Escape from Tarkov is the original first-person extraction shooter. While previous games had modes that extraction shooter fans would now find familiar, there can be no argument that the unashamedly hardcore Escape from Tarkov introduced the extraction mechanic to the wider gaming public — and Nikita Buyanov was at the heart of it.

The boss of Battlestate Games is widely credited with establishing the extraction mechanics that we see in so many other games now. Arc Raiders is a more accessible take on Escape from Tarkov. Even Call of Duty is getting in on the act with Modern Warfare 4’s upcoming extraction mode, DMZ. So, with well over a decade of Escape from Tarkov development behind him, and the extraction shooter genre now firmly in the grip of the mainstream, what’s next for Nikita Buyanov? The answer is Fragmentary Order.

Like Escape from Tarkov, Fragmentary Order is a hardcore (of course) first-person shooter, but this time we’re in science fiction territory, with a story set across the solar system. Buyanov established a new studio, Rant Gaming, to build the game separately from Escape from Tarkov, although he says he remains committed to the extraction shooter that started it all.

In the interview below, Buyanov tells me why he wanted to make a new game in the first place, what he’s trying to achieve with Fragmentary Order, and his verdict on the current state of the extraction shooter genre.

The Fragmentary Order alpha is set to launch later this year, but players can already start exploring the world through cor3.gg. The team has created a browser-based experience designed to introduce the universe and help players understand its systems. Resources earned through the COR3 terminal will carry over into Fragmentary Order at release, giving early participants a head start.

IGN: How did Fragmentary Order begin?

Nikita Buyanov: The baseline for this is that I’ve been doing Tarkov for more than 10 years. I really wanted to start a new thing in general because I was tired of making for more than 10 years the same thing. I always wanted to make something in the sci-fi genre, and by that I mean not only just some fancy ‘Tarkov in space’ kind of thing, but I really wanted to make proper sci-fi, like model the future, simulate the future to make it super realistic and grounded, that people will believe in.

And it’s not only related to just take some concept and make everything look fancy and futuristic. It means that I really want to take different parts of different kind of sci-fi, for example, cyberpunk, spaceship combat, the social element of the future, and combine it all together and make not the project but the whole universe.

I realized that life is short and we need to do what we can, especially if it still brings joy. I decided to give it a shot. And of course, because I know everything about how to make FPS realistic hardcore games, extraction shooters, I decided that maybe it will be my next trial.

I guess the Tarkov experience, it was like a testing phase for us for 10 years in a row, that we should start making some real games now, something that will be even more challenging to do. So another take to make something really interesting, something new in the genre, maybe create another genre, like how I did with extraction shooters. Who knows?

I put a lot of goals on myself and some of them are basically impossible, but it is how I did Tarkov — I’m still doing it by the way — to put these milestones which look impossible and try to fulfill them and make everything real. So it’s a lot of personal stuff in it and it’s a lot of heritage, I guess, that needs to be used. It became more serious. Creating Tarkov, nobody understood what it is and we basically were in the middle of nothing. We didn’t understand what it is all about, how it will be. In Fragmentary Order, it is more clear, but it doesn’t mean that it will be easier. Right now it’s even more challenging than Tarkov, like several times.

IGN: You talk about maybe creating a new genre again. What type of game is Fragmentary Order?

Nikita Buyanov: Of course, I cannot disclose everything, because people will use it, other companies will use it most likely! When I created extraction, it was a mechanic for how you can survive, basically. In the new game, we will have several options how to survive, and it doesn’t mean that you’ll need to extract via the classical way: infil / exfil type of extraction. There will be different options for you to survive. We will try to break patterns here because again, Tarkov created the whole concept of extraction shooters. It’s like a pattern, infil, load, shoot, exfil, extraction, even if you die, we’ll lose everything, blah, blah, blah. But I want to break that pattern and create some new stuff just to enrich the gameplay.

But the main goal is to add realism to everything. The most exciting thing in Fragmentary Order that we will utilize is future mechanics and future aspects, the potential future things. Everything will be covered with the different advanced mechanics that will tie to the actual lore and the visual sci-fi elements of the game. Everything will be made super grounded just for players to believe in. This is the main challenge.

The main thing is that we need to make the game realistic, not only with gun handling, combat, and all of the basic stuff that we have already everywhere. We want to create the whole concept, the whole world, the whole gaming session. It will consist of different things that will add more to the realism, and not only with small things, but also globally. We need to make people believe in that world and live in it. And this is the main thing that we want to achieve in general as a project.

It will be a dream world or something. It will be the living world, the universe. And as I like to say, it will be the passageway to the future for those who want to experience the future, even though we are sitting in the current gen. So that’s the thing. And everything, of course, will be super militaristic, realistic, tactical, and with a lot of different kinds of features that will only be available in the future.

IGN: Tarkov is famous for being ultra hardcore. Are you sticking with that philosophy for Fragmentary Order, or will you make it more accessible?

