The following text is not mine, but it perfectly captures how I envision the game at release. (whoever wrote the story is awesome, thank you)
"It is a beautiful 6:30 Zulu time morning in Tarkov, but you don't care as you open the third floor fire escape door on the south end of the dorm building. As you point your gun into the poorly lit hallway, a shape is moving at the far end of it. A player is about to put a key into the marked room door. He looks back at you, reaching for his AKS-74U. Not enough time to aim, he fires his 30-round magazine at you. At the same time you empty your makarov 8-round mag at him. As you are hit in the shoulder your hand starts shaking and you increase your rate of fire.
As you furiously click to land more shots on your target, the gun slide locks back on the 6th shot. That PBM round you stuffed into the magazine 13 minutes before, as you were desperately loading it with anything you could find, the makarov refuses to cycle it. A hot round like the PBM is too much for the action and the pressure ruined the mechanism, locking the slide back. But the bullet still flew out of the barrel and hit the player near the marked room into his left forearm, penetrated it and deviated on exit into his chest. Enough damage to cause the target to crawl into the marked room and close the door.
This bought you a minute you figure, as your enemy is probably low on bandages, and sophisticated medical items like morphine, you have not seen on the market for 3 days, and the last time you saw it, someone wanted a whole 30 round AKM magazine for it, in good condition, a priceless artifact. As you imagine an AKM, with an actual functional magazine and the capacity for 30 rounds, you are fascinated by the potential firepower. This must be what these highly organized clan players run. Real automatic weapons, With a full magazine or even several ones.
You reach for your M870. It never failed you so far. And that short pistol grip, you had to trade it for a grizzly with 20% left. It was a hard thing to trade. The only downside of the situation was that you only had 3 shells in that gun. So you aim it at the hallway end. For 3 minutes, nothing happens. It is smarter to wait and let the other guy bleed out instead of risking to spend 3 full shotgun shells for a near dead target. Even one shell would fetch a bandage on the market, shotgun shells have been the currency for medical items the last 5 weeks. A slug would even trade for an AI-2. But you try to not think about lofty goals. You have one possibly dead enemy cornered in the marked room. You find the courage to approach, slowly. As you are 5 meters in front of the room, a terrifying sound makes your freeze on the spot.
click
From the room opposite diagonally of the marked room, you hear that awful noise. It is a fire selector switch of an AK. Which one you can't tell, but you realize the situation has shifted. Your enemy in the marked room has a friend who prepared an ambush for when you get close to the marked room. Or perhaps it was another player looting who was hiding in the room before. Too much to handle for a player with three shotgun shells. But why is he not coming out? You run the possible scenarios in your head, he could be nearly out of ammo, or perhaps even out of it, and the fire selector is there to scare you off. Or he is just patient.
You could simply leave. The marked room target is probably dead, the AK player hiding in the room is probably out of ammo. Or you could risk it, attack one of them, then get tangled up in a dangerous death triangle, that even if you would survive it, you would not have enough meds to get you to the exit.
What will you do?"
