The Icebreaker event is coming soon.

Credit: Battlestate Games

The next major event in Escape From Tarkov, known as Icebreaker, is now expected to launch in the coming weeks, much sooner than many fans expected after the initial teases.

Given that the last Escape From Tarkov event only just ended, and the arrival of a new patch that made a lot of behind the scenes changes and upset the balance of a lot of the game, most Tarkov players assumed that things would be quiet for a while. Possibly even expecting to wait for the next wipe, expected during the summer, for the next major bit of content.

But a new tease from game director Nikita Buyanov on social media suggests that may not be the case, and that a new event, much bigger than anything we have seen since launch, could be coming in just a matter of weeks.

In a post on X, Buyanov said that the team is currently doing the final testing stages for the Icebraker event, which was first revealed last year and teased to be one of the biggest in Tarkov history. His exact words were that the event is currently in “final testing and preparations,” which suggests a release is right around the corner.

The Icebreaker event has previously been teased with visuals of a large cargo ship stuck in arctic ice, and is thought to feature a new map that is similar to the Labyrinth event location. In some of the developer updates that Buyanov posts on X, glimpses of the map have been spotted, and it looks to be surprisingly large with a lot of internal areas of the ship to explore.

The event has clearly been in the works for a while, and could be the first major new content addition we get since Tarkov launched last year. While smaller events and some balance changes have kept things ticking over, it has been a while since any kind of new map or major content was added.

There is, of course, no announced date for the arrival of Icebreaker, but with the first post-launch wipe expected this summer, it would not be a surprise if this ended up being an end of wipe event. That would likely put it in June or July, with most summer wipes arriving in August over the past few years.

A major event coming to Escape From Tarkov is likely to get me back into the game and playing once again. After the excitement around the launch last year, my want to jump back into Tarkov has somewhat waned with the lack of major content additions. But Icebreaker will likely be more than enough to pull me back in, especially if it turns out to be a massive new map.