Sony’s got a lot riding on Marathon. It needs the game to be a success.
It’s such a shame, then, that the title’s been a bit of a disaster so far. Aside from the drama involving stolen assets, the extraction shooter just hasn’t captured all that much mainstream attention.
Look, we’re not expecting a Concord-style catastrophe here – but unless developer Bungie can figure out how to effectively promote this project, it’s also got an uphill battle ahead of it.
To be fair, the release – which should have been out by now – has been taken back to the drawing board and retooled. We’ll get to see the fruits of the firm’s labour in a Closed Technical Test set to get underway on from 22nd October through 28th October.
If you want to take part in the stress test – which will be available on PS5 alongside other platforms – you’ll need to register through here by 16th October.
Here’s how Bungie describes it:
“This is an important checkpoint for us as we test our improvements since Alpha, including three maps, five runner shells, prox chat, re-tuned combat pacing, solo queue, deeper environmental storytelling, and more. That said, the Technical Test build is a work in progress and will only include a portion of what’s planned for Marathon‘s full release, focused on the early player experience.”
The test will be under NDA, so while we’re sure some assets will leak, don’t expect to be seeing new footage streamed online.
Assuming it goes well, though, this could be a crucial step towards the game actually coming out.
While we’ve been extremely critical of Sony’s acquisition of Bungie, we don’t want to see Marathon fail, so we hope this beta demonstrates meaningful improvements to the release.