Nikita Buyanov’s Next Goal: The Most Realistic Sci-Fi Game Yet

Escape from Tarkov is widely regarded as the original first-person extraction shooter. While earlier titles offered modes that extraction-shooter fans would recognize today, there’s little doubt that Escape from Tarkov’s unapologetically punishing design pushed the genre into the mainstream—and Nikita Buyanov is often considered one of the key figures behind that shift.

The head of Battlestate Games is frequently credited with helping define the extraction mechanics now common across the space, and the genre keeps spreading. Arc Raiders offers a more approachable interpretation of Tarkov’s formula, and even Call of Duty is getting in on the trend with Modern Warfare 4’s upcoming extraction mode, DMZ. With more than a decade of Escape from Tarkov development behind him—and extraction shooters firmly established as mainstream fare—Buyanov’s next move is Fragmentary Order.

Like Escape from Tarkov, Fragmentary Order is a hardcore first-person shooter, but it swaps the current setting for sci-fi. The game’s narrative spans the solar system. Buyanov also founded a new studio, Rant Gaming, building this project separately from Escape from Tarkov, though he says he still feels deeply connected to the extraction genre that started it all.

In this interview, Buyanov explains why he wanted to create something new, what he’s aiming to accomplish with Fragmentary Order, and his take on where the extraction-shooter genre stands right now.

Fragmentary Order’s alpha is planned to arrive later this year, but players can already explore the concept through cor3.gg. The team has built a browser-based experience to introduce the universe and clarify how its systems work. Any resources earned through the COR3 terminal will transfer into Fragmentary Order when it launches, giving early participants a head start.

IGN: How did Fragmentary Order begin?

Nikita Buyanov: The starting point is that I’ve been working on Tarkov for over 10 years. I genuinely wanted to begin something new because I was worn out from making the same thing for more than a decade. I’ve always wanted to build in the science-fiction space—not just a fancy “Tarkov, but in space” concept. I wanted true sci-fi: to model the future, simulate it, and make it feel realistic and grounded so people believe it.

To me, it’s not just about taking sci-fi aesthetics and making everything look futuristic. I want to pull together different elements from across sci-fi—cyberpunk, ship combat, the social side of tomorrow—and fuse them into one coherent universe. The objective isn’t only to make a project; it’s to build the whole universe.

I realized life is short, and you have to do what you can—especially if it brings joy. So I decided to try it. And since I know how to create realistic, hardcore FPS experiences, including extraction shooters, I thought: maybe this is the next trial for me.

In a way, the Tarkov period was our long testing phase—ten years straight—where we needed to stop and start making actual games. Something even more challenging. Another approach to create something interesting and new in the genre, maybe even something that becomes its own genre the way I did with extraction shooters. Who knows?

I set myself a lot of goals, and some of them are basically impossible. That’s the way I approached Tarkov too—I’m still doing it. You put milestones in front of yourself that look unreachable, then try to make them real. It’s personal, and it carries a lot of inherited responsibility. When we created Tarkov, nobody really understood what it was. We were kind of in the middle of nowhere, not knowing what it would become. In Fragmentary Order, things are clearer—but that doesn’t mean it will be easier. Right now, it’s even more difficult than Tarkov was, several times over.

IGN: You talk about maybe creating a new genre again. What type of game is Fragmentary Order?

Nikita Buyanov: I can’t reveal everything, because people will use it, and other studios will probably use it as well. When I created extraction, it was essentially a survival mechanic. In this new game, we’ll offer multiple ways to survive, and it won’t necessarily rely on the classic infil/exfil extraction structure. There will be different paths to make it out.

We want to disrupt the patterns. Tarkov established the extraction-shooter concept, almost like a template: infil, load, shoot, exfil, extraction—and even if you die, you lose everything, and so on. I want to break that pattern and create new ideas to enrich the gameplay.

But the main objective is realism across the board. The most exciting part of Fragmentary Order is the “future” approach—future mechanics, future possibilities. We’re planning advanced systems that connect directly to the game’s lore and its visual sci-fi identity. Everything is meant to be grounded so players can believe in it. That challenge is the central focus.

The realism can’t stop at gun handling and combat, which are things you can already find in many games. We want realism in the entire concept: the world and the full session. The experience will include many elements that support that realism, not just small details but the whole structure. We need players to buy into the world and feel like they’re inside it. That’s what we’re trying to do as a whole project.

It’s meant to be a dream world, a living universe. As I like to say, it’s a passageway to the future for anyone who wants to experience what’s next—even though we’re still in the current generation. And everything, of course, will be super militaristic: realistic, tactical, and packed with features that are designed to feel like they belong in the future.

