Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[moocow]

I dunno what exactly my point is with all this. I guess it's to say I don't envy a game designer's job one bit, honestly.

Oh I'd love to work as a game designer, especially to work specifically on "game balance" issues. Your job is to literally make sure things are 1) "fair" and 2) "fun." Only an incompetent, cynical asshole wouldn't genuinely enjoy that kind of work. Even if you're constantly fucking up enough that some people publicly hate you, fuck it, at least you're trying to give people a good time. Not that I think there's any genuinely enthusiastic game designers out there in AAA anymore. It's cynics all the way down.

It's not even that hard to figure out the difference between somebody whining about X mechanic/perk/strength being "too OP" because they just suck at the game and their specific playstyle is losing to players with greater skill, and somebody complaining legitimately about something that, when it appears/is used in a round, always ensures victory. And it's not even so much about making sure there's absolutely never an OP "I win" button, but providing opportunities (and means) for other players to have a "heh, not so fast, champ" button they can push in return.

As you said, nerfs shouldn't be too severe and buffs shouldn't be too strong. Whenever I see any game make a vicious nerf to something, I know they made a devastating mistake during the design phase or they're listening to a handful of whiny bitches instead of more valuable players. Any numeric "thingy" being hit with a 2x factor (or more) change (up or down) is a HUGE red flag something shady is happening or a major design fuckup is being fixed that should have been caught during playtesting. If you're cutting a skill or weapon's damage down by half, there's something else going wrong unless you're also doing something else to compensate, like reducing the cooldown by 60% or almost-but-not-quite doubling the fire rate. At the same time, if you're doubling or tripling some class' damage reduction to X element type, you should probably just retire the class and replace it with something different.

Something else just occurred to me: nobody ever seems to revert a nerf/buff after they implement it. They always seem to just keep "tweaking" things around it when things go wrong rather than saying "oh wow that didn't work, let's revert that for now and try something else." Never an admission "oh hey this change sucked, sorry," always just "we've received reports this absolutely perfect change wot shall never be reversed is causing X side effect, so we'll be nerfing X's Y beams too, lol!" They're allergic to admitting error or fault. Sad to say that's another clean alignment with leftoid thinking.

 

[The Doom Slayer]

First day under 15k.

 

[fml]

It's not even that hard to figure out the difference between somebody whining about X mechanic/perk/strength being "too OP" because they just suck at the game and their specific playstyle is losing to players with greater skill, and somebody complaining legitimately about something that, when it appears/is used in a round, always ensures victory. And it's not even so much about making sure there's absolutely never an OP "I win" button, but providing opportunities (and means) for other players to have a "heh, not so fast, champ" button they can push in return.

Crazy thing is that the devs have this info. Modern live service games send more telemetry from matches than an FBI tapped windows feature. Developers can clearly see what is being used 99% of the time. If some item, ability or gun is rocking an over 90% pick-rate then there is clearly a reason. The fun part for a developer comes from figuring out why that is. However the lead devs usually have some retarded statistical figure in their head that justifies nerfing something that cleary isn't strong, or refusing to face the reality that a certain gun or ability is clearly meta while being uncounterable.

Spoiler: slightly off-topic tangent about nerfs and retarded lead devs

Bit off topic but for example Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour's lead devs have these static goals like a killer having a ~60% kill rate. And they are so dead-set on these goals that they will nerf everything in the ground that shoots past this (unless it's the communities "approved" killer and would cause riots if nerfed). What this does in practice is make the nerfed killer fucking miserable to play, only because the players are way too retarded to learn proper counter-play so the killer shoots way above the desired 60% percent even if their kit is C tier at best. And every time a new character gets released that's a bit strong, retarded crybabies will just give up or disconnect against them inflating the kill rates so they get nerfed into the ground a couple months later.

 

[moocow]

Crazy thing is that the devs have this info. Modern live service games send more telemetry from matches than an FBI tapped windows feature. Developers can clearly see what is being used 99% of the time. If some item, ability or gun is rocking an over 90% pick-rate then there is clearly a reason. The fun part for a developer comes from figuring out why that is. However the lead devs usually have some retarded statistical figure in their head that justifies nerfing something that cleary isn't strong, or refusing to face the reality that a certain gun or ability is clearly meta while being uncounterable.

