Overall, what do you consider to be the biggest problems you’ve encountered during this production?

The greatest challenge, after all, is network and network infrastructure. Graphics and performance optimization is a hard task indeed, but it already has a solution. There are parts in graphics pipeline that can be enhanced to make it turn out well. Network, however, is harder. We write a lot of things of our own, of course, and encounter a huge amount of issues. Needless to say, bad network-related components can seriously damage gameplay, it’s a core-breaking thing we can’t allow. That’s why it always puts a lot of pressure on us in cases when, for instance, we’re launching an update with network optimization and something’s wrong with it. There were many occasions like that when it comes to network and it’s always hard. Naturally, there are also bugs and other tech issues… Not sure if I can single out something in particular. Almost every month, some terrifyingly humongous problem arises. How do we solve them? We get down to do our research and look for possible solution, and there always is a solution or workaround, nothing is impossible if you try hard enough. Moreover, Unity is helping us too, support sometimes aides us with some questions, and we hit the roadblock, we often develop in parallel, if something can’t be done with a specific function, we devise a workaround. That has its price, sometimes in performance, but in the end it pays off. Our project is not ideal in terms of tech, it’s really large and complex, it has a lot of parameters that can misbehave and a lot of components that can possibly fail due to its very complicated architecture, but we are gradually improving it, making it better, adding new features and repairing old ones. It’s a hard way, but we keep our spirits high with realization that we are the innovators here and no one has done something so complex in Unity before.

The Team of Escape from Tarkov

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev