Bungie is finally opening up about Marathon, its shiny new extraction shooter that's been under wraps since 2023. This is the legendary FPS studio's first new game in eight years, its first non-Destiny project since the Halo days, and a reimagining of a series that's laid dormant since the '90s, so the collective hobby is keen to know what sort of spin the Destiny folks can put on a relatively new flavour of PvP known for its loot lust and high stakes.
Today's big reveal stream made one thing clear: Marathon will have all the hallmarks of Escape From Tarkov: A blocky inventory, faction quests, three-person squads, customizable guns, and a huge emphasis on money. Everything in your inventory has a sell price, and what you choose to extract from a map will be informed by big ol' dollar signs. Or in the game's case: credits.
But Bungie says Marathon is about more than just getting rich (and dying trying). It's the journey, not the payday, is the idea. The studio's stated goal is for Marathon to be a "story engine" that produces memorable fights, adventures, and anecdotes for your group chat. Even if you leave the map empty-handed.
"A lot of people who are looking to try an extraction shooter, when they look at it, they don't see that adventure of going hiking in a dangerous area or going through a horror experience, right?" Marathon game director Joe Ziegler told PC Gamer in an interview last week. "They just look at the complexity of all this stuff like, 'Is it just me trying to do things and dying over and over again?'"
Partially, yes. Bungie's gameplay overview video and Tim's hands-on with an early build of Marathon suggest its loop is more-or-less dying over and over again, but the hope is that you're always bringing a new memory back to the menu. Although in some cases trauma might be a better descriptor.
"What we're trying to do is say, 'how do you go on adventures and then feel that survival challenge, that survival story that you're making?' Some of the best survival stories and moments I've had in gaming are actually failures or weird things that have happened, right?" Ziegler said. "And so it's learning to learn, it's learning to enjoy both of those things. Not seeing success purely as every single time I expect to survive, but every time you should expect to come out with a good story."
Honestly, that sounds like a tall order. I'm not a Tarkov enjoyer, but I have played hundreds of hours of the other biggest extraction shooter, Hunt: Showdown. That game is a "story engine" in the sense that its fights are intense, explosive matchups that can last seconds or drag out into 20-minute standoffs, but the truly memorable ones are way more rare than something you can expect to experience in most play sessions.
I need stronger motivations than the chance of an all-timer showdown, which is why Hunt has clear-cut win conditions in the form of scarce bounty tokens won by defeating a boss. Based on what I've seen, Marathon doesn't have anything like that. Like Tarkov, the loot is the goal, and the loot is inherently not going to be something you hold onto long-term, given Bungie's expectation that most maps will have a less than 50% survival rate. So I wonder what a memorable story in Marathon looks like beyond "I extracted with this expensive gun which I will probably lose soon".
We've got a lot more on Marathon today, including our hands-on, Bungie's reasoning for not having proximity chat, and the unexpected inspiration behind the animated short that premiered today.
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