Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[creaturestorm]

Holy shit was there server maint going on yesterday or today? Because if not, wew lad.

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Well it was Thursday.

How do you get that lore, out of curiosity?

You are pretty spot on.

There is also environmental storytelling, but you're most likely to miss it due to the nature of the game. You can't breathe in the environment and enjoy it for what it is, you risk standing still or being out of position both of which can get you and your team killed.

The rare loot in the game functions as clues or bread crumbs to understanding the world, narratives, and over all meta plot of the game. Each map has its own story within it, I believe the psychotic AI is the story of outpost. I just haven't extracted with the right items to read about it in the codex. Some times the rare items are clues in it of itself, like Arachne has a strong penchant for children's items. Arachne loves children's books, toys, and other things associated with the youth and will reward you for extracting with it and providing them with it. What that means.... I cant fucking tell you, but it doesn't sound good. That guy with the tattoo might have some serious regrets pretty soon.

To clarify: The rare loot will open up codex entries. The codex can be accessed from the main menu from outside of raid. The entries are a mixture of images, audio files, and text files. You must successfully exfil with the item in your bags to unlock the corresponding codex entry. Completing priority tasks can also unlock codex entries, these are usually supplementary audio logs for added context. Images below for what this looks like in game.



There is a mission briefing and debriefing after every priority contract (main mission storyline quest). The faction rep might say one thing, but then you might learn something contrary to that or something that recontextualizes what is happening through some of the item clues. A few times if your paying enough attention you can find intersections in what the various factions are trying to accomplish, they all have their own agendas and narratives, but some times there is enough cross over that you can glean new information about what's actually happening.

There are also some visual clues foreshadowing the story to come. There are also audio, visual and literary themes happening, like how the marathon is shaped like a sword and its stuck in a stone... how Durandal is not only every one's favorite AI, but also a sword of legend. The game never ever says this or even hints at it directly, but it would seem to me that Durandal is currently stuck on the marathon once again and needs you to pull him out from it. There is nothing in the game to suggest this other than a very brief visual.

The game never winks at you or nudges you. It really respects your intelligence when it comes to the story telling, but I cant think fast enough when the bullets start flying. Another problem is that some times these clues and tasks take for ever to find and by the time you discover them or accomplish the task you've long forgotten what the story was so far. It's hard to keep track of what's happening when your clocking into the CBT factory all night.

I'm enjoying the dark creaturestorm saga.

I think there are a lot of people who are so blinded by their hate for this game that they’ve mistaken my lack of negativity around it for fanboyism. I’m not rooting for Bungie, I haven't played a bungie game besides Marathon in nearly 20 years. I appreciate this game despite it's flaws and I’m just looking at the situation realistically. I recognize that a $250 million live service game pulling only 20k players is a business disaster. I would prefer Marathon continue to be developed for a long time coming. I don't want to go back to Tarkov, which is a much worse game if you aren't some kind of /k/ gear queer.

 

[Sigg Kyle]

Sony go cut bungo like plantain for this yeye game wey dem fuck up.

 

[Steven Chapman]

We're at around 18-20k concurrent now. How bad does this get before it goes f2p or shuts down?

It’ll be soon. Sony earnings call is early May, Paul “I love Tranny dick” Tassi just reported that there are officially more people in the studio working on Marathon than Destiny 2 (panic reassignment essentially). I think we’ll see a full on shut down around the sixth month mark, MAYBE it’ll survive to one year so Bungie doesn’t get sued for false advert; they essentially promised in pre-release marketing that they had a year of content planned out, and lord knows Daddy Sony doesn’t want another costly lawsuit.

 

[Swine Schwein]

Paul “I love Tranny dick” Tassi just reported that there are officially more people in the studio working on Marathon than Destiny 2

What the fuck, just by looking at the state of D2 one would have thought Bungie had at least 80% of its personnel on Marathon for a long time but I guess not.

What are the supposed masses working on D2 even doing? Are 90% of them just there to eat cheese cake in their fucking tranny club meeting rooms? At least Marathon looks like a real game.

 

[creaturestorm]

Tassi just reported that there are officially more people in the studio working on Marathon than Destiny 2

Isnt destiny 2 a dead game?

 

[Steven Chapman]

Isnt destiny 2 a dead game?

Hey, even a hospice nurse has to check the morphine IV every once in awhile.

What the fuck, just by looking at the state of D2 one would have thought Bungie had at least 80% of its personnel on Marathon for a long time but I guess not.

