The Much Maligned PS5 Shooter Marathon Returns for Another Playtest in December

I want this to be good so badly. I don't hold water for Bungie, I simply love the art direction and want it to be as fun to play as it is to look at.

At this point, I have little faith in it living up to anyone's expectations, but hopefully we can all be happily surprised by it. I'm just real worried with it not (afaik) incorporating any sort of meta progression, which I think helped make Arc Raiders the hit that it is.

I feel like this will be the game that shapes the direction that Sony takes Bungie in. It’s just got fail written all over it.

This gives me hope: If an experienced studio like Bungie doesn’t hit the taste of its target audience, then AI won’t either. It needs daring human talents like those from Sandfall or Embark to create something remarkable and loveable.

It would be a miracle if somehow Bunjie could turns this titanic-destined ship around. All popcorn consumption is on hold until this next playtests reactions start hitting.

Looking forward to see this game flop.

People want this game to fail way too much. I think ARC Raiders proves that there is an untapped demand for well-made, accessible extraction shooters. Bungie may have really fumbled the ball with Destiny, but if they know one thing, it's how to make really fun gameplay moments. I say we give them a chance to prove they've still got it. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But we don't know yet.

Ain’t nobody playing that joint…

Honestly, i find it pretty cringy to always see the same “I want this to flop so badly” comments every time there’s an article about Marathon. I dont understand it. If you don’t like it, why would you want it to flop? Maybe other people are excited about the game. So now other can’t play it, because you dont like it? Can’t people just ignore a game they don’t like? I do it all the time.

I’m not saying people can’t express themselves, but damn, it’s literally every comment section. Its so negative, pointless and childish.

But hey, that’s just my opinion

@MFTWrecks I'm with you. I'm not the biggest extraction shooter guy. But Helldivers 2 and Arc raiders opened the genre up to me a bit more. So I'm willing to take the plunge if a game is good.

ARC raiders had me hooked for about a week, then the samey action of collecting the same old junk, with zero narrative/story and the same handful of enemies just got so old. I dropped it and never went back. Great atmosphere, just too repetitive.

So like you, I'm hoping that maybe Marathon can become a thing. But we'll see.

This has disaster written all over it. Let it be the final nail in the coffin for the live service debacle.

@LogicStrikesAgain Do I want Bungie in general to fail? Nah.

Do I want this game in particular to fail? Only because they used the name of a series I grew up with and loved as a skin suit. If they'd called it Jim Bob's Extraction Shooter instead, I'd feel nothing but "eh" for it rather than the annoyance I have at its existence. Pretty cringy? Perhaps, but I'd like to think that's the correct reaction to someone taking something you loved and completely altering it into something that feels utterly soulless.

As it is, I wish all the best to Bungie as a whole, but at this point my only interest in it will be how large Marathon's impact crater will be compared to Concord.

But hey, that's also just my opinion!

@nessisonett I dont understand why people dogpile on Sony doing live service. Sure they messed up their approach, but many seem to be averse about them doing any live service at all. Do people not realize that literally every other publisher has multiple live service titles?

Why single out the one publisher that hardly has any live service titles at all, and probably is one of the last publishers to even give it a real go?

Seems to me like people are piling up on the wrong publisher here, somehow Sony is the only one getting heat for this, when other publishers have been doing this for way longer, and are far more agressive and predatory with their live service approach

@Neonix why exactly do you want to see this game flop?

I played last beta and i wasn't impressed by it

@windxtravelerx I don't want to see it flop. But it seems like just another mediocre live service attempt with color characters and skins to appeal to the Fortnite crowd. Not my cup of tea. And not what most Bungie fans were asking for or hoping for either. And the last playtest was garbage, so... I'm expecting this will fail. Maybe not as miseraly as Concord, but not far from it.

The last playtest was great. Most stuff can’t be talked about but somethings from the test have been made public by Bungie. Like the battle pass system, which do not expire and can be completed at anytime.

The questing got a big update and were really good too.

