Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

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ScurvyRat said:
you severely underestimate how bad things are for AAA game companies in 2026
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Comes to how Sony feels about how their 3.6 Billion dollar investment is doing. They were purchased to also provide consulting to all of Sony's other Live Service titles, but if anything those consultants did more damage than help. The game doesn't have any lightning in the bottle excluding the weapon feel, but that was aped from Destiny. I hope that when this crashes and burns Sony or Bungie doubles down harder than anyone has ever seen and it becomes an inferno because the aftermath would be hilarious.
 
Day of the Cope said:
All these developers seem to think that Tarkov doing account wipes was "part of the genre" and just proves how the industry is full of midwits. The entire reason Tarkov did inventory and progress wipes is because Tarkov was still in beta. They wanted a reason for players to use the new things they added or to try out something that was adjusted instead of relying on their old faithful with a massive stockpile of resources. Of course, when you mention that Tarkov, the game that "inspired this tentpole of the genre", moved away from bi-annual wipes to a permanent character system with it's 1.0 release, you get retards sperging out.
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Y'know, reading that, I can't help but think that some Marathon devs wandered over to the Destiny side of the studio one day, and some of that "let's wipe our players' progress constantly!" design ended up leaking over to D2. It's about the only explanation I can think of for the boneheaded decisions there.
For those unaware, this past year has been objectively the worst in Destiny's history. Even worse than D1 before The Taken King, even worse than D2 before Forsaken, even worse than D2 after The Final Shape. A big reason for why that is, in many players' minds, is the massive changes to loot and progression introduced with The Edge of Fate.

The short version: all new loot was changed to have multiple tiers of quality, with tier 1 equating to the usual drops players were familiar with and tier 5 having a bunch of extra traits and enhanced power. You would engage with progressively higher tiers of difficulty to get better loot drops. Fairly simple, right?

Well, as it turns out, the only way to get better loot was to grind power levels, which was done by playing a limited range of activities in their shiny and sterile new menus, replacing the beloved and soulful planet maps players were used to. Increasing your power level would unlock higher difficulty levels, but you never actually felt more powerful because the design always put you weaker than your opponents, so it never felt like progression, making "power" irrelevant outside of a bigger number in your menu. And on top of that, lower difficulty levels where you would feel strong wouldn't give power increases when you outleveled them and would never give higher tier loot, so it was an utter waste of time to do anything but full throttle slaying out all the time.

Naturally, this also made it so that players stopped considering anything less than tier 5 loot as worth keeping. Bungie probably wanted people to see each step up as an upgrade and a tangible sign of progression, but in reality, it was the opposite, as nobody wanted to keep a well-rolled tier 1 when they could already see they'd just need to regrind when they started getting tier 5s. It was a constant loop of grinding whichever activity was the most efficient in terms of loot drops per minute, hoping you'd get drops in the right slots to raise your overall power, and repeating indefinitely. (Oh, and the last stretch of the grind required even rarer drops to make progress, just as a little extra fuck you.)

But the best part, and the part that this post made me figure out where some of that stupidity came from? Bungie was going to reset everyone's progress by dropping everyone's power back down every six months when another expansion launched, forcing you to do the whole power/difficulty/loot tier grind all over again, a process that was already not fun the first time. Sure, technically they wouldn't remove any of your gear, but with how much of your score was tied to using the latest gear, it was effectively soft-sunsetting your loot if you wanted efficient progression. And this was the model they were preaching as the future of Destiny!

Naturally, given the playerbase's vehement and well-documented disgust of any kind of reset in their progress, this did not go over well, with Bungie having to make constant changes to ease the pain of the grind and also cancel the first power reset before it happened. Unfortunately, the damage was done, and with no updates planned for another three months (when we were supposed to have a new update this week), the sentiment in the community is at an all-time low.
I don't know why they thought lifting the concept of hammering your players back down over and over again was a good idea when they already knew how much players hated it, but if the Marathon devs were planning on it for a while, it wouldn't surprise me if there was some cross-pollination there. As if I needed another reason to hate Marathon when I already hate how it's nowhere near what I would want from a new Marathon game!
 
King Dead said:
Y'know, reading that, I can't help but think that some Marathon devs wandered over to the Destiny side of the studio one day, and some of that "let's wipe our players' progress constantly!" design ended up leaking over to D2. It's about the only explanation I can think of for the boneheaded decisions there.
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Destiny's tiering system is very different from a true wipe like Tarkov and Marathon have.

