Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[Toxic BRAAAAP Mask]

Death by a thousand cuts

 

[Swine Schwein]

who suggests adding options to soulslikes to make them easier

I'm very retardedly, bicuriously and fatly against such things for mainly two reasons.

I would use those options myself in a moment of frustration, robbing myself of something crucial when it comes to the appreciation of the whole thing later on. I don't care how autistic this is, what matters is that I'm right, beautiful and valid.

Also, if the devs get used to optional difficulty, the line gets dimmer where the "real and intended difficulty" even is, if they at all times have to take those things into consideration. Currently it's an integral part of the experience, the world doesn't bend over for me and my sensibilities. It's tied to immersion in a strange way. I'm adventuring in a strange world where I'm just a little speck of dust and a piece of shit (unlike the real world where I'm loved and important), not in a diluted, shitty F-tier world where I have any power over it that goes beyond game mechanics.

I don't give a shit if people mod their games with easy modes. I care about my own experience. The games are already full of items and mechanics that make them easier, but that of course requires people to actually play the games instead of complaining about not being granted a free passage to the end credits.

 

[Frightened Rabbit]

This is how I feel about people who go absolutely feral at anyone who suggests adding options to soulslikes to make them easier, or a straight up easy mode. Nobody's forcing you to use it if you'd rather continue gitting gud.

To be completely fair, I can see someone who buys a game purely for PVP being against the implementation of a PVE mode, as it can pull away resources from the PVP mode they like and ultimately the PVP mode gets put on the back burner as PVE is more played.
It's like getting a game you like for one part but then a new wave of shitters comes because of something else and as time goes on the dev caters more to the new shitheads, you'd be pissed off.
Fandom infiltration isn't exclusive to Troons, you should get more autistically mad about the media you consume.

 

[Oliver Onions]

I would use those options myself in a moment of frustration,

The games are already full of items and mechanics that make them easier,

These feel like a contradiction. It's true there are already numerous existing methods to make these games easier, so if you're capable of not using them to cheese your way through the game, you could similarly ignore any other features that decrease the difficulty, no?

It's like getting a game you like for one part but then a new wave of shitters comes because of something else and as time goes on the dev caters more to the new shitheads, you'd be pissed off.

Divided resources is the fairest argument against it and one I personally support, but that cuts both ways. I used to buy CoD games exclusively for the campaign because I don't give a shit about multiplayer, so when the latter gradually became the focus of the series I just stopped buying them. (That's why I stopped buying most AAA games tbh, because virtually all of them have pivoted to open-world checklist slop.)

I'm obviously in the minority in the CoD example, but in the case of something like Marathon and the gross disparity between the numbers it's currently doing and the numbers Bungie needs it to do the devs really aren't in a position to be picky when it comes to their audience. They need as many people as possible lining up to buy this game even if it does piss off the PVP purists.

you should get more autistically mad about the media you consume.

Life's too short and I'm too old. If something I used to enjoy becomes pozzed I point and laugh and stop consooming it.

 

[Disc]

Odds on it hitting below 10k this week?

Now confirmed.

It's really not, you guys desperately are hoping for concord and its not matching up to that at all.

You do realise the practice of watching games and companies crash and burn has long preceded Concord, yes? We don't need fireworks tossed in to enjoy a good bonfire.

Like, I agree that it's not going to be a concord, but I'm not here for that. I'm here to watch people cope and seethe about the game they claimed was gonna be the Next Big Thing flop. It doesn't matter if it's just a flop or a concord-level disaster, the seethe is still all the sweeter.

I would use those options myself in a moment of frustration, robbing myself of something crucial when it comes to the appreciation of the whole thing later on. I don't care how autistic this is, what matters is that I'm right, beautiful and valid.

Also, if the devs get used to optional difficulty, the line gets dimmer where the "real and intended difficulty" even is, if they at all times have to take those things into consideration. Currently it's an integral part of the experience, the world doesn't bend over for me and my sensibilities. It's tied to immersion in a strange way. I'm adventuring in a strange world where I'm just a little speck of dust and a piece of shit (unlike the real world where I'm loved and important), not in a diluted, shitty F-tier world where I have any power over it that goes beyond game mechanics.

I don't give a shit if people mod their games with easy modes. I care about my own experience. The games are already full of items and mechanics that make them easier, but that of course requires people to actually play the games instead of complaining about not being granted a free passage to the end credits.

These feel like a contradiction. It's true there are already numerous existing methods to make these games easier, so if you're capable of not using them to cheese your way through the game, you could similarly ignore any other features that decrease the difficulty, no?

What he's poorly (porkly?) trying to explain is that in soulslike players have issues with explicit difficulty modifiers, not implicit ones. And good soulslikes tend to honour that - rather than having an explicit difficulty slider they have other in-built mechanics that make the game easier for those who use them.