What are the supposed masses working on D2 even doing? Are 90% of them just there to eat cheese cake in their fucking tranny club meeting rooms? At least Marathon looks like a real game.

Literally nothing. Even before development on Androgyny: The Video Game started, they struggled to put out quality content in a timely manner. Add in the layoffs and sending half the PVP team over to Marathon and it’s slowed to essentially nothing content wise.

 

[creaturestorm]

Hey, even a hospice nurse has to check the morphine IV every once in awhile.

I get that, but if the game is actually in maintenance mode then of course 90%+ of the staff are going to be focused on the new cow that needs milking.

 

[Steven Chapman]

I get that, but if the game is actually in maintenance mode then of course 90%+ of the staff are going to be focused on the new cow that needs milking.

Remember, they said D2 will not be affected by Marathons development. Kek.


There is ALLEGEDLY content being made, even before the 3 month delay. There is supposed to be another expansion this year, taking place in Old Chicago. So, as much as we joke, there is (A L L E G E D L Y) a dev team dedicated to D2 still, and even then, as inefficient and low quality as that team has been, they’re still being milked for the Marathon team.

 

[The Secret Sauce]

What the fuck, just by looking at the state of D2 one would have thought Bungie had at least 80% of its personnel on Marathon for a long time but I guess not.

I'd wager that bloated zombie companies like Bungie have most of their employees devoted to doing nothing at any given time.

 

[Tanner Glass]

In the interview, he explains there was no clear foundation for the project. There was no “Titan bible,” no design guide, no real documentation, and no shared vision of what they were making. Each person had their own interpretation, staff weren’t aligned on what the game was supposed to be and so when they weren’t waiting for their turn to work, artists and other contributors created things that didn’t fit the project’s scope or direction, and much of it was never planned for use. The result was a lot of wasted effort and material.

Titan was in development for 7 years.

It is a fairly well known scope and project though, it just didn't materialize. We'll never know the "behind the scenes" but the impression I got at a time from being dialed into the drama is as follows.

- Blizzard (~1999) is chugging along, until they explode into one of the best developers of the era with a series of absolute bangers (Diablo, Starcraft+BW, Diablo 2+LOD, and Warcraft 3+FT) all inside of 6 years. Quite possibly one of the best runs a developer ever has had in all of video game history, even to this day.
- The crown jewel of Blizzard would be World of Warcraft - which would drastically reshape the company. In the run up to making a MMO, they recruited a bunch of of Everquest nerds to help develop the core gameplay system, which largely revolved around making Everquest drastically less painful to play (no XP loss, faster crafting, more accessible dungeons, etc). One of which was Jeff Kaplan
- World of Warcraft explodes and starts generating untold amounts of money, prestige, and money - Blizzard turns into what was described as "an adult daycare center". Games that are in development just kind of go on in light, unsupervised development forever. It's worth noting that allegedly Diablo 3 (2001) and Starcraft 2 (2003) were both in development in the run up to WoW's release.
- Blizzard gets bought by Activision in 2007, and Bobby Kotick decides to start forcing Blizzard to actually make games again - which people seemed to hate for some reason.
- This is felt across all IPs, everyone has very clear marching orders. Starcraft 2 needed to release some version of the game that contained Multiplayer to start moving people off 1999's Brood War. This wound up being Starcraft 2 : Wings of Liberty, which contained (after ~7 years of dev time) multiplayer, an oppressive EULA, and 1/3rd of a story campaign centering around Terran only
- Diablo 3 needed to start moving people off of Diablo 2's Lord of Destruction (from 2000), expand the game back to consoles, and to insert a revenue stream into the "real money economy" that sprang up around Diablo 2 (through sites like d2jsp.net) - leading to D3's mediocre release after ~11 years of dev time
- From WoW's release 2004, a massive push in the games industry forms to find the "WoW killer". Tabula Rasa, RIFT, SWG's relaunch, and so on - studios are hunting hard to try and knock WoW off the pillar and Kotick tasks Blizzard to take everything they've learned from WoW and put that into a next generation MMO to stay ahead of WoW's eventual downfall - which becomes "Project Titan"

If there was a major lesson to learn at this point from Blizzard for Blizzard it was simple - they did really well at cleaning up games that already kind of existed (Starcraft/Warcraft coming out of other RTSes of the time, Diablo coming from Gauntlet, and WoW coming out of Everquest) but struggled massively when they actually had to create something, which was the issue that would show up for Titan.