Nikita Buyanov: No, it will be more complex, more punishing, more painful, but the rewards will be bigger. You can imagine perfect Tarkov, which keeps you motivated to play it because you basically will feel yourself out of the loop, like out of the loop of your, let’s say, typical source of dopamine during your lifetime, not even games. Basically, you’ll be waiting to get that emotion from the game. And hopefully it will shift the whole philosophy around gaming to something else. You will be not playing it, you will be living that game, living that universe, and it won’t be for everyone. So that’s the thing. We basically will stand out and we will put this, that this is not for everyone. The same thing was for Tarkov by the way.

But right now about Fragmentary Order, we will say, “It’s not for everyone. We are not trying to earn all of your money. We need you guys to shape up this experience together for sure.” Because this is the next big thing that probably will be out of classical gaming. Maybe it will be like this perfect project for those who want to suffer, but receive a lot from that.

IGN: Is this a game that’s actively in production? Are you conceptualizing it still? Where are we at and what’s the plan for working on it?

Nikita Buyanov: Already we are two years working on it. The company is 130 people already. It’s not enough. We’re prototyping the new mechanics, the new features. We basically almost built the basic mechanics. We almost built the first location. A lot of content already. We have multiplayer builds. Basically, it’s not a startup. It’s not something that we just started.

We have huge lore being expanded every single day. We have really cool people onboarded like Ben Mauro and Aaron Beck, basically our art directors and all of that super fancy and grounded sci-fi approach to devices, world and everything. And we constantly get other people onboarded right now. So it is already like a factory, because we need to make it real and make it really fast. I don’t want to make it for another 10 years. I don’t have time for that. So that’s why I’m putting a lot of effort in it and a lot of additional resources to make it faster and faster and faster on the new engine. It is not like super close that we will be able to actually go public with a full scale release or something soon.

When I was working on Tarkov, I remember that we needed to show something. We need to make it like this live ops development, because basically it was the deal for us. Here, we will have the face of live ops development, but we want to make as much stuff as possible and as much of a perfect initial build as possible. So it already will be super balanced, super polished, and it will be ready to be tested in multiplayer right away.

At the current moment we are making the gameplay trailer, and it will have a pretty big amount of features that actually you won’t see in any kind of game. I’m not talking about every single feature, of course, but some of them are pretty neat, and it’s quite surprising and good that we still have a lot of things to do that nobody did. That’s kind of fantastic for us.

We’re already doing a second location, but we don’t want to spoil anything. And of course gamers are super demanding right now, especially Tarkov players. They love drama. They love to be speculating on things and making insults, this and that. We have these two huge armies, potential an army of Fragmentary Order fans and a Tarkov army, basically tens of millions of people, and they’re already kind of skeptical about everything and we need to actually place them all together.

Because my idea is to not break things, to not replace Tarkov. One of my goals is to give people a new adventure that will be just a different thing for those who love the aspects of super hardcore and realistic approach, even if it’s in the future. But still this is basically my thing, right? And it’s a lot of competitors who try to kill Tarkov, but I’m not trying to kill Tarkov, by the way. I just want to make something new and wonderful and groundbreaking again, or at least I will die trying to. So that’s the thing.

IGN: I understand you created a new company to make this game. Why did you feel it was necessary to create a new company to build it?

Nikita Buyanov: One of the main reasons is that Tarkov must go ‘Tarkov for life.’ We need to have a fully sustainable company to continue with Tarkov. And I’m basically working on the two projects simultaneously, and we have huge plans for Tarkov, by the way. It’s unrelated and I don’t want people to get distracted from that.

IGN: You’re credited with essentially creating the extraction shooter genre, which is an incredible achievement. It must be funny for you to see this attention on the genre now when you were the one who basically invented it years ago.

Nikita Buyanov: Yeah, I’m not concerned at all. So basically all of the competitors, those who actually try to do something and they actually achieved results, really good results, like Arc Raiders, Marathon and all that, they started doing that a long time ago. They started doing the production for years and years. I can feel and actually can see how they actually shaped their game design with us. Some of the things that I said on the podcast that we planned, they did it in advance because it was a good idea.

And my position here, it is a really good thing. Of course, I’m proud of myself and my team, BSG, that we actually did something that was designed initially for the super narrowed community. It actually spread to the mainstream with a lot of technical issues, with a lot of craziness and madness, how we did patches, the release, where basically the game wasn’t working for 24 hours at least. It was full of struggle and pain.

And it’s a funny thing to see how other companies with these budgets, they try to adopt the same thing, not to make our own mistakes. I’m not saying they don’t know how to do it, but they basically utilize all the patterns that we have or we planned for EFT to make their own extraction shooters. For example, Arc Raiders, they did a wonderful casual version of extraction shooters. They made the step not forward, as I said, they made a step to the side and created the whole parallel thing that allowed casual gamers to play extraction as a fun game. EFT wasn’t designed to have fun. It was an intentional design decision, but also it has had way more issues than now and it was also a painful, struggling experience.

