Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

King Dead said:
It's always felt like a really bizarre direction, taking a series that helped to pioneer storytelling in a single-player FPS campaign and slapping its name on a multiplayer-only game instead, alienating both existing fans (like me) and newcomers that would prefer to go at their own pace and not get interrupted by Randy McDickbag. I doubt they'd change it anytime soon because they don't want to lose face, but maybe I could see them doing a single-player/co-op rework in the future.
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The way the story is unfolds works for me ,t’s roughly 20% direct narration and 80% piecing things together yourself. If you don’t go looking for the details you wont get the full picture. You have a reason to dive into the Raids and help people do tasks you've already done.

It’s in a strange place, because like you said, the pvp people couldnt give a fuck. They arent bothering with it.

There’s this whole bug theme running through the game that I’ve noticed, but I've never seen one person talk about it. I’ve only caught bits and pieces from other players about what they’ve experienced or figured out, and it honestly sounds like it belongs in a completely different game. Meanwhile, I’m out here collecting bacteria samples while someone else is investigating a serial killer AI.

It feels like the design isn’t meant to be clean or straightforward. You’re not supposed to carefully absorb every audio log. They intended that you miss things while gunfire is going off around you. You’re not really expected to find every clue, either. I’ve played the same map for around a hundred hours and I still haven’t uncovered everything, I don't think I ever will.

I think this has to be intentional. It feels like they expected this fragmented storytelling to fuel community discussion and speculation, almost like a self-sustaining marketing campaign and at the same time it keeps people playing the game searching for clues. But it's clearly not working.

My impression is that if this were a more PvE focused game, you might actually have the space to experience the story properly, but with a simple solo pve mode it would still be an imperfect and impartial retelling. The amount of grinding required just to hear scattered lore about things like bonsai trees and synthetic animals is pretty extreme.

Who knows, maybe a PvE community would actually put their heads together and post schizo theories for me to brush up on.

I was thinking just now about how every major Bungie release up to now has essentially been a PvE shooter with multiplayer as an option. Marathon is the first time they’ve fully committed to a hardcore, PvP only multiplayer experience. In a way, they spent years building and cultivating a player base that’s mainly interested in PvE driven shooters.

Destiny 2 alone sold tens of millions of copies, I'm guessing.

And then they pivot to this? lol wtf? Why would you completely abandon your audience? Triple A studios just think they know so much more than their players.
 
When you think about it, Marathon I feel like could have easily been repurposed into a Helldivers 2 alike. You already have the looter shooter thing in place, the AI enemies and the environments (granted they'll need to work on this a lot more because HD2 has like a dozen different biomes all randomised from the get-go).
 
I Know 孤独のせい said:
Can somebody enlighten my as to why Destiny got popular in the first place ? I spent a couple of hours in both games but found them utterly boring. Bungie's fabled gun play made me fall asleep.
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I got hooked because it felt good getting headshots. That was it. I only found out in this thread that the reason I was getting so many headshots is because Bungie's aim assist is ridiculously generous.
creaturestorm said:
A tear down and rebuild of the game play loop, swapping it out for something else. They have the entirety of D2's assets if they wanted to pivot away from an extraction shooter entirely.
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1) There is no way on earth Sony would greenlight wasting the money this kind of overhaul would take and 2) If they just converted it into a Destinylike why would people buy it instead of playing Destiny 2, with almost a decade of existing content, for free?
King Dead said:
Can't tell you how many times I've heard people asking what's going on in a Destiny raid; for them, the story is really nothing more than "you good guy, shoot bad guy."
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I got back into D2 about 2023 I think. I played it long enough to complete the battle pass, did raids and seasonal content with a group of friends every night, and I have no idea what the lore was or why I was doing anything. I never bothered to ask, either.

The only D2 lore I remember was Bill Nighy vs The Molemen which has since been completely erased from existence.
 
Oliver Onions said:
2) If they just converted it into a Destinylike why would people buy it instead of playing Destiny 2, with almost a decade of existing content, for free?
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Not sure how much actual content is available for free at this point honestly. They deleted the first 2(?) years of content and you cannot play shit without buying the DLCs, it is quite aggressive with the 'buy this now' as well from what I have seen.
 
Civillian 18 said:
Not sure how much actual content is available for free at this point honestly. They deleted the first 2(?) years of content and you cannot play shit without buying the DLCs, it is quite aggressive with the 'buy this now' as well from what I have seen.
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When did this happen? Because there was a ton of content when I last played it, but now I'm wondering if that's because I was playing on Game Pass.
 
Oliver Onions said:
When did this happen? Because there was a ton of content when I last played it, but now I'm wondering if that's because I was playing on Game Pass.
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When beyond light dropped they removed a vast majority of the Red War, all of Curse of Osiris and Warmind alongside a lot of content from Forsaken.
 
Oliver Onions said:
When did this happen? Because there was a ton of content when I last played it, but now I'm wondering if that's because I was playing on Game Pass.
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They deleted the Red War (launch campaign), Warmind, Curse of Osiris (the campaign/content so bad they were 'weeks from shutting down') and the Forsaken campaign & the tangled shore patrol zone. Not to mention every season they have released that has had story, world building, lore etc has been eventually deleted after a year(? perhaps longer, not 100% sure).
 
