If you've been watching Fragmentary Order since its initial reveal earlier this year, today just got a lot more interesting. Rant Gaming dropped the game's first in-engine gameplay teaser as part of an NVIDIA showcase, giving the world its earliest real look at what Nikita Buyanov has been building since stepping beyond Escape from Tarkov.
It's a brief glimpse, not a deep dive. But it's enough to make clear this isn't just a reskin of ideas Buyanov has already explored.
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What the teaser actually shows
The footage is in-engine, built in Unreal Engine 5 and developed in partnership with NVIDIA. The visual fidelity is immediately noticeable. One of the persistent criticisms of Escape from Tarkov over the years has been its technical ceiling, a product of the engine it runs on and the scale it was trying to achieve. Fragmentary Order doesn't appear to have that problem. The environments look dense, detailed, and lit in a way that suggests the team is leaning hard into what UE5 can actually do.
Buyanov himself has described this as the most challenging project he's ever worked on, which is saying something given the decade-plus he's put into Tarkov. The scope here is genuinely larger.
More than 'Space Tarkov'
The "Space Tarkov" label has followed Fragmentary Order since its announcement, and it's not entirely unfair as a first impression. Buyanov built his reputation on hardcore, punishing first-person shooters where every decision carries weight. That DNA is clearly present here.
Here's the thing, though: Fragmentary Order is explicitly not a pure extraction shooter. It takes a near-future sci-fi setting, moves the action off Earth entirely, and introduces mechanics that push beyond the extraction formula. The game is set to be immersive and punishing in ways that go past what Tarkov established, not just a retread of it in a new coat of paint.
Earlier this year, Buyanov gave an exclusive look at several in-engine images taken from the game's enormous Blue Mars map, which hints at the kind of scale the team is working with.
September brings the real look
The NVIDIA teaser is explicitly a preview of what's coming. Rant Gaming confirmed a full gameplay deep dive is scheduled for later in September, which is where the real detail will land. Expect a proper breakdown of mechanics, systems, and what separates Fragmentary Order from everything else in the hardcore shooter space.
The timing makes sense. Dropping a teaser through a high-profile NVIDIA showcase builds awareness before the full reveal, rather than burning the deep dive on an audience that hasn't been primed yet.
What most players miss at this stage is that the NVIDIA partnership isn't just a branding exercise. Building in UE5 with NVIDIA involvement typically points toward specific technical features, ray tracing, DLSS integration, and simulation-level lighting, that would directly affect how the game plays and feels at a hardware level.
Where Fragmentary Order sits right now
This is fast becoming one of the more anticipated projects in the hardcore FPS space, and the NVIDIA showcase appearance signals that the team is ready to start showing their work publicly. The game has a real pedigree behind it, a developer who knows exactly what hardcore players want and has spent years learning what they don't, and a technical foundation that removes some of the ceiling that limited his previous work.
September's full reveal will tell us a lot more. For now, keep an eye on the gaming guides hub for coverage as more details drop, and if you want to explore other titles in a similar vein, the card games genre page is worth a look for tactical alternatives while you wait. Players already tracking Rant Gaming's output should also check out Final Form for more from the studio's broader slate.