For example, in Elden Ring, the first story boss Margit the Fell is quite a steep jump in difficulty from most of the Limgrave shitters. However, depending on your playstyle, you can:
- Rush him straight-up with base gear and tackle him head-on.
- Amble your way through Limgrave, pick up a few upgrades to your flask, weapon and stats, then face him clean.
- Really search the map, find patches, and buy the item "Margit's Shackle" that stuns him in phase 1.
- Go south and get even more good loot to fight him with, or go east to caelid and get the REALLY good shit like greyoll the easily-bullied 50000 runes
- Get a spirit ash and use them to distract him from hitting you.
- Use a ranged spell to step back and avoid most of his attacks.
- Summon another player at roughly the same level at you and give margit a health and damage increase in exchange for a friend just as competent as you are.

Each of these function like a difficulty setting, but because the scaling is coming from the player's exploration and choices, not the boss, it feels a lot more organic. You don't ask the world to play nice, you play dirty, and that's a great way to keep up the remorselessly unfair feeling of these games while still making them very doable.

 

[Swine Schwein]

so if you're capable of not using them to cheese your way through the game, you could similarly ignore any other features that decrease the difficulty, no?

No, because I'm a retard with a temper. I need to be protected from myself. It's a whole different thing to find something powerful in a game than just nerfing the game world entirely. I'm not mad at powerful items, nor do I need to pretend they don't exist.

And like I said, it's about the integral integrity of the world created by the devs. It's important to me that it's not fragmented, starting from the development philosophy. The world is how someone envisioned it, including the different aspects of challenge, not how gimped or buffed I personally want it to be at any given moment. Someone wants it to be of certain quality for every player. I fucking love that. Just by having the power to change that, I'd feel like something would be lost.

"Yeah but that sounds like a personal thing" well it is.

Arguing about this, especially in a Marathon thread where people are kind of anticipating about Bungie's future, would make more sense if something like Elden Ring wasn't a huge hit and if it didn't sell many times over their own pre-launch estimates (if I recall right they would've been okay with 4 million copies sold).
With FromSoft games in particular, the "easy mode would bring in more people" argument happens every fucking time so the normies (which are now a large part of the audience) absolutely know what's up, but From sticks to their guns and their customer base just seems to grow. It seems like their approach to games is exactly what people fucking want. This shit is so popular now that it's kind of cool to hate it because of its mass appeal.

But it's a Marathon thread, I'm not going to continue about this here.

 

[regalterry]

why on earth would you play pvp

I assume what you could generously refer to as "people", have so little going on in their lives that being a sweat and actively ruining the fun of other people is the only joy they can derive out of their existence.

Kinda like being a janny now that I think about it.

Imagine making a universe of fucked up and cool futuro armies and then you tell the player that he needs to play as the fucking dweeb and crawl on the ground so be doesn't get atomized in half a second.

Yeah, Forever Winter is infuriating.

Such a cool setting would have made for a perfect STALKER wannabe. Instead it's a gay extraction shooter, when they could have just made the game single player, with coop as a fun bonus, and for the perpetually unemployed, also added a permadeath mode.

Also, change the premise from being the human equivalent of a cockroach to something cool like a mercenary, because yes you faggot devs, I do want to be that guy.

They would have likely made far more money that way.

That being said, the character models are utter shit - the artists obviously failing to grasp why you use stylized characters.

 

[Oliver Onions]

What he's poorly (porkly?) trying to explain is that in soulslike players have issues with explicit difficulty modifiers, not implicit ones.

Implicit modifiers are what I'm in favour of, so it's probably my fault for not being clearer in my original post (although personally I'm also not opposed to devs adding a Games Journalist Mode, so long as it's their choice/optional).

It's a whole different thing to find something powerful in a game than just nerfing the game world entirely.

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about, sorry for the confusion. For example, I think the Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring are a perfect example of a QoL improvement that give players who just want to keep throwing themselves at the boss that option, while others can suffer the runback from the bonfire if it makes them feel like a Real Gamer™. It's a best of both worlds solution.

Having said that I'm also not opposed to an overall nerf so long as the option remains to play the game un-nerfed if that's what players want. I'm no game dev expert but I doubt it would be that hard to patch in when all it's doing is adjusting sliders.

Spoiler: TL;DR Old man yells at Blasphemous II

An example that's fresh in my memory is Blasphemous II, which is a phenomenal game I'd recommend to any fan of Metroidvanias/Soulslikes, but since release the devs have patched it to make the player significantly weaker and the enemies significantly stronger, and it's purely artificial: literally all they've done is give enemies 3x as much health while making the player take 3x as much damage and deal 3x less. Ultimately it changes nothing about how you approach the game, everything just takes longer.

I didn't personally mind these changes because it feels about the same as the first game did to me, but when all you're doing is moving sliders around to alter stats I see no reason you can't have an Easy mode (pre-nerf player and enemy stats), Medium (pre-nerf player, post-buff enemies) and Hard (current stats).

 

[Civillian 18]

Now confirmed.

