Marathon

Bungie

Marathon is struggling to attract and retain players. Its hardcore extraction nature either isn’t appealing enough to casuals or causing some amount of burnout among its current playerbase. While Marathon has tried a number of more casual-friendly modes for two seasons now, it is about to run its biggest experiment yet: A full-on PvE mode, almost entirely separate from the rest of the game.

Bungie laid out the idea for the upcoming experimental mode, out July 21, called “Vault Breaker.” The concept:

• Solos, duos or three-player teams will enter Cryo Archive, the hardest, most complex map in the game, but without any other teams for PvP fights. No sneaky Rooks allowed either.
• Players will take on progressively harder and harder vaults, likely based at least to some extent on the current mechanics, though we don’t know full details yet. It will, however, definitely end with a fight against the fabled Compiler, the “raid boss” of Marathon that only a small percentage of players have even seen.
• Multiple runs will allow players to make in-mode progression to make themselves stronger for subsequent attempts through upgrades.
• Players bring in a special Sponsored Kit and do not extract any loot they find, as it is only used for that specific run. Rather, you exfil with Vault Data, a new form of currency that can either buy upgrades for your starter Vault Breaker Sponsored Kit or buy items for the other “normal” Marathon modes (a system designed to avoid flooding the whole game with Vault Breaker loot).

What’s being described here is not really an extraction shooter at all; it’s a roguelike. An FPS roguelike. It’s got all the pieces. Progress through runs and if you die, you lose found upgrades and start over. However, in time, you gain more and more power through repeated runs, getting further each time thanks to better strategy and those strength increases. The “exfil” in Vault Breaker is for currency alone, the equivalent of either leaving a run early or finishing the whole thing for rewards.

This is the answer to “What if Marathon wasn’t an extraction shooter?” That’s something that many players, namely now adrift Destiny players, have wondered from the start, interested in the world and even gameplay of Marathon, but wishing it was another genre. Many were just never going to be able to get into an extraction game, no matter how well-designed it might be.

This PvE mode was not initially planned in Marathon’s internal roadmap, at least not for barely a season and a half into the game. Bungie devs previously dismissed the idea of PvE content in Marathon, saying they were focused on the core game. The problem is that it appears that if they continue to focus on the core game alone, they will not find new players and likely keep bleeding old ones. Marathon needs a big moment to be some sort of turning point. And this mode will be as big of a swing as the studio has made to date.

While I am excited to try this out, expectations should be kept in check. This is not a long-planned addition, and it’s likely to be somewhat barebones at the start. The idea is that if it catches on, it could be built up in time. And Bungie is going to invest in anything in Marathon that catches on at this point, even if it’s barely related to its original extraction genre at all. A comparison might be Fortnite, starting with the defense-based Save the World mode before a side-project, Battle Royale, took over and blew up the game’s fortunes. Not that Marathon will be some world-changing game if this PvE mode works, but any significant improvement is what Bungie wants to see, even if they have to shift away from the current game’s format and focus. That, of course, is not going over great with some existing Marathon players.

This Vault Breaker mode, along with other changes like Cradle prestiging, will be live on July 21, and we will no doubt get more details before then.

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