What Went Wrong with Escape from Tarkov’s Plot

By the end of 2025, the multiplayer extraction shooter Escape from Tarkov finally left closed beta. Despite its strong foundation and recognizable core formula, version 1.0 made it clear that not all of the promised elements were equally well developed. This is especially true of the storyline — the game’s key new feature and the aspect that raised the most questions.

In my review of the game, I deliberately avoided discussing the story, since Escape from Tarkov was never really about narrative. Still, over the past few months, I’ve been trying to escape from Tarkov at a relaxed pace, without rushing the process. To this day, however, I haven’t succeeded. Today, I’ll explain why.

The game’s story revolves around the TerraGroup organization, which was running illegal projects in the Norvinsk region. I won’t go into too much detail here. If you want to dig deeper on your own, feel free to do so. Instead, I’ll briefly explain what you actually need to do to escape the city.

You’re introduced through an initial mission on a local server with no other players, regardless of whether you choose PvP or PvE. This first raid acts as a kind of tutorial, but it only covers a small part of what you’ll need to know. Realistically, you’ll learn maybe 10% of the game’s mechanics from that mission. Don’t expect any additional tutorial quests after that.

So, you play as an operator from one of two PMCs operating in Tarkov. I stress that there are two private military companies, BEAR and USEC, for a reason. BEAR reports directly to the Russian Armed Forces and was deployed to the region to suppress hostile forces and gather intelligence on TerraGroup’s activities. USEC, by contrast, operates under the corporation’s control and exists to protect its interests.

This is where, according to longtime players, things were supposed to go differently. BEARs and USECs were meant to have separate storylines, working with different traders as they tried to escape the city. For example, BEARs were supposed to receive more support from Prapor, since they’re locals, Russian, their own people. USECs, in turn, were expected to work with Peacekeeper, who represents the international community operating in Norvinsk.

None of this made it into the game. Want to know what your faction choice actually affects? Only your character’s voice lines and the visual style of your gear. That’s it. The rivalry between the two factions ends there. Every player, without exception, must complete the same set of quests to escape the city. Some of them are mandatory, others are optional. It all depends on which ending you’re aiming for. I’ll get back to that later.

When you first spawn in your stash, your next stop is the traders. Previously, after a wipe, all maps were available to players right away. Now, you’ll need to complete the story quest “Tour” to unlock them. The tasks themselves aren’t complicated: it’s mostly about grinding and running dozens of raids.

Other quests unlock alongside this. Some, like “Heaven on Fire” and “Ticket,” which is the main quest, appear in your task journal automatically. Others are optional but crucial for getting a good ending, and they have to be activated manually. How do you do that? By finding story-related items during raids at specific locations. The game never tells you about them, and if you don’t rely on guides to progress through the story, there’s a good chance you’ll never even realize they exist.

The release also introduced animated traders. In practice, though, they don’t add much. Each visit lasts only a couple of minutes and includes just a few lines of dialogue. After that, you’re sent off to another location to look for items, kill enemies, or grind money, take your pick. Some traders aren’t implemented at all. Even now, you still can’t access Peacekeeper.

In short, this isn’t Call of Duty: in Tarkov, there are only in-engine cutscenes in the first and last missions. I didn’t even manage to see the pre-finale cutscene at Terminal, the new map.

The narrative is delivered through notes and audio tapes. In practice, though, searching for story items isn’t fun. It’s hard to enjoy hunting for something when you don’t even know what you’re supposed to be looking for, especially when it turns into pure pixel hunting. For example, during the “They’re Already Here” quest, I got fed up searching for a key in a tiny three-by-three-meter room. I only found it on my third run, when it finally spawned in a spot that was actually visible. The same issue applies to almost every other item, notes, tapes, diaries, and everything else.

In practice, players simply run around Tarkov’s locations and complete tasks for traders, much like side quests, all so they can eventually earn themselves a ticket to the submarine.

Since I’ve spent over seven years in EFT (with breaks), I still keep in touch with longtime veterans. Many of them dropped the game ages ago; some returned for the release, but, seeing no real improvements, left again. The friends who did stick around play much less—just a few hours a week, or they prefer PvE for obvious reasons. And those who stayed have started to notice a ton of lore inconsistencies.

The most glaring example is the lack of navigation devices for PMCs. According to the story, an EMP explosion goes off in one of the high-rise buildings at the Epicenter, disabling all electronics in the city. That’s the in-game explanation for why your character doesn’t have a PDA or, at the very least, a smartphone. Supposedly, electronics just don’t work! But in reality, every other electronic device works just fine: flashlights, night vision goggles, red dot and holographic sights, even Christmas lights that show up during winter events.

You could argue that the EMP only affected communications, but that doesn’t hold up either: traders contact you regularly, radio communication is used in the story, you scan frequencies at the Intelligence Center, and Voivode communicates with the Lighthouse Watchman. So, comms are still up, and so is electricity. The lack of navigation devices is just the developers not wanting to implement them. And this is a game released in 2025.