@StitchJones I had the same experience with Arc Raiders, played it for about a week and got to level 11 but it got repetitive and stale pretty fast. I also felt the same with HellDivers 2 albeit I've put a lot more time into that than Arc Raiders but the gameplay loop just got too repetitive, maybe I just have an issue with these extraction shooters as The Division was the same, loved the idea and played it for around 30 hours but nothing keeps me hooked. Only extraction shooter I've thoroughly enjoyed enough to keep going back to it is The Hunt Showdown, must have put nearly a thousand hours into that game.

@dskatter

But hey, that's also just my opinion!

Good! And you’re entitled to it 👍🏼

Dont really know what to say, i’m sorry you dont like it. There’s many games i dont like. I just dont make a scene about it, like some people do literally everytime a Marathon article comes out.

To be clear, i dont care that you and others want this to fail. Personally, i’ma bit indifferent, but still curious. But some are excited about this game, so i just dont understand why people are so dramatic about constantly wanting this to flop. It’s literally every comment section, its a bit over the top and after a while all this doomposting just gets a bit tiring that’s all

Can't wait to see the reaction

@UltimateOtaku91 yes 100%. its ashame too about ARC raiders, cause the graphics and performance are really great. The atmoshphere and enemy design is great too. For it to have all that and be so shallow in story/narrative and be such a repetitive grind is ashame. I feel they missed on a great oppurtunity with that new IP. but i'm in the minority cause the thing has sold great and has a big fan base.

However, the big question is, how many people feel like we do now? I have no idea, how you could not get burnt on that game after a couple weeks max. So maybe it fell off, or will fall off soon. People glaze that game hard, so we'll see.

I also agree on Helldivers 2. I enjoyed that for a few weeks and it was fun. But there wasn't enough RPG and upgrade systems for weapons and characters in that grind fest. The only thing you were doing basically is upgrading the ships combat capabilities and some of your heavy drop in weapons. The unlock's for characters was a tedious grind of mainly cosmetics and i found that the weapons unlocks were trash. Grinding for a weapon that turned out to be garbage was tedious. It was way too shallow for me. ARC raiders was not shallow on this front, but boring as F after a week. lol we can't win

As someone who wasn't overly interested in Marathon before the last playtest ... I am very much looking forward to it now. Make of that what you will.

@LogicStrikesAgain The problem isn't that Sony is doing live-service. The problem is they drunkenly and haphazardly bought several studios and asked many of their top partners to make 'em, just so they could greenlight 12 of them at once. Which, itself, is just bad business.

But where it really goads our gobs is that the move very apparently gutted their output of traditional games for several years. No one really minded that they did Helldivers II. Many were legitimately excited for Factions. I personally see nothing wrong with with that Horizon MMO being developed by an outside studio. But those and the 9 other games that are mostly cancelled now should not have came at the expense of the experiences most of us buy PlayStations for.

There's a right way to do it. Sony did it the completely wrong way. I have no personal vendetta against any of their live-service games — especially now that they're ostensibly shifting gears and deemphasizing live-service. And am kinda rooting for Bungie just because they're Bungie (single-player Marathon reboot would've been sick as f***, though). But when it seemed like the entire company was barreling towards a live-service, multiplayer focused factory, I think it was fair to hope they would fall flat on their face and return to what most people follow them for.

EDIT: Although I generally agree about the doomposting. I'm very exhausted of every mention of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 being a circle jerk of hate validation. I can't stand the internet's obsession with s***ing on Mario Kart World. And, yes, I agree that people disinterested in Marathon shouldn't feel the need to complain about it every chance they get at this point. I just find online gamers completely insufferable now, honestly.

They should change the name to Marathons so they can end the name with a dollar sign

@RoomWithaMoose I get all that, that’s why i said that their approach was bad. They did handle it very poorly. But thats unfortunately how things sometimes go in business, things dont always pan out, then you react and pivot.

But i was reacting to someone who said “Let it be the final nail in the coffin for the live service debacle”. That definitely reads like they dont want Sony to do any live service, and many feel the same way. Which is fine btw, i just dont understand the singling out of Sony, when literally every other publisher gets a pass.

