After Inventing the Genre, Tarkov Creator’s New Game Won’t be an Extraction Shooter

When Escape from Tarkov was released, it was the defining moment for the extraction shooter genre, paving the way for games like ARC Raiders and Marathon, and creator Nikita Buyanov is striving for innovation once again.

Buyanov has been working on a new sci-fi FPS game called Fragmentary Order, which is being developed by the newly-formed Rant Gaming Studios, while Battlestate Games continues to work on Escape from Tarkov.

Tarkov Creator Says Fragmentary Order Could Be the Start of a New Genre

While there’s still a lot of mystery surrounding Fragmentary Order in terms of how the gameplay loop will work, we’ve been shown quite a bit about the lore of the game.

FragOrder takes place in the year 2251, after humanity was brought back from the brink of total destruction by an AI-controlled corporation known as Core.

With the help of this corporation, humanity began to overcome famine and war, unite the governments of the world, and explore the solar system, but now, the Core’s control has been weakened by newly-formed, power-hungry alliances, resulting in a Fragmented Order.

While this exciting new space shooter has been lovingly nicknamed “Starkov” by fans, Buyanov revealed in a recent interview that this game may not be what you expect. “We call it a combat simulator. It will have extraction mechanics, but it will be pretty different. Again, we want to have something new in the genre, create some new mechanics, and maybe it will be another genre after all.”

FragOrder has reportedly been in production for a year now, and is being built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, but a firm release window has yet to be announced.

Buyanov says, despite the basic mechanic being to infiltrate and exfiltrate, there will be other types of gameplay, and your main objective is to improve your life by earning money through the system: “The basic extraction principles will be there, but they won’t be the main principles.”

Tarkov fans might be wondering if FragOrder will have any sort of lore connection to EFT, but when asked if any part of the story comes from Tarkov, Buyanov simply replied, “This I won’t say.”

With the massive success of ARC Raiders, which took home the best multiplayer game of the year award, and Marathon also doing extremely well, we’re seeing the extraction shooter genre evolve and start to snowball in terms of popularity, and Buyanov says the key to success is soul.

“It’s a never-ending battle. A lot of games try to do different things by looking at each other and imitating the same things over and over, especially in extraction shooters. They don’t understand that extraction shooters and Tarkov-like games are different. You can’t just re-create all the same features. You need to put the soul into it. To put the soul into it, you need to love what you do and make a game that you love to play.”