Let's Sperg Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[Disc]

like?
no one expect anything of bungie in 2025, most people don't even know about marathon and the few that do did the seinfeld "laugh and leave" gif after they heard "extraction shooter".

people shit on /v/ for trying to get another tortanic going, but a lot of that is annoyance because newfags completely missed what made it the event it was.
when the old republic was announced, star wars wasn't complete dogvomit of an IP as it is now and bioware was one of the hottest studios coming off dragon age origins and fucking mass effect. people blew their pants thinking they'd get a "world of warcraft/mass effect/kotor", the expectations were astronomical - which made the eventual game that much worse and hilarious.

the only way to get another tortanic would be gta6 turning out like nu-saints row. besides that there isn't even any real hype for anything anymore since most AAA shit is pozzed slop that runs and plays like ass, the only expectation people have is it will be shit anyway. hardly a tortanic.

I've said that this is part of why we've had a bit of ennui in early 2025 regarding games. There's just not much way for games to realistically outdo the flop levels of Concord and Dustborn, and it seems like the games that will and won't go woke have largely been settled by this point.

GTA 6 is probably one of the last big ones that can have a really spectacular fall from grace at this point. Either that, Fromsoft, or one of Nintendo's main arteries (not counting Pokémon because it's obviously had it's Tortanic moment). Pretty much everything else is tarnished enough that people are braced for disaster, or was never big enough to get that level of response in the first place.

I am tempted to buy this game out of Halo nostalgia or should i wait i have the gut feeling i should wait

If you are not dead fucking certain you're going to have a good time, you can afford to wait for the game to actually release.

 

[419]

Something that might be worth pointing out, though this is more related to N² / Antireal than Marathon itself: this is actually not even the first time that his work has been plagiarised.

Take this poster below, for example, made on 7th Oct 2017 and posted both on Xwitter (a) and on the antireal.info Tumblr blog (a).


At some point in time after the poster was made, a random Adobe Stock (a) user going by the name of "Kordiush" turned out to have ripped both this graphic and several others, either from N² or from other such artists as well, to sell off as stock images for others to reuse as though they were this user's own work.



Since then, at least two different high-profile plagiarism cases occurred involving the use of this graphic and its forms, with "hundreds" (a) more cases having been suspected because of this. Some time in 2023, the music label Monstercat made use of this graphic for their own merch, including on a lilac hoodie (unwittingly or not) featuring the graphic on its back (Wayback only, 404'd since then).


(t, a)

Earlier still, however, back in 2021, the e-sports organisation Team Liquid made a series of videos showcasing their team's performance in a Valorant tournament, complete with a merch line including a custom player jersey. This jersey also heavily aped this graphic (a) all throughout, which was also frequently plastered on the videos themselves as a motif.



Most egregiously, however, this same Team Liquid promo also thought it would be a good idea to copy the homework of not one, but two different art groups. They also saw it fit to ape off of the work (and logo!) of Detroit Underground / Detund, a related art and music collective which is both adjacent to Antireal themselves and also directly affiliated with The Designers Republic, previously mentioned JUST EARLIER IN THIS VERY THREAD as the team behind the graphical/visual identity of the WipeOut series of games!



In fact, Team Liquid continued to abuse both of these graphics (a) into 2023 for other generic merch of theirs, incorporating both the forms aped off of N²'s poster and the "Liquid" logo aped off of what is in fact a "Detund" logo, originally designed by the artist dmas3 (who has since been alleged to be inactive).



Tranny or not, N² really hasn't been able to catch a break, and it's just depressing. Poor guy.

 

[Snekposter]

TMI but when I was in highschool I literally learned how to make games and permanently altered the trajectory of my entire life because I really respected Bungie and wanted to make games like Halo.
Kind of dodged a bullet by never applying to them tbh

Less of a bullet and more of an artillery shell, I'd say. There's a non-zero chance you might have ended up looking and acting like "Trick" Weekes.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Maybe the Bungie devs actually went to some old folks homes to ask the Marathon fanbase what they would want in a sequel, but they just couldn't decipher the toothless demented ramblings they got in response.

Don't be rude, Marathon fans aren't that old...yet

I am tempted to buy this game out of Halo nostalgia or should i wait i have the gut feeling i should wait

Your pink triangle is well deserved

 

[Oliver Onions]

I am tempted to buy this game out of Halo nostalgia or should i wait i have the gut feeling i should wait

If you really must, at least wait a month to check Sony aren't going to immediately shut the servers down like they did to Concord.

 

[yt Oliander]

this is actually not even the first time that his work has been plagiarised.

Yeah man I drew this in 2003 and you wouldnt believe how much i've seen it get ripped off. not even worth suing over with how much it happens tbh

 

[my penis is on fire]

Paul Tassi: "It's Just Over For Marathon" 🄰

I’ve tried to put this off for a while now, giving Marathon the benefit of the doubt in terms of fixing what ails it, and maybe snagging an audience that’s large enough to make it at least sustainable.
But no, it’s over. I can’t dispute this anymore. This has probably always been true, but the events of the past week have cemented it.

The entire idea of this game was a mistake.

The game attempts to split the difference between casual players who may be new to extraction shooters and existing, hardcore extraction players it would like to pilfer from games like Tarkov. It will do neither.

I’ve seen almost no established extraction shooter players that are eager to jump over to Marathon for anything but a trial run based on what they’ve seen and played.

