Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

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Civillian 18 said:
They have implemented a 'good boy system' in which you get stickers or something for not killing other runners but leaving matches with them?
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Doesn't this go against the entire spirit of the genre? Maybe they're hoping this will draw in more casuals if they create an incentive to discourage such TAHXIC behaviour.
 
I wonder what is going on behind the scenes at Sony and Bungie. Nobody there will be happy about the failure, but I do wonder what the expectations were. They will probably try to relaunch the game adding some PVE mode or just bot matches and pivot harder into MTX. But if that fails I wouldn't be surprised if Sony decides to just shutdown the game.
 
Oliver Onions said:
Doesn't this go against the entire spirit of the genre? Maybe they're hoping this will draw in more casuals if they create an incentive to discourage such TAHXIC behaviour.
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As ARC Raiders has proven, the vast majority of players prefer PvE instead of PvP or PvPvE, to the tune of 1+ million vs 40,000.
 
I Know 孤独のせい said:
I do wonder what the expectations were.
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I remain convinced they knowingly sent it out to die purely because the shareholders would have slaughtered them if they'd cancelled another of their big live service projects.

Or they just needed to release something to remind people the PS5 still exists. Has Sony got any other AAA releases billed for this year?
regalterry said:
As ARC Raiders has proven, the vast majority of players prefer PvE instead of PvP or PvPvE, to the tune of 1+ million vs 40,000.
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But muh genre purity!
 
regalterry said:
Imagine being so completely captured by troons you stake the future of the company on pandering to them.
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This is the same studio that wasn't going to put proximity chat in a game where communication with other players is almost mandatory, because they didn't want anyone's feelings to get hurt.

We're reaching incompetence levels that shouldn't be possible.
 
regalterry said:
As ARC Raiders has proven, the vast majority of players prefer PvE instead of PvP or PvPvE, to the tune of 1+ million vs 40,000.
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You'd think Bungie would have learned this lesson themselves, considering how they basically gave up on Destiny's PVPVE mode, Gambit, after the first year. Apart from deleting the old multi-round format and some minor adjustments to scoring and mechanics, nothing has been done with it for about seven years now because nobody wants to play it. And that's in a mode that gives you loot regardless of whether you win or lose, so clearly it's not because of rewards.

The vast majority of players either want to shoot bots or each other, not both. Most people don't want some rando interrupting their slaughterfest by taking potshots at them, nor do they want to have their 1v1 interrupted by some bot getting in the way. Extraction shooters and any other game that combines PVP and PVE will always be a niche market because of this.
 
I Know 孤独のせい said:
I wonder what is going on behind the scenes at Sony and Bungie. Nobody there will be happy about the failure, but I do wonder what the expectations were. They will probably try to relaunch the game adding some PVE mode or just bot matches and pivot harder into MTX. But if that fails I wouldn't be surprised if Sony decides to just shutdown the game.
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Sony: "Why didn't it sell?"
Bungie: "The Chuds! The Chuds are stopping it from selling"
Sony: "We've spent a billion on you at this point and we aren't getting returns."
Bungie: "If we cancel the game or lay people off the Chuds will win!"
Sony: "Shit."

So at this point they're desperately trying to figure out if they continue to waste money on the money hole to try and prevent the "heckin chudders" from winning or if they're going to just silently try to lay people off and recuperate with the next title.
 
regalterry said:
As ARC Raiders has proven, the vast majority of players prefer PvE instead of PvP or PvPvE, to the tune of 1+ million vs 40,000.
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Something interesting is Arc Raiders has been losing players as well. It's 24 hour peak on Sunday was 131k, Monday was 103k and yesterday was 95k.

It's also apparently lost 123k players since March.

Though this definitely doesn't mean that the game is failing, but the devs dropping the ball for it wouldn't surprise me just going off of how they treated the Finals. Embark has a bad habit of seeing problems the fans have with their games and overcorrecting.
 
Professor Donger said:
Something interesting is Arc Raiders has been losing players as well. It's 24 hour peak on Sunday was 131k, Monday was 103k and yesterday was 95k.
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Yeah, but ARC Raiders was made by a small dev team, with a smaller footprint, and whatever money they spent on development they more than made back via game sales, likely dozens of times over.

Even if the game plummets to current Marathon player numbers, it's still going to be profitable for a team of around 50 people, compared to Bungie's 500 800, still saddled with expectations of needing to make back the $3.6 billion Sony wasted on their purchases.

A lot of people have already said that if Marathon had been made by an indie developer, the playercount would have likely meant it was, if not massively successful, then at least reasonably profitable.

But Bungie isn't a small indie studio. They're Bungie.
 
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regalterry said:
A lot of people have already said that if Marathon had been made by an indie developer, the playercount would have likely meant it was, if not massively successful, then at least reasonably profitable.
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I know, I was the one that said it. I'm not trying to say that Arc Raiders is a failure or anything like that, I was just pointing out that it's losing players and that the devs dropping the ball wouldn't be weird for them.

Its still infinitely more successful than Marathon.
Professor Donger said:
What's funny is that if it was run by a smaller dev studio the game would definitely be considered a success. But because Bungie is so big and owned by Sony, who injected so much money into it while not meeting player numbers, the game is a failure. There was a video by the Devs for Wardogs where they mention that as long as their game mantains a player count of about 2,000 on steam they can keep the lights on and continue updating the game. Which was a pretty neat transparent thing for them to say. They point out that games like Hell Let Loose are "successful" and get constant updates despite their relatively low player count.

