I've been trying to distill my thoughts and feelings about playing Marathon into something easily communicable and I keep coming back to Season 6, Episode 13 of The Simpsons. In the episode, titled "And Maggie Makes Three," Homer learns that he's become a father for the third time and, in response, reacts with a despondent thumbs up that simultaneously acknowledges that something good has happened but that it also creates the potential for stress, hardship, and maybe even disappointment. I hate to reduce playing an alpha version of the next game from the team behind Halo and Destiny to a reaction meme deployed by millennials in group chats, but the accuracy of what homersadthumbsup.jpg conveys is undeniable.
After around eight hours of gameplay where I faced off against developers, content creators, and members of the press, I left Bungie's Bellevue studio keen to play more of its high-stakes PvPvE multiplayer game. And at the same time, I couldn't deny that I had serious concerns about the experience that its compulsive gameplay loop is couched within. Putting it plainly, I'm worried Marathon could launch as a solid multiplayer shooter that is brimming with potential but thin on content. And in the dog-eat-dog world of multiplayer games, that could be a major issue.
Even in its alpha stage, what made playing Marathon so compelling was immediately evident. It took just one match of running, gunning, looting, and extracting to identify that the core of the experience leverages Bungie's pedigree as a best-in-class first-person-shooter developer. As longtime Halo or Destiny players can attest to, there's a satisfying texture in the moment-to-moment gameplay that makes Bungie's games hard to put down. The satisfying thump of a melee kill or the glee that comes from sticking an enemy with a plasma grenade has carried Halo through multiple generations. And deep loot-based progression layered on top of that gives Destiny a gravitational pull that's hard to escape. Marathon has all that, but within the framework of an extraction shooter. For those not familiar, this is a relatively new flavor of multiplayer shooter that takes the thrills of PvP and marries it with the tension of battle royale to create a game about dropping in, grabbing resources, and then making it to an extraction point to get out with your goodies in a single life.
Most of the individual components of the genre are familiar territory for Bungie, but what makes it appealing for the team is the highly engaging risk-versus-reward format that treads some new ground for the studio while also leaning into the PvP roots that helped make its name.
"For us, the opportunity of an extraction shooter really comes from two parts," said game director Joe Ziegler. "One is that we have a team that's very excited to build it, and we also have this idea of how do we create the next step of Bungie but also harken back to some of the PvP roots that Bungie originally had with Halo and things of that sort?
"We're also doing something quite crazy experimental, if you will. We're trying to build a service that's like a PvPvE game where we can do a lot of the cool storytelling things that Bungie really does, but do it in the context of a game where a lot of the content is driven by players interacting with one another. I think that nexus of things really makes us very excited to create this experience for players."
Whether Marathon represents a bold new future for Bungie remains to be seen, but at this stage I can confidently say that its gameplay sits comfortably in the genre, feeling familiar but not so much as to be derivative of its past works. The framing of the PvP is in line with most modern extraction shooter or battle royale games: Multiple teams of three spawn into a map that is filled with loot that's up for grabs. Some of it is crafting materials, some of it is weapons of various rarities, and some of it is items that are associated with quests or objectives relevant to the game in progress or the overarching progression system. Matches can take anywhere between a minute if you're unlucky/bad to around 20-minutes if you’re lucky/good. Your backpack space is limited, so there are decisions to be made about the balance between what to keep and what to leave behind. You can fill your pockets with things that will be valuable later or things that could be necessary to your objectives now. Loading up on guns, ammo, and items to keep in your vault might make future runs less of an uphill struggle, but if you can't get it to the extraction point because you didn't grab enough health or shield recovery items and got jumped, you're going to end up losing it all anyway.
Tried-and-true shooting akin to Halo and Destiny is the bedrock of the game, while characters called Runners facilitate a variety of playstyles and team roles. Their various abilities are somewhat analogous to the skills and Supers employed by Destiny's Guardians or Apex’s Legends, but commonalities are more on a functional level than being impressive ways to live out a power fantasy. Marathon is much more grounded, and there's a weightiness to it that means it moves at a slower pace than its stablemates, which emphasizes the tactical flow that is intended to drive skirmishes. Movement is governed by a stamina meter that fills as you sprint and slide around, so things are a little more controlled--if you're expecting the floaty leaps or over-the-top abilities Destiny usually has, you're going to be disappointed.
Deliberate, grounded gameplay is crucial to the tension of most extraction shooters, and it serves that purpose in Marathon effectively. This, Bungie hopes, will reinforce the idea of making gameplay that feels different from its past games and creates moments that tell their own stories.
