Earlier today, Escape From Tarkov officially launched on Steam for the first time, but just hours after the launch the game already has mostly negative Steam reviews with fans upset with server issues.
Escape From Tarkov launched earlier today at 11 GMT / 6AM EST, but fans were immediately met with server issues that prevented them from accessing the game. When purchased through Steam, players will still need to go through the Battlestate Games launcher to play the game and that seems to be where the issues started.
While Steam users could download the game through Steam servers, actually launching the game required a connection to the Battlestate Games servers, and they appear to have been overloaded pretty much as soon as the launch happened. With new players on Steam and existing players on the launcher bother having to go through these servers, it seems demand was much higher than anticipated.
With the servers struggling to handle the load, a lot of players have simply been unable to play the game so far on launch day and that has unsurprisingly led to a lot of negative Steam reviews. At the time of writing, approximately eight hours after the launch, only 34% of the 7,259 reviews are positive, with many highlighting server issues as the main reason for their negative reviews.
To their credit, the Battlestate Games team has responded to the issues, posting on social media to explain the issue.
“We thank players for their interest in the release of #EscapefromTarkov 1.0 and are aware that due to high traffic, some players may experience problems connecting to servers and authorising in the game and launcher,” said a post on the game’s official social media accounts. “Our technical team is actively working to stabilise the game servers and authorisation services. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
Some players are managing to get into the game, so anyone hoping to get in on launch day might still have a chance, but this could be a case of just waiting a day or two for things to settle down before jumping into the launch version of Tarkov.
The good news is that a lot of new content has been added to Escape From Tarkov, with the launch patch notes revealing new weapons, story content and more. Those that have actually managed to get into the game are discovering more secrets that were previously unknown, so if you can’t play, sticking on a stream to watch the new content in action seems like the best idea right now.