Despite initially teasing that Escape From Tarkov would hit 1.0, and thus a full release, this year, game director Nikita Buyanov has now confirmed that the upcoming wipe will not be the full launch of Tarkov, with that now presumably targeted for next year.
This time last year, Nikita teased that the story content that will arrive alongside the full launch of Escape From Tarkov would be added to the game in 2024, suggesting that the 1.0 version of Tarkov would also arrive this year. However, in a new interview, Nikita has confirmed that the upcoming wipe will not be a surprise 1.0 launch.
“No, version 1.0 won’t arrive with the New Year’s patch,” said Nikita in an interview where he also discussed the future of Escape From Tarkov Arena. “We are moving towards the release, and we are currently preparing patch 0.16.0.0 for release.”
Despite some speculation from the community that the upcoming wipe could be a surprise 1.0 launch, it now seems that will certainly not be the case, with a full launch in 2025 being much more likely. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, as you would expect the dev team to announce the full release well in advance to try to drum up some extra hype heading into the launch window, and with seemingly less than a week to go before the wipe hits, that wouldn’t be an effective marketing strategy.
However, that doesn’t mean that the upcoming wipe will be disappointing, with lots of new toys to play with being added to Tarkov. It will be slightly smaller than a usual wipe patch, given that a lot of the team is creating content for the full launch, but there will still be some cool new weapons, a rework to Customs and the Unity 2022 engine update that should make some technical improvements to Tarkov, which is starting to show its age.
We are expecting the Escape From Tarkov wipe to arrive next week, likely on December 26th given they tend to arrive on Thursdays. However, as we have seen before, there is still a chance that it could be delayed until Battlestate Games announces the official release date. But before then you can still enjoy some entertaining pre-wipe events in Tarkov such as one that gives you a free Kappa container, another that increased cultist spawns and today’s addition that had made the AA-12 shotgun much easier to get.