Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

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We've all been there said:
Government waste is still worse than anything you've described, and it's entirely to enrich some connected contractor or elected asshole's relative. At least this waste can be enjoyed by the proles.
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I didn't describe the worst of it (not willing to dox myself by giving specifics). Government waste is nothing compared to the excesses of private industry.
 
moocow said:
I didn't describe the worst of it (not willing to dox myself by giving specifics). Government waste is nothing compared to the excesses of private industry.
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My brother in Christ, the US government wasted, by the most forgiving estimates, almost as much as the entire AAA industry's revenue in 2024. Not even just America's AAA, the entire global industry. And that's the federal government only, not counting state or local.
 
We've all been there said:
My brother in Christ, the US government wasted, by the most forgiving estimates, almost as much as the entire AAA industry's revenue in 2024. Not even just America's AAA, the entire global industry. And that's the federal government only, not counting state or local.
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And does it also surpass the collective waste of every single industry of private enterprise? And how many billions have the fucking Rothchilds and Soros personally wasted just on their own attempts to "reshape society"? I know the governments of the world piss away lots of money. I just also know there's a lot more money in private hands and they're just as stupid about how it gets spent.
 
Rodeo Roadrunner said:
Bungie has been promising things and not delivering for years. Why do you believe them now?
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I think largerly because i didnt play the shooter slop called destiny and so I'm not eternally butthurt over it.

Professor Donger said:
K, gunplay still feels good regardless.
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That and the sound design, animations, and recoil just feel like your shooting a gun with some weight behind it. People die when you shoot them.

Cardef1121 said:
How do PVP games with such little content, asset wise, have such high budget costs? I assume they-- or at least hope that they do a lot more refining of things like the layout of the map than single player games but I just can't see how it works out to justify the cost.
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I think 1 of 2 things, either they have a fully fleshed out game and they are going to drip feed us 3 months at a time or the most likely scenario is they spent millions of dollars developing 3 different games before finally cobbling something together that looks like an extraction shooter.
 
Rodeo Roadrunner said:
Forgot to add: People comparing player numbers to other games, saying that even 40k continued playerbase is enough to sustain a studio. You would be right if this wasn't Bungie. They have over 800 employees, and they are based in Bellvue Washington, very expensive salaries and cost of living. For comparison, Embark studios runs both 'The Finals' and 'ARC Raiders', and they have just over 200 employees. Arrowhead Studios (Helldivers) has just over 100 employees. Bungie's burn rate for money is famously so high, that Microsoft refused to buy them back after they left Activision.
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don't forget the program the use to make content for Destiny 2 is so bizarre it takes hours to boot up or some nonsense (I'm paraphrasing from an interview from years ago) and it takes them eons to make new maps and guns because of what they program with and how they do it, its why they are so proud of maps like the one in Witch Queen despite it being tiny as fuck.
 
Cardef1121 said:
How do PVP games with such little content, asset wise, have such high budget costs? I assume they-- or at least hope that they do a lot more refining of things like the layout of the map than single player games but I just can't see how it works out to justify the cost.
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Like others have said, massive headcount and frivolous expenses add up very quickly.

There's also the unspoken competency crisis ravaging the gaming industry. I always like to challenge people to play a little game: try to find a team picture of your favorite developer from 20 years ago, and a picture of the team now.

What do you notice? Try to count the number of women, "women", non-Whites/East Asian men and other diverse hires in the past and now.

A modern AAA developer requires ten times the manpower to deliver ten times less content, always years late, overbudget, with game breaking bugs and nowhere near the quality, ambition or fun of their older titles.

Bethesda delivered Morrowind with less than 40 people, Skyrim with less than 70 people, but needed over 1000 people for Starfield. The was in development for twice as long as Morrowind or Skyrim, and despite that Morrowind has 300+ unique quests while Starfield has 39.

You can't deliver a competitive product when the whole team consists of dysfunctional freaks.
Zenos Yae Viator said:
don't forget the program the use to make content for Destiny 2 is so bizarre it takes hours to boot up or some nonsense
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If they want to make changes to maps, no matter how tiny or insignificant, they need to spool up the map and leave it to load overnight IIRC.