Yeah, that insistence on sticking with telemetry and raw metrics is stupid. The right solution is to watch people livestreaming (or, less reliably, posting recorded gameplay after-the-fact) to see what they're actually doing. Or even joining in (as a "normal" account, without admin privileges or perks). Personally witnessing what players are actually trying to accomplish can reveal a shit ton about a game's mechanics that their detailed metrics don't show. A dedicated and competent game designer who actually gives a shit about things would even jump in (both anonymously/incognito and as an official representative) to metacomms (Discord voice chats or whatever) just to get a feel for what's happening in that realm too.

It's amazing the kind of shit asshole players will admit to on private comms that they'll never say on a public forum -- and that can help deliberately nerf unintended shitty player behavior too.

Bit off topic but for example Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour's lead devs have these static goals like a killer having a ~60% kill rate. And they are so dead-set on these goals that they will nerf everything in the ground that shoots past this (unless it's the communities "approved" killer and would cause riots if nerfed). What this does in practice is make the nerfed killer fucking miserable to play, only because the players are way too retarded to learn proper counter-play so the killer shoots way above the desired 60% percent even if their kit is C tier at best. And every time a new character gets released that's a bit strong, retarded crybabies will just give up or disconnect against them inflating the kill rates so they get nerfed into the ground a couple months later.

Ah yeah, those boneheads. I was on the fence about whether to bring them up before (my last post was already getting a bit long-winded), because they're a classic example of a "toxic relationship with the players." They have a miraculous talent for choosing the absolute worst players to listen to and ignoring the rest who actually play for fun.

DbD is one example of where they should declare open war on metacomms. It should seriously be a bannable offense or at least a match auto-forfeit when detected. Replace it with in-game VoIP with proximity -- no more telling your co-op teammates all the way across the map where the killer is and what he's doing. Going AfK-until-death or disconnecting early in a match upon first contact with the killer should negatively impact player ranking and even temporarily ban non-friend-group PvP (you can be a faggot all you like with your friends, if they'll tolerate it, but randoms shouldn't have to put up with that shit).

There's no doubt a good chunk of regular players would rage-quit over that, but those players drive away the rest. I guarantee if word got out they'd fixed DbD by actively annoying the crybabies so they'd leave, more regular players would come back to more than make up for the loss.

 

[Dullahan3579]

I met a traveller from a no games land,
Who said—“Two vast and player-less games
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose brown,
And AGP smirk, and sneer of soy command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these Player-less things,
The studio that mocked them, and the conglomerate that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Bungie, king of shooters;
Look on my live-Services, ye chuds, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, player-less and bare
The lone and level DAUs stretch far away.​

 

[fml]

Yeah, that insistence on sticking with telemetry and raw metrics is stupid. The right solution is to watch people livestreaming (or, less reliably, posting recorded gameplay after-the-fact) to see what they're actually doing. Or even joining in (as a "normal" account, without admin privileges or perks). Personally witnessing what players are actually trying to accomplish can reveal a shit ton about a game's mechanics that their detailed metrics don't show. A dedicated and competent game designer who actually gives a shit about things would even jump in (both anonymously/incognito and as an official representative) to metacomms (Discord voice chats or whatever) just to get a feel for what's happening in that realm too.

It's amazing the kind of shit asshole players will admit to on private comms that they'll never say on a public forum -- and that can help deliberately nerf unintended shitty player behavior too.

Im not gonna lie the only game I can remember that still has developers actually playing their games and popping in is Phasmophobia lmao.

Spoiler: More semi-unrelated DBD sperging

Ah yeah, those boneheads. I was on the fence about whether to bring them up before (my last post was already getting a bit long-winded), because they're a classic example of a "toxic relationship with the players." They have a miraculous talent for choosing the absolute worst players to listen to and ignoring the rest who actually play for fun.

DbD is one example of where they should declare open war on metacomms. It should seriously be a bannable offense or at least a match auto-forfeit when detected. Replace it with in-game VoIP with proximity -- no more telling your co-op teammates all the way across the map where the killer is and what he's doing. Going AfK-until-death or disconnecting early in a match upon first contact with the killer should negatively impact player ranking and even temporarily ban non-friend-group PvP (you can be a faggot all you like with your friends, if they'll tolerate it, but randoms shouldn't have to put up with that shit).

There's no doubt a good chunk of regular players would rage-quit over that, but those players drive away the rest. I guarantee if word got out they'd fixed DbD by actively annoying the crybabies so they'd leave, more regular players would come back to more than make up for the loss.

For some reason BHVR only and I mean only listen to raw metrics and maybe if they feel generous they will check their self hosted forums (lmao) which is obviously just a glazer echo chamber arguably worse than reddit. The game as a whole has an identity crisis, because they have an MMR system and the whole 9 yards, yet they still balance the game as if it is a party game and assume that the avg player is a 1 hour fresh install.