- No lessons from WoW were applied even at conception. The game would be set in the future but also in the real world but would center around superheroes but also secret agents. Also those would all be player characters and would day jobs in between combat cycles which would include cooking and running businesses. They could not even conceptualize how this would work or how it would be engaging to players to participate in the gameplay loop.
- They largely wanted a smaller gameplay loop on a single server and then would break players away for the "main" gameplay loop - further disjointing the cohesion of the game.
- They locked in to class design but couldn't find a way to have more active combat without changing to First Person Team Combat (aka Team Fortress 2), they locked into Talent Tree (because WoW had them) but couldn't balance them at all.

Eventually - the "combat" gameplay loop was focused on by a small team and became Overwatch, which was successful and clearly should not have been cancelled like Kaplan (allegedly) wanted.


I like Kaplan and feel for him - but him whining about it now is just sour grapes. Blizzard's hubris wasn't getting into "Titan", it was every senior director (him included) coming off of the gas when the WoW money started rolling in and then being unable to perform under new management. I deeply suspect that Kaplan was initially excited to work on Titan in 2007 but was extremely mad by 2010 that it wasn't going to become anything, WoW was still going to be tentpole for the company, and that Ion Hazzaokstis got promoted to Game Director instead of him. On top of that, even with being given Overwatch - Kaplan put his Blizzard hubris on full display, a game that just kind of existed as a polished copy of another game - it just sat there. It released, was monetized, and then nothing for ~4 years, just recycled events, skins, a battlepass, and a drip feed of new heroes. Even after working on WoW, pouring all of that time into Titan, and then years on Overwatch, he just could not conceptualize a PVE mode/story mode and left stamping his feet which he's apparently doing still to this day. He is not a person who should be speaking about the hubris of anyone because he doesn't see it in himself.

 

[Swine Schwein]

I'd wager that bloated zombie companies like Bungie have most of their employees devoted to doing nothing at any given time.

Sure, but they had already laid off like four million people. I wonder what THEY were doing before getting fired? Probably their jobs, someone just got the "keepers" and "fire these first" lists mixed at first

 

[The Secret Sauce]

Sure, but they had already laid off like four million people. I wonder what THEY were doing before getting fired? Probably their jobs, someone just got the "keepers" and "fire these first" lists mixed at first

I'll admit to talking out of my ass here, but the way I envision Bungie is a gayer and less funny version of Brazil. The management spends their time having meetings about the upcoming weekly meetings with every department. The grunts spend their time attending HR seminars, attending meetings, and preparing presentations for their next meeting. They get a paltry amount of actual work done each week, then spend half of the next week undoing what they accomplished because it conflicts with the Vice Co-Chair of Design Philosophy's new idea for the main menu layout. This is obviously a horrible system for getting anything done, but it's even more horrible at attracting and maintaining anyone with creativity or talent. Again, I'm talking out of my ass, but this is my explanation for why half a decade of dev time and hundreds of thousands of man hours go into AAA games that flop so hard.

 

[Toxic BRAAAAP Mask]

At minimum two days out of the week are combing for plagarized art, another day for gay sex and MtG troon tourneys, one for DEI meetings and sensitivity checks... So I'd wager half a day of work gets finalized each week. Thank god it's not Canada where devs only work 4 days a week, where do they find time for the gay sex?

 

[Oliver Onions]

I really think there is at least one total desperation move in store before they abandon the game. Like FF a realm reborn, but probably more like Anthem.

If you mean Anthem 2.0 which never came out then I agree. All the devs actually managed to add to Anthem between launch and work being suspended on the project was a single multi-stage raid event. It was actually kind of cool because unlike other raids in the game it actually required a team to co-ordinate, but you'd regularly time out on the first section because retards wouldn't read the objectives.

And ultimately it was a pointless addition any way because they still refused to fix the core issue that the loot was still so shit there was no point grinding anything.

Anyway, I can't see it happening with Marathon. I think they'll commit to a year's worth of minimal roadmap content then wrap up development and leave it in maintenance mode, same as what happened with Suicide Squad.

 

[creaturestorm]

they did really well at cleaning up games that already kind of existed

This was known even to the consumer back then, they were incredibly good at polishing games and forming a diamond out of the rough.

WoW itself wasn't in the best shape when it was first released, but people believed they could easily fix it as they had many other things, unlike today where we know they will just make a turd even more smelly.

Blizzard's hubris wasn't getting into "Titan", it was every senior director (him included) coming off of the gas when the WoW money started rolling in and then being unable to perform under new management

That's basically what he explained in the video though. That they had just created an infinite money machine that shaped culture, something they built with a rag tag group of misfits ended up being one of their most successful releases. He then describes how they were absolutely laxed in the approach and how they went on to hire a hundred people, the best in the industry, thinking they could make anything profitable even more so with the best and brightest.

