In a recent interview with Epic Games around Escape from Tarkov Arena, Battlestate Games’ Nikita Buyanov explained just how long it takes to develop a single weapon for the popular extraction shooter series. Escape from Tarkov has been on the market for almost a decade, and in that time, it has amassed a staggering arsenal of weaponry, but it’s not all that easy to add more.
Typically, new weapons will be introduced with major updates to the game – otherwise known as ‘wipes’. The weapons, Buyanov says, can take several months to be designed, created, coded, and balanced in Escape from Tarkov, and by association, Arena.
Putting in the Effort
In the discussion with Epic Games, Buyanov, who heads the studio at Battlestate Games, explained:
It’s a long and complex process that requires many iterations. We have a large team of game designers and testers who constantly check and refine the balance. We also carefully listen to feedback from our community. Many people are passionate about Tarkov and eagerly share their comments and impressions with us.
It’s a very slow and meticulous process.
To fully implement a single weapon in the game, with textures, animations, and all the details, takes about two to three months. It depends on the specific weapon. The fastest one we ever made took about a month, but we already had the animations ready. However, for example, belt-fed machine guns take an average of four months to complete.
He stressed that the team has a perfectionist attitude towards new weapons because they’re all ‘gun nerds’:
We shoot real firearms very often. This is especially helpful for our programmers who work on the gameplay mechanics.
When you fire a real weapon, you hear it, smell the gunpowder, feel the weight, and experience the recoil, something in your mind shifts, and you start approaching weapon creation in the game with much greater attention to detail.
Fans of the extraction shooter might not agree with the perfectionist claims, but the weapons in Escape from Tarkov are being adjusted and balanced all the time in a bid to keep as many people as possible happy. Every time a major update surfaces, it seems a new meta emerges, and that’s often by design.
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