The big Marathon server slam is now underway ahead of the game's full release on 5th March, and it's attracting a lot of curious players. During its first 24 hours of free access, the server slam peaked at 143,621 concurrent players on PC.
With the weekend approaching, the chances its peak player count increases are high. There's no way to track console users on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, but it's generally agreed that if a game or beta test is proving popular on PC, it'll be doing similarly well on console. You can learn more in our Marathon Server Slam guide.
As a quick comparison, Highguard peaked at just over 97,000 players during its launch window, and the pre-release ARC Raiders test managed to hit 189,000 players at once. With the weekend looming, there's potential for Marathon to top it — on PC at least.
The PvPvE extraction shooter is the first non-Destiny game from Bungie since its work on the Halo series. It brings back a franchise it was making in the 1990s. Should you like what you play in the server slam, the Marathon standard edition is £34.99 / $39.99, while a Deluxe Edition packing bonus content costs £49.99 / $59.99.
Infil into the dark sci-fi world of Tau Ceti IV: A derelict colony rife with rival Runners, hostile UESC security forces, and hazardous environments. As you scavenge its zones for valuables with a crew or alone, tense moments of exploration break into fast-paced PvP combat where gunplay is responsive, time to kill is low, and preparation is rewarded.
[source eurogamer.net]
Comments 26
Had decent fun with it. Menus are gaudy and hard to read. Ammunition is scarce. It has promise.
@captainsandman Agreed the menus are a bit much right now, but otherwise I like what I've seen of it so far.
I’ve heard a lot of mention of how slow it is… which I assume is in relation to it being less action-centric but more tactical than say Destiny or… and I’m only mentioning this as I’ve heard so many people state it in comparison - Apex Legends (yes I know they’re totally different games but people are using it as a comparison for some reason). Hopefully it finds its audience, in much the same way as Hunt: Showdown and Escape from Tarkov has.
Played for two hours last night and had a blast, the UI is chaotic but you kinda get used to it. Also thought the bots hit hard or is it just me 😅.
I am a big fan. Just played as rook (survived, solo play).
Played a couple hours with my kids last night and we had an awesome time!
I played through the tutorial and 2 matches, while I actually like the unique artstyle and Bungie’s signature gunplay I found the gameplay loop a bit too slow and it quickly got boring since the very first match, plus the interface seems unnecessarily convoluted.
I think it had the potential to have a very interesting campaign for single-player content but they decided against it.
As a console player, I’m not a fan of having to move a mouse pointer to select things In the games menu.
Very nice , impressive!
Can't wait to see the retention numbers!
I'd say thoroughly whelmed is how I feel about Marathon. After spending a few hours yesterday in both solo and squad with friends, there's something lacking about this that I can't quite put my finger on. Even the friends I was playing with seemed pretty indifferent to it, and they're way more into PvP shooters than I am.
It's clearly not for the Destiny crowd.
I played it and found it boring, slow and frustrating. Even the soundtrack is monotone and sleep inducing.
Also the menu UI is godawful. They clearly haven't learned from Destiny's mistakes in that regard.
Saying that, a lot of my negative feelings are subjective and genre based, I think the extraction shooter crowd will be satisfied.
I still think this game will live in the shadow of Arc Raiders, which feels like a more complete product.
@BusyOlf yeah games do that annoy me. Cyberpunk was a poor culprit also. Surely it can’t take much for them to “optimise” the menu controls for console?
I played this for around an hour last night and I enjoyed it but not sure if it's enough for me to buy. I then tried to load into a new run after the tutorial and it kept crashing (PS5). I'll try again tonight.
Played an hour or two last night and then turned it off. Thought it was pretty mid to be honest. Nothing was outright terrible but neither was anything very good.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays in a years time should it survive.
Tried it last night. I really like the art style, but… is it just me or does the game sort of… not tell you what to do? And the menus were so small that they were impossible to read without me getting closer to my TV too, so that didn’t help either.