But again that's also because games like Hell Let Loose and Wardogs are indie games that had much lower budgets compared to Marathon.

Bungie really should have outright come out and said the amount of players they need to maintain the servers instead of just going "Well we're totes gonna keep the game alive no matter what."

Here's the video in question with the timestamp for those interested.

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Professor Donger said:
Something interesting is Arc Raiders has been losing players as well. It's 24 hour peak on Sunday was 131k, Monday was 103k and yesterday was 95k.

It's also apparently lost 123k players since March.

Though this definitely doesn't mean that the game is failing, but the devs dropping the ball for it wouldn't surprise me just going off of how they treated the Finals. Embark has a bad habit of seeing problems the fans have with their games and overcorrecting.
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as someone with MANY hours in Arc Raiders I can tell you why.

they add annoying, painful, and strong enemies to the game as a form of content updates.. the Firefly enemies and Comet Enemies are fierce, and a fun little thing to deal with, but for alot of players they are just annoying little grim reapers, for the Hurricane update you got those two fuckers, and the Hurricane Map Modifyer, which added rarer potential loot locations but the annoyings of running around in an active hurricane.

then they followed this up with a map condition/mode that dropped temporarily breechable Arc structures that fly down and have rare arc materials and blueprints for one of the only two new guns since release, however, they are guarded by an ABSURD detail of Arc, including the new heavy arc, the Vaporizer, which shoots frickin laserbeams out of its head, oh did I say one? every Assessor is guarded by two vaporizers and a Rocketeer and a dozen smaller fliers.

seeing the picture i'm painting? all their additional content is just added difficulty (which I personally enjoy) its not a whole lot of new things to actually fuck around with, and its FRUSTRATING for the average player to want the new blueprint, but the Assessors are daunting to actually breech, get the required luck the blueprint is there, and escape without being vaporized... players haven't had anything truly new to do since the Stella Montis map dropped months ago.
 
Zenos Yae Viator said:
seeing the picture i'm painting? all their additional content is just added difficulty (which I personally enjoy) its not a whole lot of new things to actually fuck around with, and its FRUSTRATING for the average player to want the new blueprint, but the Assessors are daunting to actually breech, get the required luck the blueprint is there, and escape without being vaporized... players haven't had anything truly new to do since the Stella Montis map dropped months ago.
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Yeah I have a friend who played Arc Raiders religiously since release and he's pretty much stopped because of the issues you listed
 
Professor Donger said:
I'm pretty sure planetary immune systems and consciousness has been some leftist scifi bullshit for a while
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Not exactly science fiction but certainly leftist. Well, communist. Hardly what people think of as leftist today. The backdrop of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and it's sequels is that same soviet noosphere, the planetary immune system reacting violently to human intervention.

but it's an allegory for good environmental stewardship practices, not an indictement of trying to manage the environment in the first place. the first stewards absolutely fucked the whole thing up and now everyone has to deal with the consequences. if it was written by jews then taking agency to solve the problem would be seen as a negative instead of a matter of basic survival.
 
Oliver Onions said:
Or they just needed to release something to remind people the PS5 still exists. Has Sony got any other AAA releases billed for this year?
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For better or for worse the PS5 seems to be doing alright even without any actual exclusives. But you raise as good point. Apart from maybe the Wolverine game I can't think of anything else for this year which is pretty embarrassing. Maybe Sony is already gearing up for the PS6 launch.
 
I Know 孤独のせい said:
For better or for worse the PS5 seems to be doing alright even without any actual exclusives. But you raise as good point. Apart from maybe the Wolverine game I can't think of anything else for this year which is pretty embarrassing. Maybe Sony is already gearing up for the PS6 launch.
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The only other games I can think of would be the next part of FF7's shitty remake
 
Oliver Onions said:
Doesn't this go against the entire spirit of the genre? Maybe they're hoping this will draw in more casuals if they create an incentive to discourage such TAHXIC behaviour.
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Spirit? I don't get why would any serious sweaty PvPer play an extraction shooter in the first place when there are actually competitive pvp games without all that looting and extracting bullshit available. Some of them even for free and they are all somewhat different from each other so you can keep it fresh.
The only reason I can think of is that they want to stomp noobs? You can do it in other games too and be more impressive doing it because everyone is somewhat on equal ground unlike in extraction shooter.
 
hawkisnight said:
Spirit? I don't get why would any serious sweaty PvPer play an extraction shooter in the first place when there are actually competitive pvp games without all that looting and extracting bullshit available. Some of them even for free and they are all somewhat different from each other so you can keep it fresh.
The only reason I can think of is that they want to stomp noobs? You can do it in other games too and be more impressive doing it because everyone is somewhat on equal ground unlike in extraction shooter.
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There's probably a subset of pvp "sweats" that enjoy scrubstomping with (relatively) overpowered gear outside the reach of casuals and weekend warriors. You saw this a scant couple of times during D2 where some out of reach weapon dominated crucible lobbies with an entire slew of tryhards capitalizing on it, though more often it was a relatively common weapon being completely overtuned. Not saying that it's common, just that it exists.
 
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