As for the comms part this was proposed a couple times already however they shot it down because "people say mean things". Going next was dubbed as an epidemic and it hasn't gotten any better last time I played. They had an "operation health" that fixed exactly none of these issues.

One of my pet peeves that makes me drop the game is them bringing back 2v8 (while making it worse and buggier each time) because the execs and the lead devs like jerking themselves off to big number while completely annihilating the core 1v4 game mode to near unplayable levels making queue times take anywhere between 5-40 minutes for a game while also making matchmaking inconsistent since the MMR loosens the longer the mm goes on.

Marathon so ass it got me sperging about DBD of all games.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Gotta post this because it's utterly demented. Had to triple check if it was a parody or something.

So Anthem was the Bob Dylan of looter-shooters, and now Marathon is the Lord of The Rings of extraction shooters. I think I hate this level of self-sucking more than the DEI shit tbh.

 

[creaturestorm]

So Anthem was the Bob Dylan of looter-shooters, and now Marathon is the Lord of The Rings of extraction shooters. I think I hate this level of self-sucking more than the DEI shit tbh.

The most charitable interpretation I can dream up for the Marathon dev is that he has a fundamental misunderstanding about how great stories of heroism feature obstacles which require sacrifice to overcome. Even if he came to understand that its only a small part of why lotr is a timeless classic.

It would seem that the last 20 years our media has been driven by people who don't understand the culture at all.

Even Marathon, the game is extremely anti trans and anti communist. These Philistines completely miss the point and end up creating a strong endorsement of everything they claim to be fighting.

 

[moocow]

As for the comms part this was proposed a couple times already however they shot it down because "people say mean things".

"People might say mean things to each other while playing our video game in which one player chases down four other people to brutally slash them up, hang them by their flesh from rusty hooks and bleed them out or brutally massacre them for the amusement of an unseen evil entity, so we couldn't possibly facilitate verbal communication between the people desperately struggling not to die."

Cuttin' people up and sacrificing them to a literal eldritch abomination in horrifically gory ways? A-okay. "Might call someone 'nigger' or 'faggot'"? FUCK NO SHUT IT DOWN.

I love modern morality sometimes. It's almost as bad as the "bloody gore and violence good, a single bared breast for a quarter second instantly makes it R-rated" thing America has going in film & TV.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

It slides right in with DEI and libtard thinking -- someone's whining because they're losing? Punish the victor (nerf). Never do anything to raise up (buff) the side deemed "too weak." It's always "weaken the strong" rather than "strengthen the weak." It's like there's some unspoken understanding that actually making things better might reveal other, more personal weaknesses (lack of skill/talent, etc.).

Balancing is important for just about any game, sometimes you have to nerf stuff to ensure there's a healthy diversity of options for the player.
Otherwise they will largely gravitate toward outliers, as minmaxers optimize fun out of the game, and then all your work creating all this other stuff would be for nothing. At that point you'll start seeing accusations of the game lacking variety.
While some choose what's fun to them, others feel like they're playing wrong if they're underperforming when compared to said outliers. It's probably just male brain stuff, but many of us strive for efficiency, and it might seem like a waste of time if you aren't following meta (assuming there's major difference). Ultimately, it's about satisfaction. For more players to be satisfied, there has to be something for their playstyle that doesn't fall behind the best too much.
Game design can be rather complicated. Being overwhelmingly powerful can get boring quickly, the real meat is problem solving and effort needed to get to that point IMO. Earning it, if you will.

 

[Oliver Onions]

It would seem that the last 20 years our media has been driven by people who don't understand the culture at all.

Not just don't understand, but are actively opposed to learning.

It's ironic that the people most likely to carp at you about media literacy usually either misinterpret the material they're referring to or haven't seen it at all; like retconning The Matrix to be a trans allegory or the Halo TV show writers proudly stating they never played the games. I just wish it resulted in the funny kind of ignorance we used to get with stuff like live-action Super Mario instead of mid video games.

And to be fair to the guy being quoted I think the article did him dirty and he just picked LOTR as a random example. It's still a stupid analogy but the headline is pretty obvious clickbait.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

Not just don't understand, but are actively opposed to learning.

Naive, they know, they choose to do the opposite, they use DoubleThink to not discuss or admit it

Everything they do is a complex purity test and ruination of the things their enemies love at all costs
They force egregious progressive stuff to test their own, virtue signal, and destroy it for you.

