Marathon is burdened with the past. Its twin namesakes, the titular colony ship and the trilogy of classic boomer shooters for the Apple Macintosh, are both corpses plundered for new life. The protagonists of this new, rebooted game are scavengers, quite literally picking over the bones of what came before.
This fact has colored the reception of Marathon from its very first announcement. The fact that Marathon was set to be a pure live-service game, with no single-player component, was a blow to franchise fans. Sony’s acquisition of Bungie fueled speculation. Was Marathon a corporate-mandated multiplayer game?
Just a couple months after release, the announcement of Destiny 2’s final update, as well as the revelation that Bungie had no “Destiny 3” or any other tentpole project waiting in the wings, have put Marathon in a difficult and unfair position. But part of the skepticism about the game exists because Marathon, unlike every Bungie game since Halo: Combat Evolved, is not a game expertly tuned for mass-market success. Instead, it is something altogether stranger and more exciting.
Perhaps the best way to articulate this shift is the difference in themes. In Destiny and its sequel, the player character is special. She is a warrior of light, one of the absolute guardians of humanity. She gathers legendary weapons that do not tarnish or vanish. She charts new worlds, venturing boldly into fights with gods and demons alike.
In Marathon, the player character is nobody: a floating consciousness uploaded into readily disposable bodies. She’s a freelancer for massive corporations, which freely experiment with her, risking her well-being for ever-slimmer margins of profit. Even the Compiler, the raid boss that presents one of the new game’s most daunting challenges, is a regularly encountered foe in the original trilogy.
In Destiny, even in the competitive Crucible modes, the player is a key part of an organization that works together. In Marathon, she is just one soldier on the edge of space, fighting her own kind to tick down a debt she can never fully pay.
But these differences go beyond Marathon’s writing, and into the brass tacks of how it feels to play; it is friction-forward in a way multiplayer games at its budget and scale rarely are. In contrast to the nigh-infinite vaults of Destiny 2, Marathon players have limited space to store their goods. They can horde, but eventually, if they want more, they have to stake some of their hard-worn gear. With each season, like in other extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov, each player’s gear fully resets. Absolutely nothing is permanent. The only thing that any player can carry from season to season, and match to match, is what they have learned. This includes the regular skills of any first-person shooter: what guns suit a particular playstyle, where is best to flank enemies, find cover, or avoid the sight lines of enemy snipers.
But Marathon’s sprawling maps make the simple act of learning more difficult than it might appear. For one, the alien world of Tau Ceti IV is awash with unfamiliar sounds. Players opening loot-laden locked rooms, starting specific events, gaining the attention of patrolling robots, even simply dying–each of these things carries with it a unique sound cue. Learning what each sound means and how to get in position in relation to it is its own battle.
In short, Marathon throws a lot at new players. Getting proficient takes time and knowledge.
A lot of the discourse around Marathon has posited essentially one of two things about it: that it is a money-grubbing cash-in on a popular trend, or that it fails at being a mainstream title at the scale of Destiny 2.The graveyard of live-service games like Highguard and Concord have prompted constant comparison. But Marathon is not a shotgun blast, trying for the broadest possible appeal; it is a knife’s edge, cutting away at a well-defined niche.
Take the Compiler, the game’s ultimate PvE challenge. To get there, players must successfully raid each of the Cryo Archive map’s six vaults and exfil with their goods intact, which they will need special keys to attempt in the first place. After doing so, they must use a separate key to activate a set of challenges, which will lead to the boss room. These things would be significant time investments in any game, but in Marathon, the threat of an ambush by other players is constant, making a team lose both progress and loot in a single fiery enchange.
In contrast, a casual Destiny player could “beat” the game, at least in the sense of completing its many campaigns, without spending hundreds of hours on it. With a little dedication, she could even see some endgame bosses. Marathon demands more. If not more time, at least more skill.
Still, Marathon has become more approachable over its first season. Mercy kits let players revive their foes, offering another way to negotiate between enemy squads. Bungie added cheap ways to get back up when down, making it harder for runs to end thanks to enemy robots or far-off sniper shots. Season 2 has more of those changes in store. The Cradle, a brand-new stat system, lets runners tune their character’s strengths and weaknesses without looting or buying items. Upgrades, which players buy with a combo of cold, hard cash earned on runs and materials robbed from Tau Ceti, now can be purchased for less. But these changes have all maintained the heart of Marathon’s eerie, threatening landscape.
For example, take the “Sponsored Survival” experimental mode just added to the game. In this mode, only one squad enters the “Night Marsh” map, giving them time to loot without (player) inference. They must take free equipment, meaning they cannot carry any loot from their vaults to lose or use in the match. However, Rooks, the lone scavenger players who propagate in the middle of matches, all enter the map just a few minutes later. And unlike other Marathon modes, there is only one place to extract at the end of the match. If the lone team or any of the rooks make it to the end, they can all leave together–or test their might in a hail of gunfire. It makes looting easier; but extraction more targeted.
And this all takes place on Night Marsh, which drenches a familiar location in darkness. In most video game nights, the world takes on the hue of dusk. It’s sort of dark, but everything you need to see is still visible. In Marathon, the night is pitch black, with occasional lights illuminating only select sections of the map. Additionally, the player’s eyes and ears will trick her. Ghostly figures can wander by, vanishing as soon as they appear. Shouts and screams will emerge from the dark, seemingly without source. If speculation is correct, there are fewer enemy players to be found than on the more standard “Dire Marsh” map. But even so, the world holds threat.
These might all sound like reasons not to engage, but all these things combine to make something with genuine mystery and awe. Marathon’s most game-changing loot and its most profound challenges might be locked away, but anyone can start to get the picture from their very first match. The electronic hum of the starting music. The terror of enemy footsteps. The thrill of a well-timed attack. Deciding not to extract, because there is still loot waiting to be found, and dying from greed. Or besting an enemy team’s ambush through guile and speed.
Within Marathon’s nigh-endless deaths and rebirths, there is the rush of life. It is stressful, demanding, and by definition “not for everyone,” but that’s true of most things that are worth your time.