Earlier, I talked about how the story quests work. The idea of telling the story through notes could have been effective, if not for one major problem. The quest descriptions are genuinely awful. I’m not exaggerating, trust me. Start the story quest “They’re Already Here” and you’ll immediately see what I mean. The description tells you to find a place where nobody has lived for a long time, almost word for word. There are no clues, no map markers, and not even a vague hint. You’re essentially expected to search every abandoned house on every map, because the description doesn’t even mention which location you’re supposed to be in.

And it’s not just this one quest. It’s the same story with almost every task, again and again. “Find and inspect a place on the Shoreline.” Where exactly are you supposed to look? Have you seen Shoreline? It’s a massive map with dozens of houses, a huge resort, and countless points of interest.

Another thing I really “enjoyed” while playing through the story is how some quests require optional items to be completed properly, like audio tapes. Take the “Blue Flame” quest as an example. Your journal tells you to inspect the post office. Inside, you find audio tape #1. That recording hints that there’s also a tape #2, so you go and find that one as well. But it turns out there’s a third tape too.

If you miss it and keep progressing the quest by opening the mail worker’s car and taking the document, the quest will update but won’t actually complete. You then have to go back to the post office, find the final tape, which, just like the previous two, is never mentioned anywhere, listen to it, and return to the car to open the trunk again. Only after that does the quest finally complete, because you’ve now found everything.

I ran into a similar issue during the “Ticket” quest. Let’s set aside the fact that I was going for the good ending, completed all the optional quests, seven of them in addition to “Ticket,” and found every piece of minor evidence, which I then handed over to Kerman and even unlocked an achievement for it. I also turned in the major evidence I had found earlier.

After that, though, I heard the line “The Mechanic couldn’t get anything off the flash drive,” and Kerman simply stopped talking to me and sent me to Prapor. The strange part is that I never refused to cooperate with him. I searched through every online resource I could find and didn’t come across a single person who had run into the same problem.

Anyway, I went to Prapor, who demanded I grind 500 million rubles. Fine, challenge accepted. After handing over the full amount, I got three quests, each with a 72-hour time limit. I finished all three in 10 hours and turned them in. But only 1 out of 3 was marked as complete in my task journal, so I didn’t get the achievement. Still, the NPC handed me a “note” to activate at the intercom on Shoreline, which serves as the transition to Terminal and the start of the final mission.

I head to Shoreline, and there’s no “Use” button. I filed a bug report, assuming the button is missing because the game thinks I haven’t finished Prapor’s quests yet. There’s no response for two days, and on the second evening I try to reach Terminal again.

This time it works. The “Use” button appears. Excited, I make some tea, gather my family around the PC, and head to the transition. After 12 minutes of object generation, my operator spawns in a supply room. You’re only supposed to end up there after a cutscene and after all your loot is removed from the right side of your inventory. But I still have my weapons and gear. I can hear gunfire outside. The Scavs are already attacking Terminal. I try to get out, but I can’t. The door interaction button is inactive.

So what now? I force-close the game and try to enter Terminal again. Same result. I switch computers, my son kindly lets me use his monster of a rig for a few hours. Does it help? Nope. My character is back in the supply room, still fully geared.

So I decided to go all in. I launch the Shoreline map on BSG servers, there’s a PvE mode for this, activate the note at the intercom again, move toward Terminal, and then… after nine minutes of object generation, the game politely throws an error saying the session is over and sends me back to my stash. Only now, the note from Prapor is gone. I could have taken a new note from the NPC, except after visiting Terminal, the quest isn’t marked as failed.

Since the quest chain logic was completely broken and the game believed I hadn’t completed the three timed tasks, the quest was finally marked as failed after three days. But it didn’t fail because I couldn’t get through Terminal. It failed because the game decided I hadn’t finished those three timed quests.

Now, to access Terminal again, I need to bring Prapor a secure “Kappa” container, which only unlocks after completing 200 quests. And that’s not a joke. You actually have to finish exactly two hundred side quests to get it. Naturally, over the course of the story, I completed maybe half of them. But honestly, none of this feels like my fault, and wasting time grinding the rest just to reach the final mission makes absolutely no sense.

People who truly don’t care about something don’t bother pointing out its flaws. They just shrug and move on. So when we, players who have spent thousands of hours in Escape from Tarkov, criticize the game, it doesn’t mean we’re haters. It means we care. It means we want, and have every right, to demand that the developers listen to us and make the game better.

Right now, though, the situation looks very different. And as I said in my review of this otherwise remarkable game, if the developers continue to ignore their community, Tarkov will remain nothing more than a shadow of its original idea.

As for me, I don’t plan on trying to escape from Tarkov again. Three and a half thousand hours was enough to understand that it’s simply no longer worth my time.