My comment wasnt really geared toward you, you actually have a nuanced take, which i totally agree with. I was really just reacting to the crowd that just doesnt want Sony to do any live service at all

And i agree with everything you’ve said btw

I kinda like the art style retro-clean-sci fi looks. But sadly i'm not into extraction shooter genre.

Good luck to Bungie though. They gonna need it.

@LogicStrikesAgain Oh, that's my misunderstanding, then. I was trying to give a nuanced take because I thought you were assuming people opposed to Sony's efforts are absolutely against any and all of their attempts at live-service.

That you were specifically questioning the reasoning around someone being an anti-live-service absolutist I actually empathize with. I have A LOT of negative opinions about their live-service push, and am not a fan of live-service in the first place. But with Helldivers II — not to mention all the other industry-wide success stories — live-service is absolutely here to stay. And, if the game's good and not too predatory, who really cares either way? The biggest thing for me is that it feels like they're planning on releasing a lot of non-live-service games here in the near future. Which makes it really hard to be that upset about it anymore.

I wonder if my friend will be on this playtest again
He was on the last few ones and from what he said watching paint dry was more excting than the overall gameplay and look of Marathon.

bring Battleborn back, you cowards!

@RoomWithaMoose Thats allright. Funnily enough if we were to go into the topic of how Sony approached live service, i really do agree with everything you said. I personally hve no interest in many live service titles out there, but i have no qualms with Sony trying to venture in to that space, especially if they can bring with them some of that Sony quality game making.

But alas, there approach was typical of a naive and inexperienced publisher in the space, and frankly was a pretty poor way of going about things. I do feel they have pivoted and made some correction, it just unfortunately take a bit of time to see them fully get back on their feet again.

But yeah, just to reiterate, this wasnt really about their dumb handling of it, but rather the people that just dont want them to do any type of live service period.

I respect their opinion, thats not what im arguing against. I’m just confused why they single Sony out, when the worst offenders of live services are some of these other predatory publishers, but somehow Sony usually gets the brunt of it.

Oh well, i’m all ranted out for today. I do appreciate the nuanced discussion 👍🏼

@LogicStrikesAgain Because they’re rubbish.

@LogicStrikesAgain you are at the reaction to the reaction part of the controversy cycle. You can just take someone's word for it when they answer your question.

It's like watching a slow death that everyone else sees coming but Sony refuses to accept. The faster live service games fail the faster money starts going to good games again.

@Lavishturtle

The faster live service games fail the faster money starts going to good games again.

Bad news for you then, the 3 biggest games of the year were probably all live service: Battlefield 6, Monster Hunter Wilds and Arc Raiders

Meanwhile, games like League of Legends and Fortnite continue to have 100m monthly active users, but don’t let me disturb you guys from your alternate realities where the failure of every live service game validates your innate biases, but the failure of any single player game is irrelavent and not even worth mentioning.

Probably the worst thing Sony have going for this game is how many people seem he'll belt on it failing! Not a multiplayer guy but I hope it does well, the art style alone is so compelling I hope it sends a signal that developers can be more visually ambitious

@LikelySatan

you are at the reaction to the reaction part of the controversy cycle. You can just take someone's word for it when they answer your question.

I dont really get what you mean tbh. I do take someones word for it. If people hate it, then they hate it. I’m not silencing them, or saying they’re wrong. This is not about me not believing people. I dont care if people say it because they mean it, or because they just want to troll.

People can dislike what they want, but all this constant negativity and doomposting is getting a bit tiring that’s all.

But by all means, people continue doing what they want, i will continue finding it a bit over the top 😉

@LogicStrikesAgain "Can’t people just ignore a game they don’t like?"

This being the internet, no.

And I will never understand this. In any other walk of life, if there's something I dislike or it's simply not for me, I ignore and move on. Unless any given opinion drives positive change, move on...

@LogicStrikesAgain Some artists have put their heart in soul into creating this game. Wanting their work to fail is just nasty. We have seen what happens to these artists when their game fails with closures and job losses. Fingers crossed it resonates with those who like shooters.

NDA: Don't let other people know how bad it is

@CupidStunt Exactly, good point! From that point of view it is indeed particularly nasty