The game storyline aims at introducing players to the maps, guns, tactics and the like. While most of the time it goes ok, the point about introducing players to maps is concentrated almost exclusively around "old" zones of the maps. This problem is the most sensible on Woods and Customs. Let me explain.
On Woods, when we have a peek on a map, the vast majority of quests are concentrated around the old territory. I've marked the approximate line where it used to be a fence, separating old territory from the new. Red squares stand for the places you should visit during the quests. There are only 2 quests leading us away from "old" Woods – the starting Prapor quest and Peacekeeper's Cult Part 2. The rest , as I said, stick to the old territory – sawmill, USEC checkpoint, ZB-014/016, car crash near the water, plane crash site, mountain stash, et cetera.
On Customs, the situation is even worse. Same as on Woods' map, I marked the quest spots and new/old zones. No quests lead the player to expansion zones – USEC camp & area around it uphill from the new gas station and area around Reshala's fortress. All things to do reside exclusively where they were since the very introduction of Customs back in the days of alpha test.
Is that game-breaking or bad enough to be fixed immediately? No. But it definitely makes me (and I think not only me) feel that there is something unfinished behind these expansions. Quests are not just stepping stones towards Kappa, Lightkeeper and a meta Mutant build. They are here to explain the world, unfold the extremely rich lore of the game, and add the immersiveness we all love Tarkov for.
There were examples of a map expansion that added a ton of new quests – as it should be by default. But as far as I see, the key here is the consistency of map release and the release of the expansion(s).
Reserve was released in 0.12 (Oct 2019), and got its expansion just 8 months later – in June 2020. And with this new content, we got a ton of new quests – scouting the underground extract, hermetic seals, killing raiders, picking the items, and so on. Same thing happens to Streets – devs prepared not only the visual content for new expansion, but also a pack of quests.
Meanwhile, Woods were added in back in 2017, and got the expansion only 3 years later, in 2020. Customs was introduced in 2016, and updated in 2019. Maybe, they should have taken their past releases at a slower and more consequent pace, to make them more mature?
I hope when this Streets-related rush will be over, they will go back to older maps, as it now feels like the game is only about one map and 8 map placeholders.
