We heard rumblings going back quite a few years that Bungie was working on something. They had announced Destiny’s multi-year “conclusion to the light and dark saga” (which of course ended up stretching even longer than initially planned due to that time the world ended), and the Crucible Team was very quiet through all of this. The very reasonable assumption was that Bungie were working on some kind of multiplayer-focused esports… thing… but all we could really tell was that it was sucking resources out of Crucible. After they eventually announced that 1) it’s a Marathon sequel/reboot and 2) it’s an extraction shooter, I was torn. Marathon is an amazing setting that I unfortunately don’t have a ton of experience with as I was a PC enjoyer not a Mac enjoyer in the 90s… but extraction shooter was concerning. But it’s Bungie, certainly they would know how to sand the crunchy weirdness off the extraction shooter genre.

Couple years later and Destiny – to me at least – is out of gas. The Final Shape was great, but narratively it was the end, and with all the staffing churn that followed its release it seemed that going forward they wouldn’t even be positioned to successfully produce another mediocre Destiny expansion in the future, let alone a good one (not that it would matter much, though, as they didn’t seem to have any coherent plan of what to do with Destiny after The Final Shape anyway). With effectively the future of the company riding on it, Marathon really needs to be outstanding. Having now played it… oof, ouch.

Marathon is an extraction shooter. You load into a map with your squad, loot materials and gear, fill up your backpack, and find an extraction point. Along the way there are buildings to explore, puzzles to solve, bots to fight, random drop events, etc. It’s like a Destiny Patrol zone… except also there’s several other squads of humans in the zone and PVP is enabled. If you die, and don’t get rezzed, you’re dead and lose everything in your pack and prepare to queue again with whatever you had previously stashed in your vault.

It’s an incredibly niche sub-genre, it’s sorta like a battle royale, but:

  1. The pushing factor is where your extraction point is (rather than The Zone)
  2. Your goal isn’t to be the last team surviving, your goal is just to escape alive (because you can decide to extract basically whenever you want to)
  3. Your reward isn’t just a crown for the next round, it’s all the gear you managed to scoop up along the way (because that’s Literally The Point)

Most games in the genre are unbelievably crunchy, like Escape from Tarkov, and it seems like Bungie haven’t really sanded off any of these rough edges. If anything they introduced new rough edges, or new rough edges are apparent because the game isn’t Done yet.

What Works:

  • Gunplay and general movement is still world-class. It’s not a direct copy/paste from Destiny and Halo before it, but their starting point was so good that it would be deeply deeply concerning if they managed to screw it up. Good News: They Didn’t.
  • The aesthetic, which I can best describe as “WIRED Magazine circa 1996: The Game”, is wonderful and refreshing. Big huge bold chunks of neon colors everywhere juxtaposed against natural environments. It’s great, no other game comes to mind that looks like this.
  • The core gameplay loop – spawn, loot gear, kill dudes, get out – works and works well.

What Doesn’t Work (Or, Idk, Doesn’t Work As Well As I Would Expect From A Studio Of This Size And Maturity In A Game That Has Been In Development For This Long):

  • Whoo boy. It’s a lot.

UI Is My Passion⌗

The UI of this game is a hot mess. Bungie has never been especially good at UI design, but this is particularly bad. It’s cluttered, it’s needlessly busy, and it’s crammed full of text (most of which is meaningless). It’s also very bright, the UI color is almost all white with no stroke, occasionally white on black. But out in the world, with such a bright environment – often literally stark white ramps or barriers or whatever – if that overlaps your HUD good luck reading how much ammo you have. Or if you need to figure out where your buddy went, it’s a lot of spinning around in a circle looking for the little white dot and nameplate, and then adjusting your view so said little white dot and nameplate aren’t hovering on top of a featureless expanse of white.

If it wasn’t for the overall aesthetic and vibe, I’d be saying “oh it’s ok they just haven’t done the full art pass on this area, it’ll be fine in the final game”, but no, the aesthetic of the game is literally going to include this much white all over the place.

It’s a Readability Nightmare⌗

Over the course of the past 20 some odd years of shooter game design – at least going back to Team Fortress 2 as best I can recall – studios have realized there is incredible value in ensuring your game is easily readable. Not like, legible (though that’s obviously important too), but like, readable. Glanceable. If your opposing team in a firefight may be composed of different classes, or heroes, or what have you, you should be able to easily look across the moat in 2fort and tell “ah, yep, here comes a heavy and a medic, and yeah, there’s a sniper up on the catwalk”. This should even work at a significant distance, “yep, over by that ridge they’ve got a Gibby and a Pathfinder, and oh yeah they’ve got a Wraith back there Naruto-running straight at us”.

Bungie has bravely ignored all of this industry-wide common knowledge, and has chosen to populate this game with an endless array of pretty generic looking robot people. They all look like robot people. Some of them are slightly beefier robot people. Some of them look like a robot person who picked out their clothes from the closet in the dark. But they all basically look like robot people.

