Escape From Tarkov players are furious with the new recoil changes

Earlier today the Battlestate games were released Escape from Tarkov patch 14.1 and after reading the patch notes, most expected players to be angry with the reveal of microtransactions coming to the game. But with the patch now live players are much angrier than expected but for a completely different reason as the recoil changes don’t seem to please anyone.

In the 14.1 code notes, there was a single line about the recoil changes for shotguns, pistols, and SKS, simply stating that the team had “adjusted the recoil parameters” for the guns. While this raised some eyebrows, with most players loving the new recoil system introduced with the last sweep, it didn’t seem too worrisome on paper.

Then the patch launched and players immediately started noticing some issues. It seems that the adjustments made to the recoil patterns basically render many of these weapons useless outside of a single shot, with players posting clips online showing the pistols bouncing massively when fired, and other types of weapons faring no better.

As you might expect with these shocking changes, fans took to social media to vent their anger. In the Escape From Tarkov sub-Reddit the top 10 posts at the time of writing are about the change, most of which call for its rollback. Multiple Tarkov Influencers have also used social media to call for change.

The obvious question is whether this pushback is intended or if it’s some kind of bug that slipped in with the patch. While we know that the Battlestate Games team wanted to change the recoil for these weapons, by mentioning it in the patch notes, we don’t know if they intended it to change that much. The hope is that this extreme recoil is a bug and that the dev team will fix it within the next few hours to make these weapons usable.

But if that turns out to be the intended recoil for these guns, then they’re once again back to being basically useless, and Tarkov it will probably go back to the AR and sniper meta that became so common in the past and turned out to be incredibly boring.

For anyone but the most die-hard players, there would come a point in every wipe that Tarkov they became almost useless as the low end guns just couldn’t compete with the high end ARs that players had with thousands of hours. But the recent change in recoil and armor meant that any weapon had a chance to take out one of those equipped players, and it looked like lower level players had a better chance in the latter stages of the sweep.

This change doesn’t completely remove it, but it does reduce what lower level players realistically have, and it certainly won’t be good for the game as a whole. It also doesn’t help that many players are still stuck on the Setup mission that requires you to use shotguns to kill other players, so I expect this mission to turn off even more players in the future.

Hopefully the developers will realize this was a big mistake and roll back the recoil changes introduced with patch 14.1 earlier today. But until that happens, you’ll probably want to avoid using shotguns, pistols, and SKS when playing Tarkov.