Battlestate Games has announced that it will make the new Escape from Tarkov PvE mode free for all owners of the Edge of Darkness edition of the game following an intense backlash from the community.
Last week, Battlestate announced the Unheard Edition of Escape from Tarkov, which would include a new PvE mode exclusive to owners of that edition.
Owners of the Edge of Darkness Edition, previously advertised as including all future DLC for Escape from Tarkov, were understandably vexed by this decision, but Battlestate maintained that its PvE mode was a "feature" of the Unheard Edition and therefore did not constitute DLC.
Over the weekend, however, Battlestate Games appears to have taken stock of what its community has been saying, choosing to walk back its controversial decisions over the new PvE mode first partially and then fully.
In a Reddit post, Battlestate COO Nikita Buyanov attempted once again to justify the inclusion of the PvE mode in the Unheard Edition by claiming it's "not DLC...in our understanding".
He went on to say that Battlestate doesn't have the resources to support Edge of Darkness players for its PvE mode as well as Unheard Edition players, since this mode is "located entirely on a separate network infrastructure".
However, in that post, Buyanov also announced that the PvE mode would be free to Edge of Darkness owners, but only once Escape from Tarkov fully launches. The game still doesn't have an official 1.0 release date.
That post also included an announcement that Tarkov players would get a 50% discount when upgrading from Edge of Darkness to the Unheard Edition, as well as a 70% discount for EoD owners on "the purchase of early access to PvE".
Following further player outrage over this post, however, Battlestate Games made another statement yesterday, with Buyanov apologizing "that fans and the game community in general are experiencing these feelings".
In the new post, Buyanov and Battlestate say that PvE access will be given to EoD owners for free, although this will be done "in waves" due to the aforementioned server capacity issue.
Buyanov also says that mod support for the PvE mode will be added after Tarkov's release, and that new perks added to the Edge of Darkness edition will be "balanced", while the prioritized matching previously added to that edition will be removed.
The Escape from Tarkov community still seems pretty disgruntled with Battlestate, however. One commenter suggests that Buyanov's apology is hollow, while another calls for all paid Tarkov features to be purely cosmetic.
It's not clear whether Battlestate will climb down any further, but relations between it and the Tarkov community will likely remain frosty for a while. Stay tuned for more on this as and when we get it.