We had one firefight in particular where we had our full squad of 3 dudes roll up to a building, and as we were entering it a group of 3-4 other UESC bots came around the corner. So we’re like half in a building half-out, crazy firefight, grenades going out, bullets flying, and at that point I had zero idea who was friendly or not. And this was against bots right up in my face. At range there’s basically no chance of telling what kind of threat you’re returning fire at without a sniper rifle with a massive scope, the only tell I had was “did they just do a weird rocket side-dodge thing?” and that means they’re a bot. If they’re a human the tell is usually “they murdered you before you ever saw them, probably because they were literally invisible, because that’s just a thing you can do in this game”.

Looting Feels Horrible⌗

Or, “UX Is My Passion”

I admittedly have not played other extraction shooters, but I’ve played a decent amount of Fortnite and Apex Legends, and those have looting and searching too. And they’re fine! You pop a chest or crate or whatever, you see your gear, you juggle it around in your limited inventory, and you haul ass. Items are all very clearly differentiated, it’s obvious which items stack and to what extent. It’s easy to compare items. All of this is very not the case in Marathon.

Looting in Marathon is an intentionally slow process, when you pop a chest the loot doesn’t explode all over the floor, it slowly and randomly “decrypts” or “identifies” or whatever to increase friction and time spent helplessly screwing around in your inventory. That’s fine, that’s apparently exactly how looting works in Tarkov, et al. What’s less fine is what you may find in a chest. It could be consumables (heals, buffs), it could be guns (unlikely but whatever), it could be materials (of which there are like 30 kinds), or it could be random valuables (which get auto-sold at end of match). When you start the game – or right after you die and have no backpack – your inventory is TINY.

You understandably have very little time when you’re looting, it has to be quick, in and out, get your gear get out. Nearly all items are 1x1 inventory slot. That 1x1 inventory slot might be a shield charge (which is HILARIOUSLY large when you drop it on the ground), it might be a very important material that you need to find like 30 of, or it might be literal actual trash, an expired tube of nutritional paste that’s worth $2. Which of these things stack? Impossible to know. Heals stack to 5x. Some materials do, too? Chemical grenades stack, but frag grenades don’t? Ok, sure. Ammo stacks, but to seemingly arbitrary levels? You can’t just slam that loot-all button, you have to seriously dig around in these trashcans full of trash to figure out what you should pick up. And you can’t stuff things back into the trash, if you’ve picked it, you have to throw it on the floor.

It also doesn’t help that half these things all have very similar names and icons. Blue Microchips? Hell yes, grab those, you need so many of those things for permanent vault upgrades. Blue Wires? Screw those, they’re worth $3 a piece. Blue Corn Chips? Absolutely worthless do not even pick up. You either have to remember the exact name and icon of the thing you need, or you need to sit there and mouseover every greeble and examine it and check to see if it says it’s a material or not and don’t get distracted by the 400 other words of flavor text, just look at the label.

And do I even need to explain that this UI is 100% not designed for controller use? It forces you to use the Destiny-style joystick-cursor in place of a mouse, and it’s bad. When I saw video of looting I assumed surely there’d be like hotkeys to navigate this on controller, like bumpers to shift between inventory / backpack / container and dpad to navigate within it? Nope. Nothing. Cursor only. Deal with it.

Based on all this, I am absolutely confident that in my handful of games I missed out on a ton of loot that was good because I accidentally clicked my sixth shield charge and didn’t have inventory space for something good instead of my tube of algae. Who is even buying this expired algae paste? Who needs it? We’re all androids out here!

I think nearly all these problems would be solved with a loot filter system. Let me grey-out all “valuables” under $100. Let me highlight specific materials I’m searching for. Something like loot filters in Diablo or other ARPGs, it can’t be that hard and would make this system usable.

My general assessment right now is that (duh) this game is nowhere near done yet and clearly needs more time. Is there enough time between now and the September 23rd release date? No idea, but it doesn’t look good. They’re already trying to manage expectations by telling people “ohhh yeah that’s on the roadmap but probably post-release”.

But even if they somehow miraculously fix everything being complained about, I’m concerned the game isn’t going to have staying power. The experience is tuned exclusively for sweaty squads of 3 players. Solo Queue is abysmal. Duos is fine, but it’s really geared towards a full squad.

I liked Destiny because there was variety. If I wanted to turn my brain off and throw on a podcast I could hit up any of various playlists by myself and have a great time. If there’s a party running you could all load in for Crucible or Iron Banner. If you want weirdo puzzles, there’s plenty of them. If you want sweatier PVE, there’s Nightfalls, GM Nightfalls, and Dungeons. If you want turbo sweaty PVE, there’s Raids and Challenge Raids. And if you want turbo sweaty PVP there’s always Trials.

Marathon right now seems very single-note. You get your 2 buddies and you go do The One Thing. That’s it. That’s the game. If you just want a chill evening with the bros for a change, that does not exist here, there is only sweat. That kind of experience probably interests somebody, but it’s not me, and I doubt it’s going to be for most people. And that’s got me worried because we’ve already seen what happens when Sony sees one of their flagship colossal-budget multi-platform games not perform to the expectations promised by the studio.

But let’s see.