Look up Slave-Morality, they cannot be direct about this, always with the coy "I have no idea what you mean" shit.

 

[TrainWreckWatcher]

I didn't expect it to sink this low quite honestly.
Even I am surprised at how much it continues to implode so quickly.

 

[Safir]

Oh I'd love to work as a game designer, especially to work specifically on "game balance" issues. Your job is to literally make sure things are 1) "fair" and 2) "fun."

It's not even that hard to figure out the difference between (...)

I haven't played Marathon, but I've read the full thread (not just the highlights), and no semblance of balance is possible with the contradictory goals they tried to tranny-chase. When you play cops and robbers and lose, the people you lose to are your friends; it'd be zero-sum except you got to hang out, so everyone benefits. When you play a MMOG and lose, the people you lose to are strangers, and if you were playing with friends and the whole group loses and a player quits, then you don't have a group anymore.

"fair": Balance in a two-side PvP game is extremely hard. Balance in a multiplayer PvP is easier IF AND ONLY IF players can gang up on the stronger guy. Balance in PvE is easy, and ridiculously easy in team-based PvE.

"fun" means you must make progress, ideally visible in-game progress, but experience is sometimes fine, too. The player should feel he gained something from playing. But from what i'm seeing, a bad player's game loop is
- play the free mode
- accumulate good equipment, sit on it
- wear your good equipment
- lose
- start over
- accumulate a different set of good equipment
- wear it
- lose
- ragequit forever

And as long-term progress goes

On March 21, 2026 a ranked mode was added to Marathon in beta after the launch of Cryo Archive.[14] The mode consists of six ranks with three divisions in each. The ranks are: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Pinnacle. Players that are Platinum or higher, gain access to more dangerous zones that have better loot. Rewards are earned for reaching higher ranks, some instantly and others at the end of the season. To enter a Ranked game, players' loadouts must be worth a certain amount of credits.
(wikipedia)

^ this grading on a curve alone is unsustainable without a constant influx of bad players, which requires a constant stream of EXCITING CONTENT!!! to counteract the negative publicity and downdoots churned players generate.

It's many bad things that go bad together. You can't balance this, you will not enjoy balancing this. No amount of playing musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic is going to make it not sink.

---

Even Marathon, the game is extremely anti trans and anti communist. These Philistines completely miss the point and end up creating a strong endorsement of everything they claim to be fighting.

1. Troons are ugly, if anyone at all cares about making likable content, it's going to be anti-troon.
2. You have to be a Communist to make pro-Communist content (and to make anti-Communist content that namechecks Communism instead of invoking RETVRN. See: Papers, Please, a game where a bureaucrat gets paid based on his accuracy and productivity. Also, rent increases and a workshy wife.)

I am going to engage with the Indian:

Also in line with leftist dogma of making sure everyone is as miserable as possible.

No, this is gay and you're a solzhenitsyn. The most basic Leftist dogma is

• MMOGs are banned, because they eat into productive hours.
  • Drone operator training is good but people should be doing other stuff as a hobby, like designing drones (and cakes, and fabric patterns, and nuclear reactors).
• All digital content should be free and open source.
  • "Gayming" computers can be scarce. You may have to go to the arcade to play an "AAA" game.

"but what if we have to fight soy with soy"

1. Playable for 2 hours per day, 4 hours per week, maybe a hard restriction on this.
   1. pay $1 per session (US prices)
2. Incremental progress, no wipes
3. Cooperation required for progress; griefing possible but heavily discouraged
   1. noobs are important and they matter, you don't get to pick, "your side" is assigned some noobs and your progress depends on how well they're doing
   2. NO GRADING ON A CURVE
4. No real money economy, no extra microtransactions on top of the $1.
5. Bad players are never locked out of any content and rewards, they just get them slightly later

 

[Snekposter]

Crazy thing is that the devs have this info. Modern live service games send more telemetry from matches than an FBI tapped windows feature. Developers can clearly see what is being used 99% of the time. If some item, ability or gun is rocking an over 90% pick-rate then there is clearly a reason. The fun part for a developer comes from figuring out why that is. However the lead devs usually have some retarded statistical figure in their head that justifies nerfing something that cleary isn't strong, or refusing to face the reality that a certain gun or ability is clearly meta while being uncounterable.

I'm about getting ready to join in with a rant on War Thunder and how spreadsheets only tell you the what and never the why or how.

 

[creaturestorm]

Gibberish

Well, thanks for stopping by!