Gameplay feels great… when there’s gameplay… but it didn’t feel like there was much that happened in any round I played. I played three rounds and felt impressed with the atmosphere, but perhaps less interested in the game overall than I was at the State of Play.
I just don’t quite know what the point of the game is. You just run around and get random junk out of boxes and go to a point to end the match? I felt the same way about Arc Raiders too, honestly. Maybe I need to play with friends or something, but even doing that, I felt a disconnection with Arc Raiders. Maybe extraction shooters aren’t for me.
To be honest, it was frustrating to play because I liked the level design and atmosphere and gunplay, but I just felt lost with it. It made me think, “Why couldn’t this game just have a campaign?” Bungie used to do a fantastic job with those…
My first impression several months ago was that this game looks exceedingly generic, and having played it, that is still my impression.
I'll give it a few months tops.
I don't play extraction shooters, so that can be a big part of it. But are they normally so boring? Dropped into a map with the most boring objectives a boring open-world game could muster, pick up lots of random s*** like it's goddamn Fallout, shoot a few bots with gunplay that could come out of literally any modern shooter, and randomly get ambushed like you're on Fortnite — except the density of other players is so nebulous, you never know how on edge you should be.
I'm going to try it again with a friend this weekend, if I have the time. But I was bored out of my mind for the 2 matches I played. Literally nothing even happened in the first match. It took 10 minutes of nothing in the second match for me to to randomly get killed from behind. And I didn't even care about losing stuff, because the game does such a terrible job with presentation that I never understood what the hell anything was for or why I should want to collect stuff in the first place.
I've had about 5 games so far. I'm not sure I'd pay £35 for it. But I am having decent fun. The UI definitely needs work.
@LifeGirl Tried it yesterday and that's pretty spot on. Game looks great and play very well (like Destiny) but otherwise very generic.
Remains to be seen if players are willing to walk away from other similar games (Arc Raiders, Hunt etc) and pay $40 for it.
@somnambulance As soon as the tutorial started, all I could think of is how much cooler this would be as a linear, single-player experience.
I would still be very interested if they put that together.
Yhhh I don't see this game surviving for that $40 price tag. Too slow and uneventful atm, like someone else mentioned the mouse cursor thing on console is aggravating to say the least.
The numbers look good on paper except for the fact that it's sandwiched inbetween highguard and arc so it's meaningless.
The Finals isn't an extraction shooter but it feels like a much better version of what they were trying to do here, flashy and visually striking game with some nice sfx and high octane combat.
@RoomWithaMoose had the exact same thought, I'm normally willing to give a new mp game a chance especially because this one looks visually striking but damn if this didn't feel like a missed opportunity as soon as I got out of the tutorial.
it’s trash, so damn boring. everything about it is just bland and the ui sucks
The menus and UI in general aren't good at all, but the gameplay is fun. After playing a little last night, I'm honestly not sold on it, but will play more this weekend. I've been very excited for a new Bungie shooter and my experience so far has dampened that excitement a little, but I don't want to jump to conclusions yet. Much remains to be seen!
@somnambulance
Your experience sounds exactly like mine pretty much. It looks really cool although the menus are a bit of a mess to sort through. Atmosphere is really great.
And yeah, just kind of get a contract, go loot/scan/whatever holding square does at a point, and leave to do it over again...or die trying to leave.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just stuck in my old ways but I think extraction shooters just aren't for me neither. Just can't find the fun in it.
The general gaming consensus seems to have switched back to "meh". I was trying to catch a couple streams but not many big streamers were playing it and if they aren't showing off your game that's kinda a death sentence in the modern gaming landscape. Even saw some people start with Marathon but by the end of the stream they were playing something else entirely.
It's really not a good look, a game lives or dies by what the general audience thinks about it and no amount of media propaganda will be able to save it.
I tried it, and it wasn't my cup of tea, but I hope others enjoyed it.
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