Wait is this not the regular Tuesday maintenance window? I saw this and just assumed it had to be.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

To be completely fair, I can see someone who buys a game purely for PVP being against the implementation of a PVE mode, as it can pull away resources from the PVP mode they like and ultimately the PVP mode gets put on the back burner as PVE is more played.
It's like getting a game you like for one part but then a new wave of shitters comes because of something else and as time goes on the dev caters more to the new shitheads, you'd be pissed off.
Fandom infiltration isn't exclusive to Troons, you should get more autistically mad about the media you consume.

This isn't how it works in these games, in Tarkov any changes to PvE would trickle down to PvP because all you could do is change the AI AFAIK. Maybe there are tweaks to loot pools but in most of these titles you could easily do parallel changes unless you have to make radical adjustments to AI to fix the lack of players. A lot of these games already have the shells to be fully capable of being pure PVE with minimal adjustments

 

[The Ugly One]

To be completely fair, I can see someone who buys a game purely for PVP being against the implementation of a PVE mode, as it can pull away resources from the PVP mode they like and ultimately the PVP mode gets put on the back burner as PVE is more played.

There's not a single PVP game in history that failed because too much money was spent on single-player content. The success or failure of a PVP game seems almost completely unrelated to its budget. LoL, Fortnite, PUBG, and Counterstrike weren't big budget games. If you hit the market with an addictive gameplay loop that isn't quite like anything else, you win, and if you don't have that, you die.

And the fact is taking away single-player doesn't convert those players to competitive gamers. They just quit. What if Destiny had shipped without the PVE content, would all those players have bought a pure battle arena game? No. They would have played something else.

 

[Frightened Rabbit]

This isn't how it works in these games, in Tarkov any changes to PvE would trickle down to PvP because all you could do is change the AI AFAIK.

I would consider Tarkov to be a different beast, Tarkov is the idea of a single man Nikita who is also the owner of the company, and he's also really fucking stubborn with the fact Tarkov is a PVP game, so it's clear that he won't divert funds to make a PVE, at most, he'll incorporate the server binaries into the game to let you host inside the app like PVE already does, but I would argue, Tarkov fucking sucks for PVE.

 

[The Doom Slayer]

Wait is this not the regular Tuesday maintenance window? I saw this and just assumed it had to be.

Nope, that was before maintenance started.

 

[Disc]

Wait is this not the regular Tuesday maintenance window? I saw this and just assumed it had to be.

To be fair yes, this is Tuesday and maintenance has now started, but that's only now at time of writing. When I posted was several hours before the drop, and the usual disclaimer handed out for a milestone at tuesday has never stopped the milestone being hit in the rest of the week.

If it really bothers anyone, take it as me saying that it 100% will drop below 10k without maintenance hanging over it some time this week.

 

[Civillian 18]

To be fair yes, this is Tuesday and maintenance has now started, but that's only now at time of writing. When I posted was several hours before the drop, and the usual disclaimer handed out for a milestone at tuesday has never stopped the milestone being hit in the rest of the week.

If it really bothers anyone, take it as me saying that it 100% will drop below 10k without maintenance hanging over it some time this week.

I am the last person to be defending Bungo, I just did not expect a natural dip so far so soon

 

[ScurvyRat]

The Forever winter is the closet I have played to PvE Co-op extraction shooters that you are describing that is decently fun.

I really want that game to be good, but the developers are insanely lazy.
I got a bug with the install where I have to uninstall/re-install every time they push a patch. Its a fucking nightmare and the devs refuse to fix it.
Not in the sense that they don't know about it or my bug report went unheard.
I joined their discord to specifically report this bug and spoke with a dev directly. They told me they have no intention of fixing this bug.

The Forever Winter is a hard DO NOT BUY/DO NOT PLAY/DO NOT GIVE THESE INCOMPETENT FUCKS YOUR MONEY from me

 

[Kofi Drinka]

So Marathon is converting to a left 4 dead clone with 3 man teams trying to extract loot?

 

[hawkisnight]

While I don't think it's actually a terrible game like Concord or Highguard

Concord wasn't exactly terrible either when I tried it in free beta. It's just ugly and uninteresting... like marathon. Concord didn't have benefit of having battered woman syndrome fanbase or a known IP.

 

[Swine Schwein]

Concord didn't have benefit of having battered woman syndrome fanbase

Benefit? I think there's a significant number of those battered women rooting against Marathon. Bungie just hasn't touched  me them lately like it used to. It's because of that new whore game.

I'd bet a gallon of my own piss that Marathon would be doing better if D2 was never a thing and a bunch of pew pew nerds never got repeatedly burned.

 

[JohnWick]

> Release a game mode with 2 maps as a full game with a $40 price tag.
> Why is the game dying?

IDK bunghole, probably the same reason why I see 5 $30 expansions for Destiny 2 during a Steam sale I turn 360 degrees and walk away.