Hardcore Wipe, which landed on Escape from Tarkov with patch 0.16.8.0 on July 8, 2025, didn’t last truly “hardcore” for long and got extensively loosened up until the launch of patch 0.16.9.0 on Aug. 20, 2025.
While Escape from Tarkov is scheduled to exit its eight-year-long beta and officially launch as version 1.0 later in 2025, the Hardcore Wipe was presented to players as the final event of this scale ahead of the release.
In a recent interview with Igromania dated August 18, 2025, Nikita Buyanov, head of the game’s developer Battlestate Games, justified the idea of the Hardcore Wipe by expressing the desire to bring back the old gameplay of Tarkov, specifically, the real challenges of progression and leveling up, and to see how players would respond.
“The last pre-release wipe is an excellent time for such a thing,” Buyanov stated.
Meanwhile, following the drop of the Hardcore Wipe, streaming metrics from Twitch analytics depict that it turned out to be the weakest start to the wipe since 2020, contrary to Buyanov’s statement posted on X (formerly Twitter), declaring that the player count was “way more than usual.”
Either way, multi-stage restrictions deployed with the Hardcore Wipe didn’t last long, as after just one day, basic quests were returned. After that, the economy was partially rolled back (the insurance price was cut in half, the cooldown on Scav was reduced).
On top of that guaranteed boss spawns were reduced from 100% to 70% and then 50%, along with the reopening of the ability to choose any location for the raid (instead of transit through basic locations), and more.
The hardcore component continued to be softened and peaked with the return of the Flea Market in patch 0.16.9.0 (albeit with a late threshold of PMC level 35).
As of the time of writing, Escape from Tarkov playable on Windows PC only, has over 1.9 million monthly active users and around 308,000 daily players, according to ActivePlayer. The game remaines in closed beta since its launch on July 27, 2017.
Set in the fictional Norvinsk region of northwestern Russia, in the midst of a war between two private military companies, United Security (USEC) and the Battle Encounter Assault Regiment (BEAR), Escape from Tarkov features three different modes: online PMC raids, scavenger raids titled Scav, and a temporary offline training mode without progression or loot gains.