Civillian 18 said:
They deleted the Red War (launch campaign), Warmind, Curse of Osiris (the campaign/content so bad they were 'weeks from shutting down') and the Forsaken campaign & the tangled shore patrol zone. Not to mention every season they have released that has had story, world building, lore etc has been eventually deleted after a year(? perhaps longer, not 100% sure).
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They never really recovered from that backlash either. The first wave of Destiny haters I personally knew came from this retarded decision to delete content the players paid for. In the Destiny thread, I remembered someone posting player numbers that vividly showed the player count dropping and never really recovering post content purge.
 
Oliver Onions said:
1) There is no way on earth Sony would greenlight wasting the money this kind of overhaul would take and 2) If they just converted it into a Destinylike why would people buy it instead of playing Destiny 2, with almost a decade of existing content, for free?
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Sony spent 4 billion dollars to acquire this game. I cant imagine them not doing something, anything, with this. Simply shutting this down in less than a years time doesn't feel reasonable for that kind of expenditure.
 
Kane Lives said:
They never really recovered from that backlash either. The first wave of Destiny haters I personally knew came from this retarded decision to delete content the players paid for. In the Destiny thread, I remembered someone posting player numbers that vividly showed the player count dropping and never really recovering post content purge.
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there is also the retarded equipment sunsetting which created some destiny haters, me being one of them, i wouldn't know or care about the issue being fixed since i have little desire to re-download destiny just to double check if my items are stuck to a specific light level that new items aren't, fuck bungo.
 
creaturestorm said:
I've played enough Tarkov to be absolutely confused why people would enjoy a PvE version of it.
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PvE mode is good in extraction shooters because it still drops you into a map with other players, but since you can't kill each other you can work together against bots without knowing you'll get exit camped or domed by someone you never see.

Riding helicopters or meeting other people in the wild in Grey Zone is great because you run into all sorts of players and can help out in firefights without the irksome bullshit of pvp. It turns it into a more limited mmo-esque cooperative looter.
 
DiabeticSydePhil said:
PvE mode is good in extraction shooters because it still drops you into a map with other players, but since you can't kill each other you can work together against bots without knowing you'll get exit camped or domed by someone you never see.

Riding helicopters or meeting other people in the wild in Grey Zone is great because you run into all sorts of players and can help out in firefights without the irksome bullshit of pvp. It turns it into a more limited mmo-esque cooperative looter.
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Tarkovs pve mode from my understanding is just you unless you invite others to play with you but I could be wrong

How is Grey Zone? My friends have been trying to get me to pick it up
 
Burgundy Brandy said:
When beyond light dropped they removed a vast majority of the Red War, all of Curse of Osiris and Warmind alongside a lot of content from Forsaken.
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I am pretty sure it was Beyond Light that I played, I assumed that's just what they were calling the revamped game.
creaturestorm said:
Sony spent 4 billion dollars to acquire this game. I cant imagine them not doing something, anything, with this. Simply shutting this down in less than a years time doesn't feel reasonable for that kind of expenditure.
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They spent 4 billion to acquire Bungie, not Marathon. Bungie were supposed to be their live service gurus who were going to oversee the five million GaaS games they were putting out, and so far all they've done is lose Sony money.

Marathon might get a year to turn things around but you can rest assured the Sony executives are currently trying to agree on what the least costly/embarrassing way to kill it (and probably Bungie) is.
 
DiabeticSydePhil said:
Grey Zone Warfare and Tarkov both have PvE and its still fun as fuck.

Arc Raiders is basically PvE by this point.

Lots of players want to enjoy extraction style games without getting relentlessly murdered by sweats.
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I always figured these battle royale and extraction games are griefer's paradise. When you derive enjoyment not from the gameplay, but ruining another person's day, there's nothing better than this.
Kane Lives said:
The heckin' lore guys that made up Destiny's fanbase were all insufferable in the extreme.
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HisNameIsBeef's (or whatever his name is) cringy narration nearly killed me with secondhand embarrassment. I only know because this nigga tried to jump on Warframe bandwagon and shat out terribly written lore summaries that other people have already done and much better.
 
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Oliver Onions said:
They spent 4 billion to acquire Bungie, not Marathon. Bungie were supposed to be their live service gurus who were going to oversee the five million GaaS games they were putting out, and so far all they've done is lose Sony money.

Marathon might get a year to turn things around but you can rest assured the Sony executives are currently trying to agree on what the least costly/embarrassing way to kill it (and probably Bungie) is.
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They're also the reason TLOU2's standalone multiplayer got canned.

Bungie basically showed Sony the cost of running a live service game while helping put the game together and Sony said fuck that shit
 
Kane Lives said:
They never really recovered from that backlash either. The first wave of Destiny haters I personally knew came from this retarded decision to delete content the players paid for. In the Destiny thread, I remembered someone posting player numbers that vividly showed the player count dropping and never really recovering post content purge.
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They hit their peak post daily players post content purge right?
 
namelesstacotruck said:
They hit their peak post daily players post content purge right?
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Nah. On steam at least, the lightfall and final shape peaks were about the same but popularity.report shows forsaken and shadowkeep mogging both of those peaks across all platforms ofc. The game was steady between shadowkeep and the end of WQ but it never reached the old peaks.
 
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