Tech debt tends to accumulate when you only hire smoothbrains.
 
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We've all been there said:
My brother in Christ, the US government wasted, by the most forgiving estimates, almost as much as the entire AAA industry's revenue in 2024. Not even just America's AAA, the entire global industry. And that's the federal government only, not counting state or local.
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this is kind of a misnomer, USD has no real weight for the Federal Government, they literally print it (effectively) out of nothing when they need to do anything.

Private Waste is wasting "real" money they have to hoover up.
 
regalterry said:
A modern AAA developer requires ten times the manpower to deliver ten times less content, always years late, overbudget, with game breaking bugs and nowhere near the quality, ambition or fun of their older titles.
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This is unbelievably so fucking true.
I remind everyone, this game came out November 28, 2002, it probably cost a handful million, we are talking 2-3, tops.
it has more content than any AAA game on the market that isn't live service (if you can call that shit content) it has Golf, photo collecting, fishing, town building, monster collecting, inventing, and complex weapon crafting.

games on the market will give you 1/5 the content of this game, and the entire game will be narrow laser focused on its one gimmick and nothing else. Dark_Chronicle_front_cover_29.webp
 
Zenos Yae Viator said:
games on the market will give you 1/5 the content of this game, and the entire game will be narrow laser focused on its one gimmick and nothing else.
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A stark example of the competency crisis is the sad fate of Rocksteady.

The founders quit the company after the published tried to Jew them, took all the competent (White, male) developers with them and Rocksteady turned into fat landwhales and troons wearing the company legacy like a skinsuit.

The end result of this is blatantly obvious:

 
Burgundy Brandy said:
It's going to be the same for Marathon but in a shade of neon vomit. Bungie are the best at bending until it breaks and they're going to do that much sooner than you think for Marathon.
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It's been fun enough so far and even if the game dies I think I've already gotten my moneys worth consider the amount of time i put into the server slam. I've spent more on a couple of parking tickets this year than I have on triple A gaming titles. A new game will come out and I'll play that (regardless if this is still alive and kicking). I'm just not that invested in this game like a lot of destiny fans are.
 
I like this game but man, who thought that "neofuturistic diet-The Designers Republic visual language hardcore sci-fi Escape from Tarkov" was a pitch for a popular game? It's an incredibly niche intersection, it can work for Tarkov that only has to feed a few Russian devs on the back of milsim autists, but you're fucking Bungie, you're a first party Sony title, you're supposed to do something widely appealing and casual and sell gangbusters. The aesthetics and gameplay hit my 'tism but I'm not gonna finance the 3.6 billion shekels they bought Bungie for.

It's also really funny how the most successful Sony multiplayer title in recent memory was Helldivers 2, that permanently locked its developers in a fight between their vision for "hardcore gameplay" and their millions of new casual fans that just wanted a chatroom and to blast some bombs without milsim autism. Then Embark copied that for Arc Raiders turning it into third person Helldivers/Monster Hunter with epic friendlies : ) and emotes and devolving into 3D Among Us, meanwhile Bungie scrapped their plans for Marathon as a PVE co-op shooter and thought to go full unemployed sweatlord.
 
moocow said:
You know how people bitch about military and government overspending? Like mythical $10k toilets and other stupid shit? lol ... fuckin' public sector's got nothing on the sheer waste that goes on in private enterprise. I laugh (openly, out loud, even at inappropriate times) when I hear somebody bitch about some "super-overpriced" public sector related thing. "Dude, I worked at a huge game studio that gave everybody unlimited Special K every morning and handed out movie tickets like candy. STFU about 'government waste.'"
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The private sector at the higher end is just as wasteful as the government... except eventually people get held accountable and fired in the private sector. (And they mostly spend their own money, not someone else's.) And that makes everything in markets work and ensures government never works.

I remember how shocked I was when I processed the full truth of this.
 
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