The idea that this is an extraction shooter that should use a hero model has not landed well at all. It seems woefully unbalanced with full invisibility and wallhacks and things that should just not be in this genre. And it destroys the idea of making a fully custom character like other games, something most players like. It feels like a solution where a problem did not exist. An experiment to make the game stand out, but it’s just made it worse.

Asked to name the biggest issue they found coming out of the Alpha, Ziegler rattled off a list of impossibly small issues. Hugely requested things like proximity chat and Solos were handwaved away and relegated to some possible future plan.

...these pieces of art are 1:1 rips to the point where Bungie has to audit its entire game to see how many of these there might be. During the livestream they couldn’t even show the game because it was being ripped apart internally for this process.

There is no escaping this now. Not that vibes were good before, but they are dismal now with Marathon a laughing stock after this happened or even worse, outright anger that this was allowed to take place in the game, and players refusing to play and support the game as a result.

Marathon will not fundamentally change enough to be attractive to most players. Community sentiment will not change enough to turn things around on that end. A delay does not significantly change any of this, but it may be the only option.
It would be impressively stupid to actually release this game in four months given both these recent events and that we’re only seeing a small amount of new content and some balance and visual polishing for launch. But you simply cannot cancel this game at this point after 5+ years of work, even if it should have died ages ago. Sony alone would never allow that.

This will hurt Bungie and its actual healthy child, Destiny. There will be layoffs. There will be Sony takeover of leadership as they bail out with millions in vested cash. The only thing I don’t believe will happen is the complete dissolution of Bungie as that would be a bridge too far in terms of Sony being embarrassed a storied brand has collapsed under its tenure, one they paid $3.6 billion for.

I realize this is an utterly brutal article. It’s the longest one I’ve written in ages. But at this point there is no doubt the writing is on the wall and it is disingenuous to ignore that. I will continue to cover the game. If good things happen, I will write about that. If bad things keep happening, I will write about that. But I think it’s overwhelmingly bad things from here.

And this was written by one of the company's biggest gunt guards. Bungie's years of failing upwards are finally coming to an end

 

[Caddo Cobgang]

And this was written by one of the company's biggest gunt guards. Bungie's years of failing upwards are finally coming to an end

hes right, no one wants to play this shit, Pete is an arrogant asshole for assuming people would want to play an extraction shooter best case scenario is Pete getting fired and Sony completely taking over the Destiny team, it wouldnt be much better then Bungie's current C-Suite but at least it would allow Destiny 2s servers to not be shut down, the fact that they insisted on Marathon is an embrassment and in an ideal world Bungie's executives would be effectively blacklisted from ever working at a video game company again

 

[The Doom Slayer]

I am tempted to buy this game out of Halo nostalgia or should i wait i have the gut feeling i should wait

Almost no one who worked on Halo worked on this. Just play the actual Halo games instead. They're readily available and even Infinite in its current state is more acceptable than Marathon is likely to be. This game is such a clown car crash so far there’s probably at least a 50% chance it’ll get the Concord treatment and not even exist in a year.

Paul Tassi: "It's Just Over For Marathon" 🄰

He's right, however

>This will hurt Bungie and its actual healthy child, Destiny.

Destiny is not healthy. Ever since Lightfall it's been on a downward trend with plummeting player numbers and the recent livestream did not impress the fanbase at all. The Star Wars crossover shit just screams desperation.

It's total lunacy that they did not and still apparently do not have any plans for a Destiny 3. That should have been the first thing Sony ordered them to do they bought them. The franchise still has a lot of potential but the hacks at Bungie are totally creatively bankrupt with absolutely no vision at all. So instead they still insist on sticking with D2, even though the game is a technical mess and on the verge of collapse, while betting everything on Marathon. And we all see how that's working out.

 

[Asian tech support]

It's total lunacy that they did not and still apparently do not have any plans for a Destiny 3. That should have been the first thing Sony ordered them to do they bought them.

"Destiny 3" is a mobile game made by slants. I wish I was kidding.

 

[Spaced Outside Cargo]

I am tempted to buy this game out of Halo nostalgia or should i wait i have the gut feeling i should wait

There is not a single aspect of this game that is anything like halo lol

 

[Soggy Floppa]

Does it even have a lowered crosshair option, or has nu-Bungie fallen so far from what made them that they don't know the reason for that anymore

 

[BlackDragoons]

There is not a single aspect of this game that is anything like halo lol

Its not even Marathon.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Its not even Marathon.

It's not even a game.

 

[Evil Peter Griffin]

 

[30+GameOvers]

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I've said this before, but this shit just looks like Roblox version of COD Infinite Warfare
For reference, the boxart

Except IW had so much more going for it, a unified artstyle for example. As we now know, there is no Marathon 2025 artstyle, it's all literally stolen and a mish-mash from random artists without one unifying vision. Note the bright neon colors and exaggerated features in Marathon, making it look like you're playing as a toy(hence my comparison to Roblox) while COD IW has similar, but more grounded sci-fi aesthetics which look familiar to our own modern day tech while still not looking out of place in a space opera(for example, an assault rifle that doesn't look like a toy, very similar to an M4 or a Honey Badger when you take a closer look). Fucking embarrassing.

 

[Quintex96]

 

[The Doom Slayer]

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LOL, good luck with that

 

[Luke gama]

The art style feels so amateurish like something you'd find on a small indie game.

The foundational aesthetics that they list could have been cool but it's so badly done.
It really seems they where expecting a really positive reception to the reveal and the fact that you can't find one video on YouTube that's actually excited about the seems to have rocked them to there core.

What I don't understand is how they put out something that does in fact like a indie game

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

i wish bungie nothing but failure with their endeavor