I remember that when we had release issues on the Steam release date last year, people weren’t able to play the game for pretty long time. Some of my friends who are Tarkov lovers and have tens of thousands of hours, they said it’s part of the Tarkov experience to wait in the line, to wait for the load of your profile and all of that. I remember that I was so depressed about everything, and then I realized, I want to break this paradigm. I want to change it, because I didn’t want to create something really good with the lack of technical superiority. Tarkov is basically pretty obsolete in terms of visuals, but lately for the last month we actually did a lot of changing technical stuff, optimizations, loading issues, a lot of things actually were fixed, and now Tarkov is in the best shape. And it’s not the end because we plan to do more and more and more.

But then I realized in my new project, everything needs to be different. We need to make sure that we are covered in terms of potential technical issues. The servers, the load, because of the potential huge influx of the player. We need to stand. We need to actually be unbreakable. And that increased the amount of work and resources for the particular areas of Fragmentary Order related to the technical side. The servers, content distribution networks, and stuff like that. So we invested more and more and more in that, just to make sure everything will be fine.

Because for me, it’s like a nightmare. I don’t want to live that nightmare again and again and again, because I’m tired. I want to create a game a little less stressed, and this is quite important for me. This is why when I check all the games, all the competitors, I can see that they do good actually. I don’t know what they can do new in the genre, because it’s not a genre, it’s a mechanic, extraction mechanic. But I know what to do next. I know what to do next! How I can expand and enrich extraction mechanics and create something new for it even. That’s why I’m just monitoring the situation. I like how finally somebody is trying to make something different by keeping the basis of extraction shooters, but adding something new and expanding the audience. This is quite a good thing.

IGN: Arc Raiders has enjoyed huge success making extraction more accessible. Marathon though appears to be struggling, with people saying it’s too hard to obtain a mainstream audience. But that was never a problem for your and your game.

Nikita Buyanov: They don’t know the secret sauce. You need to put your life on the altar. You need to sacrifice, you need to take part of your soul and put it in a game. It sounds delusional, right? But what does it mean? And if I say it, they will use it. Okay, let them use it! You just need to make the world real. You need to make everything to make the player naturalized and settled in the world, like the actual living person. And by that I mean you need to add a lot of details, a lot of love in almost everything that you see that you experience. You just need to imagine, you need to sit on this chair and try to play it and try to experience it and add a lot of stuff, a lot of things.

You need to be risky. You need to make some mechanics and some content within an adequate concept. By that I mean for example, you are creating something that’s so super detailed, like a part of the location and this part of the location will be locked for almost everyone, 99%, but that will create a meaning that there is something more than just a widely spread and easy accessible location. There is something special in there for those 0001% and you won’t be getting there, but it will give you the sense this world is so complex, I want to be able to learn at 100%. And when the game is being learned 100% and you play with patterns, it actually brings out this soul from the game, and you need to constantly replenish that by creating areas of the game that nobody… Not like nobody, but for the most cases you won’t even access them. But who knows? Maybe at some point you will have access to it. You basically unlock this feature, or unlock this area, or unlock this special device or something and it will give you the superiority — and not like tactical superiority. It will give you the understanding and the meaning that you are something in this world that actually achieved something. And it brings the parallel for your life too, because our life is super complex and we don’t know 100% about everything which is going on right now.

So if you bring in the same concept in the game by creating this world that you cannot understand fully, like our announcement trailer, by the way, Fragmentary Order, it’s a lot of meanings in there. If you like it, if you want it, it will catch you and start asking questions inside of your head: how I can actually use this? What it is all about? It will have a lot of mysteries and a lot of things that basically won’t be accessible for everyone, and that will create this ladder of experience for those who know everything about the game. They will feel themselves great and meaningful and they will feel themselves settled in this universe. They will feel themselves like it is something real, because they have their role there and all of the benefits and perks that will actually produce these parallel emotions, like it is our natural life. We call it second life experience. This is the general idea around the whole core universe, to create second life experience with different genres connected all together in the whole system, with the whole economy system altogether.

It is not a mainstream approach. It is just an idea to create this living virtual world. It’s not a metaverse, but it’s actually a gaming world. There you will have an option to actually live in it and utilize your talents, real life talents, game talents, to make your life better in the game. And you’re able to play different roles. Fragmentary Order is a flagship that will allow you to play in different areas of the solar system as a combat clone.

IGN: Do you have any window in mind for when people might be able to get their hands on with Fragmentary Oder?

Nikita Buyanov: So all I can say right now, we already started the promotion of the game. So we have a site, fragmentaryorder.com. Because all this explanation and ambitious plans and interviews, people still will be pretty skeptical about it. And I believe that the gameplay trailer will shed light on the actual gameplay and actual visuals that we have. This year, 100% something will be released for sure.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].