If you mean Anthem 2.0 which never came out then I agree.

yes.

There is ALLEGEDLY content being made, even before the 3 month delay

So it's not actually ended it's development cycle and now bungo has two games that are sinking ships?

Yeah... I dont know... I think if I were running the ship I'd go full hands on deck for D2 and not Marathon. There is an audience for that game that is magnitudes bigger even if they aren't playing anymore, might be able to draw them back in.

Also my thoughts about them making Marathon a PvE game might not materialize, you cant make a product that competes with your other product. It might just be plug pull for Marathon.

 

[regalterry]

Sure, but they had already laid off like four million people. I wonder what THEY were doing before getting fired? Probably their jobs, someone just got the "keepers" and "fire these first" lists mixed at first

Okay, imagine this - you're a woke Western company and want to feel good about yourself. Getting them sweet finkbucks is also a nice perk.

So what do you do? You hire a bunch of niggers, browns, women, fags and troons and put them to work. It's all going to be fine, you have a reliable moneyprinter that keeps printing out more money that you know what to do with.

Only, it turns out hiring people based on what they are, instead of what they can do, is a bad idea, but now it's too late, you've already virtue signaled about your new direction to everyone, chased away all your old audience in favor of the new, fresh modern audience, and there's no going back.

You can't fire the subhuman liberals on your payroll because they're going to screech on social media about racism, sexism, #MeToo, glass ceilings et al, which will not only draw the ire of the angry woke mob against you, but you're going to get an angry call from the kikes, threatening to take away the ESG bucks, and all your friends and peers will ostracize you for being a chud.

So you grit your teeth and hope that if you hire more woke biomass the sheer number of them will offset their incompetence, laziness and stupidity. You can't bring in actually talented people because nobody competent wants to work in your cesspit, and the few naive enough to take the bait quickly resign when they see the freakshow the company has become.

Hiring more leftists also doesn't work, so now you've stuck with even more freaks, treating their job like an adult daycare, and what's worse they are actively colluding to sabotage and kick out all your remaining competent hires, so you then attempt to outsource as much development as possible to jeet sweatshops in India, working those subhuman goblins like they're niggers on a plantation, and pray they can unfuck your game.

The project has been in development for the better pat of a decade and being "worked" on by an army of retards and Indians now numbering in the thousands. But hey, human wave attacks are a staple of leftist regimes, throwing bodies at a problem is the Marxist way!

That also doesn't pan out, because Indians are retarded, and also scammers, so when your moneyprinter eventually starts running out of juice, you ship out the malignant turd that's been festering in the bowels of your company for the past 10 years to the public, only for it to crater.

Meanwhile a game made by two White guys in their spare time in a basement proceeds to sell millions of copies.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

It’ll be soon. Sony earnings call is early May, Paul “I love Tranny dick” Tassi just reported that there are officially more people in the studio working on Marathon than Destiny 2 (panic reassignment essentially). I think we’ll see a full on shut down around the sixth month mark, MAYBE it’ll survive to one year so Bungie doesn’t get sued for false advert; they essentially promised in pre-release marketing that they had a year of content planned out, and lord knows Daddy Sony doesn’t want another costly lawsuit.

I wonder how hardcore Destiny fans feel about this xD

 

[Thomas Talus]

So it's not actually ended it's development cycle and now bungo has two games that are sinking ships?

Since the end of the year of content associated with The Final Shape, it's been on a sort of diet release structure where they planned to have two semi-annual releases with actual content (Edge of Fate and Renegades for this past year), plus two "fixes and adjustments" updates done 3 months after each content release. They've been running behind schedule, though, and the start of the next content cycle has been delayed. It seems like people who were still around did like the content of Renegades, but no one likes the Portal system of accessing content and being forced into a tedious power grind that was introduced in Edge of Fate, the PvP population has entered a death spiral, and time-limited cyclical events have been marred by major quality-of-life problems not being addressed in a timely fashion, plus a lot of people decided they had reached a good point to get off the ride after The Final Shape.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

The 20% sale on Marathon still barely cracked 20k players. I'm expecting the weekend numbers to jump up, but not hitting 30k and not outperforming last weekend.

 

[creaturestorm]

Today they have given priority matchmaking to people who are using mics, a positive change that will no doubt drive even more people from the game. lmao.