"Bungie is known for its very action-forward [gameplay]; that 30 seconds of fun is the phrase that's always been there with Halo and the extension of building your own superhero, if you will, with Destiny," explained gameplay director Andrew Witts. "For us, we're getting a little bit more into tactical action, which is something that Bungie's never dipped into. Part of that is that you have to introduce a little bit of friction, but good friction in a way where you want to get people to lean forward and feel the tension. In the past games, tension came from overwhelming odds, and this is overwhelming odds, but more from the intangibles of, 'Where is everything? I don't have the perfect information.'"
Ziegler added: "So much of it is driven from the pressure of the scenario. We think games become really meaningful, moments in games become meaningful, and the stories you tell become really meaningful when they have a certain amount of agency. You chose to do a bunch of things and then, the impact is really high. In some cases, some of the loops that we're trying to create really reinforce that idea of storytelling. For example, if you go in and play the game, you're really coming out going, 'This is my story. This is what happened to me and this is why it's cool because I overcame odds. I did this really cool thing and I got this unique story out of it that nobody did by surviving that session or by getting through the trials and tribulations of the session.' For us, that does mean going a little bit more tactful at times to make sure that the decisions that people are making have really clear consequences where it's like, 'Oh, I got destroyed by AI because I made the wrong move.'"
All of that bears out in the way the Runners are played. Although they have distinct abilities that are enabled by futuristic cybernetic technology, the impact of these are restrained just enough so that, when activated, they provide a small tactical advantage instead of enabling the user to bulldoze through enemies. Locus, for example, is essentially the vanilla soldier class. His abilities include launching shoulder-mounted missiles that home in on enemies to immobilize and do damage. He also has an energy barricade that can be held to block incoming damage but drains quickly when attacked. His movement ability is a short dash using boosters, and he has a faster sprint, which is regulated by the additional heat it generates. Of all the characters, Locus plays in the most predictable ways, but the alternative Runners don't mix things up significantly either.
Throughout my playthrough, I found myself yearning for abilities that were a little more exciting. I don't need to soar into the sky and unleash a barrage of rockets or call in a sidekick named Bob to dish out some punishment when I hit a button, but everything I did in Marathon was very lacking in originality--again, closer to the character toolset from Apex Legends, which is well-trodden territory at this point. The upside of having Runners with relatively simple abilities, however, is the learning curve is very manageable, and it's very easy to understand what your enemies are capable of too. This, it turns out, makes the game much more approachable than its contemporaries, especially given how overwhelming other multiplayer games that have been running for years can be. For me, approachability is a key aspect of Bungie's games. Whether it's Halo or Destiny, the barrier to entry for gameplay is very low and, when it comes to getting to grips with mechanics, that looks to be the case for Marathon too. This is in contrast to the notoriously complex and finicky nature of most other extraction shooters.
"I think our ideal is that if you're really into PvP experiences and you really are excited by getting into the sandbox nature of play, this is an approachable way to enter that extraction shooter experience," Zeigler said. "Having said that though, is it more intense? In some ways, yes. It really depends on how you think about the Bungie audience.
"We're trying to build, expand that audience into people who want to do some of these more survival-based, intense experiences, but not have to go through a lot of the finicky nature of what's being offered currently to make that happen. We are focused on approachability, definitely, but our approachability doesn't mean pulling from the depth of the experience, but more how we stage and remove some of the things from the front layers to get people to those really deep survival experiences."
"Approachability on the gameplay side of things is really about touchstones that people go, 'Okay, I know this roughly, this feels familiar,'" Witts continued. "That is a basis for people to learn versus just upfront obtuse mechanics. We're really trying to be recognizable and [have] the approach on that angle be one of 'I know Bungie games, what the base asks are, but this is very different in a way where it's demanding in this way or I have to take my time and be slow here and I can't just have push forward constantly.'"
And yes, in this early stage, it works. Marathon in its alpha phase is an extraction shooter that is easy to pick up and get into. It is satisfying to play and feels well made, as opposed to being eurojank held together by whatever the coding equivalent of gaffer tape is.
I trust Bungie to make good on its ideas and realize its ambition in some form or another. Despite its rocky start, Destiny reached a much better place after the hard work put in to build on what was there.
