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11 Nikita Buyanov is the creator and ideological lead of Fragmentary Order, a hardcore science fiction multiplayer combat simulator developed by Rant Gaming in association with publisher Cor3. He founded Rant Gaming as a separate studio specifically to build this hard sci-fi project.
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33 Career Background
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55 Buyanov is best known as the creator of Escape from Tarkov, the hardcore looter shooter that defined a subgenre of high-stakes raid-based combat. He served as head of studio at Battlestate Games and spent more than ten years guiding its design, feature roadmap, and live operations. The systems he championed there (granular weapon modification, complex health and ballistics, persistent loss) form the design vocabulary he is now applying to a new setting.
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77 Role on Fragmentary Order
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99 Buyanov founded an entirely new company rather than expanding an existing one. Rant Gaming was set up from scratch with a fresh team of roughly 130 staff, the great majority of whom are new hires rather than carry-overs from the Tarkov years. He is positioned as the project's creator and creative ideologue, setting the tone, the systems pillars, and the long-term vision while the studio is built around him.
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1111 On the Name
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1313 Buyanov has explained that the title carries two meanings. In military terminology, a fragmentary order is a complex order made of fragmented pieces that come together to form a whole. Within the game's fiction, the "order" is Core, the super-corporation that leads the world, and it is starting to fragment from within as its control breaks down. The name points at both senses at once: a structure assembled from parts, and a structure coming apart.
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1515 Stance on Tarkov
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1717 Buyanov has been explicit that the new project is not a sequel, spin-off, or successor to Escape from Tarkov, and that Rant Gaming is a legally separate company from Battlestate Games. He intends to keep working on Tarkov in parallel for the foreseeable future, summarising that commitment with the phrase "Tarkov for life". The two projects run side by side: one continues as a live hardcore shooter under its original studio, the other is built fresh in a different studio with a different team and universe.
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1919 Design Direction Stated
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2121 Buyanov has framed the project as a combat simulator rather than an extraction shooter, arguing that extraction is one mechanic among many. He has positioned the design as the deliberate opposite of competing science fiction extraction titles such as Arc Raiders, which he characterises as aimed at a more casual audience, and his target player as the hardcore enthusiast who wants systems to learn rather than systems to bypass.
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2323 Stated targets for scale and pace:
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2525 Map size: zones of roughly four to five times the largest maps in his previous shooter, with smaller close-quarters areas planned alongside them. See Maps and Scale.Pace: combat and traversal targeted at roughly two to three times the tempo of Tarkov.Systems depth: advanced weapon behaviour, extensive customisation, a complex health model, and a corporate economy layer. See Gameplay Overview and Engine and Technology.
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2727 These figures are stated developer goals, not measured specifications, and will be validated during the alpha programme.
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2929 Alongside those targets, Buyanov has set out a broader ambition for the project. He has said he wants to build something new inside the genre, and possibly to create another genre outright, in the way his earlier work did for extraction shooters. The framing positions the game as an attempt to move the format forward rather than to rebuild a proven one in a different setting.
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3131 The science fiction premise is central to that ambition rather than decorative. Buyanov has said he always wanted to make a real science fiction game rather than relocate his previous shooter into space, and that the team is trying to simulate the future so that everything looks as realistic and grounded as possible, so that people believe in it. That goal runs through the hard science fiction choices elsewhere in the project, from the railguns named among the weapon categories to the remotely piloted Replicated Entities premise. See Gameplay Overview.
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3333 Unconfirmed Details
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3535 Several biographical and organisational details have not been formally confirmed at the time of writing:
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3737 Birth year and hometown.Exact title at the new studio (Chief Executive, Creative Director, Studio Head, or another formal title held in addition to the broader "creator" framing).Full prior credit list before the long Tarkov tenure.Whether he holds an ownership stake in Cor3, the publisher.