Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[Kofi Drinka]

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.

People still had faith in Bungie when Destiny 2 launched. Everyone was blaming MS, then activision for their failings. Turns out a studio full of pronouns are a bunch of lazy faggots.

 

[The Secret Sauce]

You know it's grim for a lolcow when their biggest A-logs are more interested in discussing and debating unrelated lolcows in their own thread. Most of this thread has reached this point with Marathon, now it's just people chatting about FromSoft games or Tarkov

 

[United Abominations]

All this hating of Nu Marathon and Boomering at old Halo legitimately made me go back to Halo 3 after a stupid amount of time I have spent into it and thought I would never play again after overplaying it

I miss when games were openly heterosexual and bro-coded Like when Gears of War had Megadeth do a song for them and things had openly cool aesthetics to them

 

[King Dead]

All this hating of Nu Marathon and Boomering at old Halo legitimately made me go back to Halo 3 after a stupid amount of time I have spent into it and thought I would never play again after overplaying it

I miss when games were openly heterosexual and bro-coded Like when Gears of War had Megadeth do a song for them and things had openly cool aesthetics to them

Or more relevant to Bungie and Halo, when motherfucking Breaking Benjamin starts playing when you get to the end of Gravemind in Halo 2.

We truly didn't know how good we had it.

 

[Dead Gay Muppet Gangbang]

It's sold over a million copies and still has 10s of thousands of people playing it despite having been out for over a month now.

Every post besides me are you faggots praying that today is the day that they shut the servers down, but there's no end in sight, just wishful thinking.

I actually agree with you retards on a lot of things, especially about this game dying, but I'm not in lock step with you. The big contention. Is this game going to die? Yeah probably, but not because the game is actually bad. They spent several hundred million on a niche genre of game, this type of pvp game is to casual gamers as what sunlight is to vampires.

*BBC stands for BIG BUNGIE COCK

 

[BoomerSperg1922]

Now confirmed.

I did not purchase marathon.

 

[Hateocracy]

You've spent years playing slop with out ever challenging yourself.

I eagerly await to see your playthrough of Zomboid with a meager x2 population, 2% sprinters and 'Oid senses set to random.

I'll toss you a bone and say you can even set melee + gun weapon spawns to "high" and set infection chance to saliva (bites) only.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

Or more relevant to Bungie and Halo, when motherfucking Breaking Benjamin starts playing when you get to the end of Gravemind in Halo 2.

We truly didn't know how good we had it.

This could be said for soundtrack in American games in general. I remember trying one of the recent NFS games after not playing one since Undercover, only to hear some kind of deepfried latino mumblerap shit that made me wanna stab my own ears with a pencil. I skimmed through the track list and quit playing for good just few minutes in, it was horrible.
What happened? Growing up, NFS games were always filled with bangers.

 

[Oliver Onions]

They told me they have no intention of fixing this bug.

That's absolutely insane but I appreciate devs being upfront about their incompetence, as opposed to the AAA method of assuring us our concerns are being heard and fed back to the team, only for nothing to ever change until the game finally gets shitcanned after years of being on life support.

 

[Bersball]

The maintenance was yesterday, right? Doesn't look too good.

 

[TrainWreckWatcher]

in terms of the concord race. It certainly ran the marathon of longest before getting shit cannned

 

[Professor Donger]

in terms of the concord race. It certainly ran the marathon of longest before getting shit cannned

What's funny is that if it was run by a smaller dev studio the game would definitely be considered a success. But because Bungie is so big and owned by Sony, who injected so much money into it while not meeting player numbers, the game is a failure. There was a video by the Devs for Wardogs where they mention that as long as their game mantains a player count of about 2,000 on steam they can keep the lights on and continue updating the game. Which was a pretty neat transparent thing for them to say. They point out that games like Hell Let Loose are "successful" and get constant updates despite their relatively low player count.

But again that's also because games like Hell Let Loose and Wardogs are indie games that had much lower budgets compared to Marathon.

Bungie really should have outright come out and said the amount of players they need to maintain the servers instead of just going "Well we're totes gonna keep the game alive no matter what."

Here's the video in question with the timestamp for those interested.

 

[Professor Donger]

Bungie, don't worry, there is a solution to your failing player numbers. It'll work, trust me. kek

 

[BScCollateral]

hat's funny is that if it was run by a smaller dev studio the game would definitely be considered a success. But because Bungie is so big and owned by Sony, who injected so much money into it while not meeting player numbers, the game is a failure.