In a genius move, each map in Marathon is also populated by AI-controlled robots that can be mowed down as you do your business and occasionally run into human opponents. This means that, even if you're not great at PvP, you are able to do the point-and-shoot stuff that feels good and gain experience and, hopefully, build the confidence to keep playing and getting better. Other games have these fodder-type enemies too, but what elevates Marathon's is their behavior. Bungie is known for creating foes that are an actual challenge and, if you're playing on higher difficulty, might even take you down. The same can be said of Marathon's roving AI enemies, who will run up on you, take cover, move between points, and even use high ground to get an advantage. Some of them, like the Commanders, can be deadly if not taken seriously, so I'm not ashamed to say that I got overwhelmed by them and team-wiped a few times during my sessions. For experienced players, the difference between AI and human is obvious, but for many the line between them won't really matter since they push back enough to make you feel like you earned the kill. The enemy behavior and the way they're used to boost confidence and build momentum for the player is genuinely one of the most impressive parts of Marathon.
The other major contributor to Marathon's polished exterior is its arresting visual aesthetic. It's easy–and accurate–to describe it as having a futuristic, techy feel with cool-looking, robotic humanoid characters that also look like they're part-time fashion designers, but there's a style and cohesion to it that is unique. Bungie used a lot of phrases to describe what they were going for, my favorites being "cyber simplicity" and "future less" because they really speak to an aesthetic that is built around being antithetical. Marathon is a bright and vibrant game that uses simplicity as its north star and graphic design as the basis for its visual language. It's visually busy and dense, but at the same time, easy to digest and appreciate; high-fidelity, low-poly industrial design, is what they call it. The Runners, meanwhile, have these eye-catching details and flair that give them personality, and it's inspired by sports fashion. Again, Bungie's own description is the most apt: Nike meets Teenage Engineering. Using my decidedly less eloquent approach: It looks kinda like if Metal Gear, Armored Core, and WipeOut had a baby. Don't ask me how three participants have one baby--it's the future; you figure something out.
Needless to say, every new screen is a visual feast of cool icons and 3D-printed-looking objects. And Perimeter, one of the two maps we played, has a kind of neon industrial vibe that reminded me of Mirror's Edge. It looks so good that when we switched to Dire Marsh, where a thick fog would occasionally roll in, it was a little annoying. Mostly because all the nice visuals were being covered up, but also because sneaky players used it as cover for jumpscares, leading to quick kills.
Marathon makes a great first impression but, very quickly, what's not there becomes as impactful as what is. Having praised the gameplay extensively, I have to pivot and also point out that everything it is doing is very ordinary, but executed well. Although I enjoyed playing the game, it was very evident that it didn't have a hook; a special something that will help it stand out from the crowd; an X-factor that gives it a fighting chance in a crowded world of multiplayer games that demand all of your time and attention. I wouldn't go so far as to say it felt soulless, but it definitely felt like something was missing, that one more ingredient to bring it all together. Without that, numerous other games popped into my head as more exciting prospects. Admittedly, most of those games aren't extraction shooters, but when it comes to making commitments, I have to assume a large portion of the intended audience isn't going to make that distinction, so why should I? Ultimately, regardless of genre, Marathon will be competing for the same time and attention that people have given, and are still giving, to Overwatch, Apex Legends, Warframe, Escape from Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, The Division 2, Valorant, Destiny, Marvel Rivals, Fortnite, Call Of Duty, Counter-Strike, and many others. Those are games that people have hours, days, months, and years of investment in, so it's going to take something special to make them even consider switching or splitting attention, let alone pull them away. As it stands, I don't think Marathon currently has that.
What it does have is ambition. Repeating Ziegler's words from earlier: Marathon is being built as "a service that's like a PvPvE game where we can do a lot of the cool storytelling things that Bungie really does." None of that, however, was evident in what I played. And various other parts of the game that were highlighted as being key to Marathon, its appeal, and its longevity were ideas we didn't get to see firsthand. It was a lot of tell with very little show.
Marathon takes place in Tau Ceti IV in the year 2893, when a cryptic message from the planet's colony causes panic. The Unified Earth Space Council is doing its best to keep the details of what happened to the colony a secret, but whatever happened has led to Runners--people who are essentially transferring their consciousness to external shells--to exploit the resources on the planet. Players will uncover secrets of the universe and what happened on Tau Ceti IV. I know that because Bungie told me, not because I saw any indication of it in-game. The narrative in-game manifested in a Faction system, where the player can take contracts from one of six groups that are vying for power? Control? Resources? I'm not quite sure. This is ostensibly a progression system where the contracts ask the player to complete objectives during a run and, in return, curry favor with the faction to build up a rank and, eventually, unlock upgrades that marginally improve things like how long it takes to decode items from loot boxes and death boxes. Each of the three factions had a very brief history about what their deal is, but beyond that there was little to dig into. As a taster of a metagame that feeds into character progression, it felt very detached from the character I was creating and the world I was in.
