Some game directors dream of making players happy. Nikita Buyanov, the man behind Escape from Tarkov, seems to dream of making them lose their best rifle in a ditch on another planet. His new studio, Rant Gaming, premiered 14 minutes of in-engine gameplay from Fragmentary Order on 4 November, and the internet’s verdict arrived about four seconds later: it’s Tarkov in space.
That isn’t entirely unfair. The footage, set in the year 2251, shows a player looting the field, heading for an exit and having to fight through several groups of enemies at both long and short range, with inventory and weapon-modding screens that Tarkov veterans will recognise in their sleep, assuming they still sleep. Squads go up to four players, and there are drones for reconnaissance, electromagnetic sensors for finding people who would rather not be found, ground vehicles for crossing between sectors, and weather that changes while you’re out in it.
The science-fictional twist is that you aren’t really there. War in 2251 is an outsourced corporate business, fought through RepEnts, cloned bodies piloted from remote stations, so dying on a job counts as an operating cost rather than a tragedy. It’s a grimly plausible bit of worldbuilding, somewhere between Surrogates and a particularly ruthless HR policy. Buyanov confirmed on 5 November that the game shares a universe with Tarkov, and that its PvE mode will be built into the main game rather than needing a separate profile.
Then comes the bit that will divide opinion. Alongside the reveal, Rant opened Prime Batch, a paid closed-testing programme. The Candidate tier costs $44.99 and gets you into alpha sessions and the major technical playtests; the Founder tier, at $79.99, adds experimental sessions and a direct feedback channel to the team. Players who climbed the ranks of cor3.gg, the ARG-style site that teased the game earlier this year, get money off. The first closed alpha, under NDA, is promised for later this year, and Prime Batch members keep their access through beta and after launch. There’s still no release date and no confirmed platforms. So you’d be paying for the privilege of being shot in an unfinished game, which, to be fair, is the purest expression of the hardcore extraction shooter there is.
Buyanov has previously dismissed Arc Raiders as an extraction shooter for casual players and made it plain that his team wasn’t going down that road. On this evidence he meant it. Whether there’s a big audience for a game that makes Tarkov look cuddly is another matter, but the reveal passed 100,000 views within hours, so there is clearly a queue of people waiting to be punished, and they’ve brought their own credit cards.
If the embed above stops working, the reveal is on YouTube here: Fragmentary Order official gameplay reveal.
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