suddenly they can’t see you anymore. In terms of initial detection, the further away you are, the longer it will take for the AI to spot you, and its vision will be affected by weather conditions but also your angle. This means that if you’re standing in an AI’s peripheral vision, they’re less likely to see you than if you’re directly in front of them.
Standing targets are detected the most quickly, then crouching ones, then prone; so if you’re lying down, you have less chance of being spotted. Vegetation is also more likely to keep you hidden now – at medium-to-long distances, enemies cannot spot you through gaps in plants, trees, and bushes. If you move between separate vegetation items, however, you can be seen. The new system applies to all AI and all bosses, except for Zryachiy, Birdeye, and the BTR.
All common AIs will now swap their guns to single-fire mode if they’re trying to hit you from a distance. However, common AI can no longer use suppressive fire – that ability is still available to Raiders, Rogues, and bosses with guards, but BSG says that giving common AI the suppressive fire function was creating a “negative game experience,” since their bullets would penetrate thin cover and create the illusion that bots could track the player wherever they were.
There are a few more big changes here. When you successfully hit an enemy, their accuracy will now temporarily drop by 30%, a higher percentage than before. Common AI of all difficulty levels, even Sniper Scavs, will no longer shoot first if they detect you at long range. Instead, they will take cover and wait for you to get closer. However, if you fire on them, they will fire back.
Speaking of cover, the AI grouping system has been improved, meaning that bots are less likely to all use the same piece of cover or move forward together in a huddle. Lastly, the distance at which bots can relay information about the player to one another has been cut. Effectively, this means that bots have to be closer to one another to share details about the player’s location.
In the past, it could feel like the AI was a little telepathic, and that htey could all pile on you pretty quickly, even if you were only spotted by one bot. Now, bots have to be within 50 meters of one another in order to communicate your location between them. AI Scavs can still group together, though, which allows them to talk at greater distances.
These are big changes to EFT’s enemy AI and we’ll have to see how they feel during live gameplay. On the surface, though, it seems like they will make fights against bots feel fairer.
As well as Tarkov, you might want to try some of the other best multiplayer games, or maybe the best war games on PC.
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