According to Bungie, each faction will have their own narrative mystery, but at this stage said narrative mystery wasn't there–beyond completing objectives, there was no other way to engage with the faction. It also seemed like I could work for multiple factions with no consequence. But whatever is going on will be explored in games, and the player will have a hand in shaping events, though I'm not clear how and, when I asked, I left thinking it involved having special items.
"Some of the later contracts actually have interactive VO that is piped into you as it's happening and they have a little bit more intricate requirements for the contract as you're going through it," explained Zeigler. "The missions become harder and also, you feel a little bit more of the presence of the narrative being told around you. We have other elements, which are for launch.
"We're working on a system that's more about collecting things and then, as you finish a collection, you get a bit of lore like a clue in the season to actually help you understand that.
One thing we really wanted to tie storytelling into is we didn't want the storytelling to dominate the player's experience, but to complement their own stories as they're telling it. There's things that are more related to what we called for a while, a digital detective strategy, which is the idea it's more about you going out there finding loot in the world, how does some of that loot help you tell the story that you want to, how do we create the context for you to tell the stories that you're going to be having of surviving that session rather than being no, everyone's playing a campaign.
"Part of our season model is actually to make it so as you're having these adventures and there are things that you are earning and commemorating at an account level. Some of which are achieved by you doing some crazy things with friends or things of that sort that unlock things, potentially cosmetics or things of that account level that will stay with you throughout the time.
"The idea is every season should be a moment to go on adventures, commemorate them, and then, some of those commemorative elements you can use as expressive elements for yourself in the future, whether they be skins or titles or things like that as a new season starts--a new opportunity to go on a new adventure. Part of the burden on us in terms of thinking about the service is to make sure every adventure that every season offers is in and of itself different and feels different to create those new stories."
Again, this sounds potentially interesting to me as a certified item-description reader--but "potentially" is the operative word. I can't help but think back to the launch of Destiny, when the story was threadbare and explored via Grimoire Cards accessible outside of the game itself. And without any concrete narrative hooks visible in what I experienced of Marathon, it's hard to get excited about a major part of why I enjoy Bungie's games.
Witts continued: "We're taking some pretty big swings for what the middle and end of the season looks like and we're already starting to think about what's happening in the world? What are some consequences? How does that manifest into the decisions that players can make, interesting ways on the mercenary fantasy and all the different ways that happens? Am I just getting something and getting out? Am I trying to take out a specific enemy? Things like that and that add to more fidelity and choice."
The kicker here is that Marathon is going to launch as a "premium" product, although Bungie said it will not be a "full-priced title." Exactly what "premium" means remains to be seen, as Bungie will reveal more at a later time. Based on what I experienced and was told, it'll have a battle pass, three maps (with a fourth arriving shortly after launch); fun but no-frills gameplay; a story that currently is all very vague in its nature and unclear in its implementation; and a character-progression system that doesn't yet show signs of offering a meaningful sense of growth. Maybe it's there behind-the-scenes and will be ready for launch, but for whatever reason, a decision was made not to show it.
Again, I'd be remiss not to once again point out that this is an alpha build (you'll be able to try it soon too), so it could all be implemented in the period leading up to launch. But at the same time, Bungie's own language indicated that much of what surrounds Marathon's core gameplay hasn't been formed yet or won't come together until much later, or is subject to change. In most of our discussions, there was a very loose commitment to ideas and direction. By its own admission, the project has changed in significant ways over the years of development and that fluidity is part of the process but, for me, there was a concern about how defined and settled the vision for Marathon is. I can't pretend to know how game development works, but at the very least I think I can say it felt like there's a whole lot to do and not a lot of time to do it before its September release.
Either way, I trust Bungie to make good on its ideas and realize its ambition in some form or another. Despite its rocky start, Destiny reached a much better place after the hard work put in to build on what was there. Similarly, Destiny 2's ups and downs also brought with them incredibly memorable characters, stories, and moments. The gameplay of both games also evolved as time went on to become more intricate and engaging. Bungie has repeatedly shown a dedication to its games, so with that in mind, I am excited about where Marathon could go.
But there's also a graveyard filled with short-lived games-as-a-service titles that failed to capture the attention of an already-committed audience. And lately big-budget titles from well-funded, high-profile teams have unfortunately made it there too. Like it or not, there are certain things that players already have and expect from similar titles, if they are to find a place in their gaming lives. In a world of free-to-play titles, a paid game that is light on content but full of hopes, dreams, and ambitions may not be enough to inspire in others the same confidence I have in Bungie.
This story has been updated to note that Marathon will not be a "full-priced title."