I'm kind of amazed that entertainment companies keep making products so expensive it is profoundly unlikely they can make a profit.

 

[Professor Donger]

I'm kind of amazed that entertainment companies keep making products so expensive it is profoundly unlikely they can make a profit.

Especially when they know that they can make quality games on a relatively small budget. Indie games do it all the time and even some AAA Games do the same.

 

[Disc]

TL;DW everything going on with Marathons player count is normal and happens to all games. Wait for season 2 and the numbers will spike. Trust the plan.

You know, nobody really responded to this, so I think it's worth adressing.

When the next season and map come out, the playerbase will rally to some degree. The question is, though, how much will it rally?

There's two models I can think of as immediate examples. The first and I think more obvious one is destiny 2 itself:

View attachment 8825354

In this, a 'major content release' is generally a 2x to 3x rally of the playercount, while a 'minor content release' is more like 1.5x to 2x.

The other option is something more like Temtems:



Where it's major content releases generally stirred up roughly the same group of diehard players, kicking the timeline of it's playercount back a few months.

I think the destiny cycle is a lot more likely, myself. Regardless of which it ultimately is, I don't think just going trvst the plvn is going to save marathon.

 

[Fae Supremacist]

When the next season and map come out, the playerbase will rally to some degree. The question is, though, how much will it rally?

It depends on what exactly "season 2" ends up being.

If it is a business-as-usual type patch, with maybe a new character and map, that wipes vaults and faction progress, it's finished. Sweats on their Discords and LFGs and premade stacks can coordinate and max their factions again in a week and go back to shooting fish in a barrel, but the normal player that took 3 months to maybe get a few factions up, seeing all the progress erased and having to run naked Rook again, is just not going to bother. The way it is set up right now, if you don't start grinding a season the same day it goes up, there's no point, and there is no incentive to do so either. Just don't wipe faction progress., it's already slow as fuck to raise.

Now, if they are putting effort on a relaunch-lite with major system overhauls, new content, the customizability that was promised, and combine it with a free weekend + discount + NOT RETARDED advertising campaign (ie. STOP SUCKING OFF STREAMERS) it could work. Compared to the launches of other recent multiplayer titles, they haven't added a single event, or meaningful update, or anything to rally a playerbase at all for a month, just blatantly obvious bugfixes, balance changes, and "experimental" testing queues. They obviously had zero content planned for post-launch support like they should, because this is a beta build forced to release early by Sony after a major shift during development, and it shows (Arachne having ONE story contract is hilarious).

I am being slightly optimistic because of those experimental changes being put online, having a clueless developer trying to fix a beta isn't great, but it's better than having it openly abandoned. Ideally a core team will remain and try to wrangle the game with a coherent vision while Bungie moves to Destiny 3 or whatever.

Also crucify Ziegler and stream it with Durandal commentating live.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I'm kind of amazed that entertainment companies keep making products so expensive it is profoundly unlikely they can make a profit.

The return if they hit is hyper massive. It's basically just the corporate math version of "Would you spend $10 in a raffle that can win you $1,600?", only it costs $250,000,000 (250 million) for a ticket and can win $400,000,000,00 dollars (40 Billion).

It's not about regular profit - it's the ungodly piles of Fortnite style money that you can get if your game hits.

 

[Professor Donger]

The return if they hit is hyper massive. It's basically just the corporate math version of "Would you spend $10 in a raffle that can win you $1,600?", only it costs $250,000,000 (250 million) for a ticket and can win $400,000,000,00 dollars (40 Billion).

It's not about regular profit - it's the ungodly piles of Fortnite style money that you can get if your game hits.

Movies and TV have fallen into the exact same trap as well. Thinking that if they can make blockbuster after blockbuster, or for TV game of thrones and breaking bad, then they can afford to throw ungodly amounts of money at it and hope whatever they make sticks the landing

Most of the entertainment industry as a whole is addicted to lightning in a bottle

 

[fml]

Apparently high ranks are filled with cheaters . One of the "named" reasons for not supporting Linux is anticheat (even though Battleye supports Linux) but as expected their anticheat measures are shit. There are games not supporting Linux but at least they use kernel level anticheats and somewhat reliable, so Marathon manages to have worst of both worlds - cheaters and cut off juicy Steam Deck users.

What I will never understand as long as I live is why the fuck would any company in 2026 ever go for BattlEye as an anti-cheat solution. Every BE game without exception is a cheater riddled mess, combine that with the fact that these companies don't seem to be doing the bare minimum of manual/stat banning people or are doing it really slowly.