Earlier today Battlestate Games launched Escape From Tarkov patch 14.1 and after reading the patch notes most people expected that players would be angry about the reveal of microtransactions coming to the game. But with the patch now live players are much angrier than anyone expected, but for an entirely different reason, as the recoil changes don’t seem to be pleasing anyone.
In the 14.1 patch notes, there was a single line about changes to recoil for shotguns, pistols and the SKS, simply mentioning that the team had “adjusted the recoil parameters” for the weapons. While this raised some eyebrows, with most players loving the new recoil system introduced with the last wipe, it didn’t seem too concerning on paper.
Then the patch launched and players instantly started to notice some issues. It seems that the adjustments made to the recoil patterns basically make many of these weapons unusable outside of a single shot, with players posting clips online that show pistols jumping up massively when shot, and the other types of weapons not fairing any better either.
As you might expect with these bewildering changes, fans have taken to social media to vent their anger. On the Escape From Tarkov sub-Reddit the top 10 posts at the time of writing are about the change, most of them calling for it to be reverted. Multiple Tarkov influencers have also taken to social media to call out the change.
The obvious question is if this recoil is intended or if it is some kind of bug that has slipped in with the patch. While we know the Battlestate Games team wanted to change the recoil for these weapons, with it being mentioned in the patch notes, we don’t know if they intended it to have this much of a change. The hope is that this extreme recoil is a bug and that the dev team will fix it up within the next few hours to make these weapons usable.
But if it turns out this is the intended recoil for these weapons then they once again return to being basically worthless, and Tarkov will likely return to the AR and sniper meta that became so common in the past and proved to be incredibly boring.
For anyone outside of the most hardcore players there would come a point in each wipe where Tarkov became almost unplayable as your low-tier weapons simply couldn’t compete with the top-level ARs that players with thousands of hours had. But the recent change to recoil and armor meant that any weapon had a chance to take out one of these geared players, and it seemed lower-level players had more of a chance in the later stages of the wipe.
This change doesn’t totally remove that, but it does reduce the possibilities lower-level players realistically have, and surely will not be a good thing for the game overall. It also doesn’t help the fact many players are still stuck on the Setup quest that requires you to use shotguns to kill other players, so I expect this quest will turn off even more players going forward.
Hopefully, the devs will realise this was a big mistake and revert the recoil changes introduced with the 14.1 patch earlier today. But until that happens you will probably want to avoid using shotguns, pistols and the SKS when playing Tarkov.
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