 

[Standard Man]

I didn't expect it to sink this low quite honestly.
Even I am surprised at how much it continues to implode so quickly.

It actually is rather shocking. While I didn't expect the game to be successful, I wasn't expecting player numbers to drop this drastically. I thought this game would last at least a year before EOS, but if this trend continues it might not even make it that long.

I'm very curious what the mood is for the average developer at Bungie, especially going forward. Imagine having hundreds of employees working daily for a game that might barely have around 10k players in a month.

 

[King Dead]

Balancing is important for just about any game, sometimes you have to nerf stuff to ensure there's a healthy diversity of options for the player.
Otherwise they will largely gravitate toward outliers, as minmaxers optimize fun out of the game, and then all your work creating all this other stuff would be for nothing. At that point you'll start seeing accusations of the game lacking variety.
While some choose what's fun to them, others feel like they're playing wrong if they're underperforming when compared to said outliers. It's probably just male brain stuff, but many of us strive for efficiency, and it might seem like a waste of time if you aren't following meta (assuming there's major difference). Ultimately, it's about satisfaction. For more players to be satisfied, there has to be something for their playstyle that doesn't fall behind the best too much.
Game design can be rather complicated. Being overwhelmingly powerful can get boring quickly, the real meat is problem solving and effort needed to get to that point IMO. Earning it, if you will.

This is a problem that Destiny has run into time and time again, in a variety of ways.

There have been periods where entire subclasses have gone effectively unused because they can't compete with better options. Hell, for the latest raid race, an entire class was basically sidelined because nothing in its toolkit compared to what the other two could bring. And since Destiny is both a PVE and PVP game, each side can end up negatively impacting the other with regards to balance.

Or you could look at weapon balance. Way back when D2 started, the meta for weapon perks was "reload perk, damage perk," anything that would let you decrease downtime and increase damage. Various flavors of these perks would make their way in, but they were always sought after no matter what. Then Bungie started to introduce guns that utilized various elemental keywords, like guns that would make enemies explode with fire or make a big ice crystal when you got a headshot or spread damage around. These worked so well with newly revamped subclasses that now these were the desired perks, and now it's seen like a waste to not have them on a gun. The designers have come up with dozens of different perks over the years, and most have either always been or are now seen as trash, filler that prevents you from getting the roll you actually want.

And it extends to weapon archetypes too. Special weapons used to be relatively simple: shotguns for close range, fusion rifles for midrange, sniper rifles for long range. Then D2 added in breech grenade launchers and trace rifles, but it was still fairly balanced until The Mountaintop, a GL which was effectively a mini rocket launcher that fired with pinpoint accuracy. Eventually it got nerfed (then brought back), but Bungie later introduced an entire line of rocket sidearms that were the same but better: ammo efficient, good damage, great accuracy at all ranges. And then those got nerfed a bit, but they were still basically better than any other option...until they then introduced rocket pulse rifles. Now you can shoot three-round rocket bursts and wipe out adds with ease at any range, to the extent that nothing else can really compete. The only other option people tend to use is the lightsaber because it's just so damn good, meaning a lot of weapons aren't even touched because why would you choose to nerf yourself so severely?

And I could also get into how the game has made weapons (especially primaries) practically irrelevant thanks to abilities getting wildly out of control, but this post is long enough.

Your point about overwhelming power getting boring quickly is certainly a good one, and it's a good way for a game to get stale. There was a bug in D2 for a brief period where you could craft guns with unintended perks, to the extent that you could swap a shotgun frame into an auto rifle and have it just spray instant death in front of you. This was stupidly fun for a while, but it couldn't have stayed forever even if we wanted it to. And although I look back on it fondly, that's not how I'd want to play the game all the time.

So yeah, like I said, game design is complex, and I don't envy the task of those that work on such massive games.

 

[Steven Chapman]

I'm very curious what the mood is for the average developer at Bungie, especially going forward. Imagine having hundreds of employees working daily for a game that might barely have around 10k players in a month.

Vibes at tranny Bungie HQ are probably horrid. Despite them all being incompetent devs, busy dilating instead of coding, and fucking about with the Keurig coffee machines instead of learning how to balance the game; they’re not retarded. Undoubtedly, most of them have probably seen the discourse online or the numbers, hell, they probably have even more in depth statistics than we do. They can see the train wreck coming even more so than we can, and that is probably nuking everyone’s mood.

Couldn’t have happened to a worse group of faggots. Suffah Bungie!

 

[Beralovesdrukhari]

Tried it for a spell on launch. Safe to say I had more fun there than on Tarkov.