IGN: Tarkov is famous for being ultra hardcore. Are you sticking with that philosophy for Fragmentary Order, or will you make it more accessible?

Nikita Buyanov: No. It will be more complex, more punishing, and more painful—but the rewards should be bigger. Imagine a “perfect Tarkov” where you stay motivated because you constantly feel out of sync with your usual sources of dopamine—not just in games, but in everyday life. You’ll be waiting to feel that emotion again, and hopefully it changes the philosophy around gaming.

You won’t just play it—you’ll live inside it, live inside the universe. And it won’t be for everyone. That’s the whole point: we’ll stand out by being clear that this isn’t designed to appeal to everybody. Tarkov was like that too.

For Fragmentary Order, we’ll say: “It’s not for everyone. We’re not trying to take all your money. We need you to sharpen up and shape this experience with us.” This is probably the next big thing beyond classical gaming. It may resemble a perfect project for people who want to suffer a bit—but also get a lot from it.

IGN: Is this a game that’s actively in production? Are you still conceptualizing it? Where are we at, and what’s the plan for working on it?

Nikita Buyanov: We’re already two years into it. The company has about 130 people now. That’s not enough. We’re prototyping new mechanics and new features. We’ve basically built most of the fundamental mechanics, and we’ve almost finished our first location. There’s already a lot of content. We also have multiplayer builds in place.

It isn’t a startup in the sense of “we just started this.” We’re expanding huge amounts of lore every day. We’ve brought in people like Ben Mauro and Aaron Beck—art directors—along with others who push a grounded sci-fi approach to devices, the world, and everything around it. And we’re onboarding more people as we speak. It’s already operating like a factory, because we have to make it real and make it fast. I don’t want to spend another 10 years on this. I don’t have time. That’s why I’m throwing a lot of effort and additional resources into making it quicker and quicker on the new engine.

It’s not close enough that we can realistically go public with a full-scale release soon.

When I worked on Tarkov, I remember we needed to show something. We needed to treat it like live-ops development, because that was essentially the deal for us. Here, we’ll also have the face of live-ops development, but we want to deliver as much as possible and build as strong an initial package as we can. That means the game should be well balanced, highly polished, and ready for multiplayer testing immediately.

Right now, we’re making the gameplay trailer. It will include a fairly large number of features you won’t see in many other games. I’m not saying it will show every single feature, but some of them are genuinely interesting—and it’s reassuring that we still have a lot of work ahead and a lot of ideas nobody has done yet. That’s exciting for us.

We’re already working on a second location, but we don’t want to spoil it. And of course, today’s players are demanding—especially Tarkov players. They enjoy drama. They like speculation and arguments. We’ve got two large potential “armies”: the Fragmentary Order fanbase and the Tarkov fanbase—tens of millions of people—and they’re already skeptical, so we have to bring them together.

My plan is not to break things or replace Tarkov. One of my goals is to give players a new adventure that feels like a different experience for people who want the super hardcore, realistic approach—even set in the future. That’s the core of what I’m doing. Of course, there are competitors who try to “kill” Tarkov, but I’m not trying to kill it, by the way. I want to build something new, wonderful, and groundbreaking again—or I’ll die trying. That’s the mindset.

IGN: I understand you created a new company to make this game. Why did it feel necessary to form a new studio to build it?

Nikita Buyanov: One major reason is that Tarkov needs to be “Tarkov for life.” We need a fully sustainable company so we can continue supporting the project long-term. I’m essentially working on two projects at the same time, and we also have huge plans for Tarkov that are unrelated—I don’t want people getting distracted from that.

IGN: You’re credited with essentially creating the extraction shooter genre, which is an incredible achievement. Does it make you laugh to see all this attention now, when you were the one who basically invented it years ago?

Nikita Buyanov: Honestly, I’m not worried about it at all. Competitors who actually tried and achieved strong results—Arc Raiders, Marathon, and others—started working on their ideas a long time ago. They’ve been producing for years and years. You can feel it, and you can see how they shaped their design using what we did. Some of the things I mentioned on podcasts that we were planning, they ended up doing early because it was a good idea.

And my position is that it’s a good thing. Of course, I’m proud of myself and my team at BSG for building something that was initially designed for a very narrow community—then spreading to the mainstream. That happened despite technical problems, despite the chaos in patches and the release situation, where the game wasn’t working properly for at least 24 hours. It was full of struggle and pain.