Especially since Destiny has had a fomo problem for gear since random drops were introduced

Game launches at 10 AM PT. So around Noon will be the time to start paying attention to the player count

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This extraction shiter gonna flop now? Afters the scandal off stolen art i thought they gonna give up, i even heard that the art director lost his job but now i sow that a bunch off people on Xitter are hyping up this garbage, i am not following on what Bungie is doing the game. I pray for the absolute death on the player count day 1, Bungie needs to go bankrupt for the crimes of making Destiny 2 a shittier game with the vaulted content, the the seasonal items, reuse off assets and making me lost 946 hours on this shit Borderlands 2
 
Guilhotina said:
This extraction shiter gonna flop now? Afters the scandal off stolen art i thought they gonna give up, i even heard that the art director lost his job but now i sow that a bunch off people on Xitter are hyping up this garbage, i am not following on what Bungie is doing the game. I pray for the absolute death on the player count day 1, Bungie needs to go bankrupt for the crimes of making Destiny 2 a shittier game with the vaulted content, the the seasonal items, reuse off assets and making me lost 946 hours on this shit Borderlands 2
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I'm going to assume that either English isn't your first language, or you had a stroke while writing this.
 
Professor Donger said:
I think bungie right now kind of has to try and keep their promises
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They have broken all of their promises before. They haven't learned, and they won't learn until they no longer have a job.
Professor Donger said:
I'm just saying that Bungie's literal reality is either try and salvage their shit game and hope to God it does well, or fail.
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They will fail. Sony has already expressed their displeasure at how Bungie is doing. Don't forget that the other Bungie game they were working on "Gummy Bears" was taken away from them, and Sony made a new studio comprised of Bungie employees they took called 'teamLFG'.
creaturestorm said:
The impression I'm getting is that with every reset they are introducing new maps
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Wrong. They aren't releasing new maps with every new season. They didn't even promise a new map this year, most likely they won't release a new map until next year. So Marathon players will be stuck with the same 3+1 maps for a year.
StacticShock said:
nah, sony was buying them out of name alone, they knew the gay developers were standard issue eons ago.
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Wrong. See this thread for more information, but they purchased Bungie due to their experience with successful monetization of live service games. Sony listened to their advice, then managed to flop 5(?) live service games in a row. Bungie also managed to butcher their golden goose Destiny. Remember when they promised that they were going to turn Destiny into a multi-media franchise, and the Sony purchase would allow them to use the broader Sony Entertainment companies to make tv shows, tie in books and comics? Nothing ever happened with that because Bungie is one of the worst managed game studios of all time.
 
Professor Donger said:
Destiny's tiering system is very different from a true wipe like Tarkov and Marathon have.

Especially since Destiny has had a fomo problem for gear since random drops were introduced
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I'm aware, and Destiny has only had one true hard reset in its entire history (from D1 to D2). But they have done multiple "soft" resets over time to try and get players to grind new stuff, generally to poor response. A complete list:
  • D1's first year -> Taken King: Various changes in how gear and character levels worked resulted in all gear from the first year becoming obsolete, including the very popular elemental primaries from raids. Some items were still accessible, but nobody would use them because they'd be far too weak for relevant content. Players weren't happy with this, so afterwards, all gear from TTK launch on could be infused to whatever the current power cap was and remained usable until the end of the game's updates, as well as most year 1 gear being rereleased in some form.
  • End of D1 -> D2: The game's only hard reset, with players having to leave every single item they acquired in D1 behind as Bungie literally blew up their banks. Players weren't happy with this, but it was never fully rectified. Nearly a decade later, I think most people have gotten over it if they even played D1, and most of the exotics and popular legendaries have made their way to D2 eventually. (I still miss my Sparrow horns, though.)
  • Shadowkeep -> Beyond Light: The first and biggest sunsetting for D2, taking everything from seasons 1 through 8 and putting a cap on its max power, with the intention of doing this with everything that was older than a year going forward to incentivize players to keep grinding new stuff. You could still use the items anywhere power didn't matter, but nobody would bother. This continued for one more season, sunsetting season 9's gear in season 13. Players weren't happy with this, and the plan was reverted by season 14, with sunset gear eventually being un-sunset with TFS.
  • TFS -> EoF: The aforementioned gear changes, with the Portal's scoring system heavily incentivizing players to use only new gear, and only new items dropping with the new gear tiers. Again, old gear is still usable and infusable up to the power cap, so it's not as bad as the earlier sunsetting, but there's a clear difference between old and new, so it's more of a soft sunset. When combined with the planned power resets every six months, though, it was an obvious attempt to create an inescapable gear treadmill. Players weren't happy with this, so the power reset was scrapped, but old gear is still a scoring detriment and objectively worse than newer items.
Point being, someone at some point decided to try and force a radically different structure onto the game, one that the playerbase absolutely hated, and they had to have gotten it from somewhere. I know Diablo's seasonal content has been thrown about as a comparison in the community, but it wouldn't surprise me if some of it came from the Marathon side of the studio too. I just don't understand why anyone would think that players would ever want to have their efforts erased on a regular basis, especially as the main mode of the game.
 
Wiping or not wiping is a hard argument in these games. Tarkov doesn’t do it anymore but even arc raiders has its own selective wiping in place

I think it’s kinda good for the health of the game in the long run
 
ScurvyRat said:
I may have to eat my words
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Doesn't mean a heck of a lot. The only competitor at par is RE Requiem, which came out a week ago, The closest competitor timing wise is Esoteric Ebb, a DnD-themed knockoff of Disco Elysium.

Not exactly a cutthroat market.
 
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