It’s also funny to see other studios with big budgets trying to copy the same process, not to repeat our mistakes—but to use the patterns we built or planned for Escape from Tarkov to create their own extraction shooters. For example, Arc Raiders produced a casual-friendly version. They didn’t step forward as I said earlier—they stepped sideways and created a parallel approach that lets more casual players experience extraction as something fun. Escape from Tarkov wasn’t designed to be “fun.” That was an intentional decision. But it also came with more issues than it has now, and it was painful.

I remember release problems on Steam last year, when players couldn’t access the game for a long time. Some friends of mine—Tarkov fans with tens of thousands of hours—told me it’s part of the Tarkov experience to wait in line, to wait for your profile to load, and all of that. I remember being deeply depressed. Then I realized I wanted to break that paradigm. I wanted to change it, because I didn’t want to build something genuinely great while lacking technical superiority.

Tarkov is already a bit outdated visually. But over the last month, we’ve made a lot of technical improvements: optimizations, fixes for loading problems, and more. A lot of issues were resolved. Now Tarkov is in its best shape. And it’s not the finish line—we plan to keep going.

When I started thinking about the new project, I realized everything has to be different. We need to cover technical problems in advance: server stability, load times, and the risk of a massive influx of players. We need to stand firm and be unbreakable. That increased the amount of work and resources dedicated to the technical side for Fragmentary Order—servers, content distribution networks, and related systems. We kept investing more and more to ensure things would hold up.

Because for me, it’s like a nightmare. I don’t want to relive that nightmare again and again. I’m tired. I want to create a game that’s a little less stressful for me, and that matters. That’s why when I look at competitors, I can see they’re doing some things well. I don’t know what they can innovate in the genre, because in my view it’s not really a genre—it’s a mechanic: the extraction mechanic. But I know what comes next. I know what to do next. How I can expand and enrich extraction mechanics and make something new within them.

So I’m monitoring the space. I like that, finally, someone is trying to do something different while keeping the extraction-shooter foundation and expanding the audience. I think that’s a positive development.

IGN: Arc Raiders has had major success by making extraction easier to access. Marathon, however, seems to be struggling, with people saying it’s too hard to reach a mainstream audience. But that was never an issue for you and your project.

Nikita Buyanov: They don’t know the secret sauce. You have to put your life on the altar. You have to sacrifice, and put part of your soul into a game. It sounds delusional, right? But what does it mean? If I say it, people will just use it—so let them use it.

You have to make the world feel real. You need to make sure players feel natural and at home inside it, like a real person living there. That means adding a lot of detail and putting love into almost everything you see and experience. You need to imagine it, sit in the chair, try to play it, and try to experience it—and then add a lot of things you’d otherwise ignore.

You also need to take risks. Build mechanics and content inside a concept that truly fits. For instance, you can create something extremely detailed where a part of the location is effectively locked off for almost everyone—99% of players—so that there’s meaning beyond the widely accessible areas. There’s something special reserved for the 0.01%, and you won’t get there. But it creates the feeling that the world is complex, and you want to learn it fully.

When players learn the game to 100% and understand its patterns, you start to see the “soul” come out of the experience. Then you have to keep replenishing that feeling by creating areas most people won’t access. Not necessarily “nobody,” but in most cases they won’t reach them. And maybe at some point they will. You unlock a feature, unlock an area, unlock a special device—something that gives superiority. Not superiority in the “tactical” sense, but superiority in understanding and meaning: you feel like you achieved something in that world.

It parallels real life too. Real life is incredibly complex, and we never know 100% about everything that’s happening. If you bring the same idea into a game—building a world people can’t fully understand, like the Fragmentary Order announcement trailer—it creates layers. It asks questions in your mind: how can I use this? What is it all about?

It comes with mysteries and things that won’t be accessible to everyone. That creates a ladder of experience for players who understand everything. They’ll feel great, purposeful, settled in the universe. They’ll feel like they have a role there. The benefits and perks then create parallel emotions—similar to how real life works. We call it a “second life experience.” The overall idea behind the core universe is to create second life experiences by connecting different genres across the whole system, including the economy.

It’s not a mainstream strategy. It’s just an attempt to build a living virtual world. It isn’t a metaverse, but it is a gaming world. Players will have the option to actually live in it and use real-life skills and game skills to improve their life inside the game. You can also play different roles. Fragmentary Order, as a flagship, will let you take part across different areas of the solar system as a combat clone.

IGN: Do you have any window in mind for when people might be able to get their hands on Fragmentary Order?

Nikita Buyanov: I can’t say more than this right now. We’ve already started promoting the game, including a site at fragmentaryorder.com. Even with all the explanations, ambitious plans, and interviews, people will still be skeptical. I believe the gameplay trailer will clarify the actual gameplay and visuals. This year, something is definitely coming out—100%.