Marathon

Bungie

Sony recently backed Marathon during its earnings call, even as it reported that it has amassed $765 million in impairment losses against Bungie. That, however, still means Sony values Bungie as an almost $3 billion asset, meaning they are sticking with the studio for a while, at least.

Here’s what Sony said about Marathon and its goals going forward:

“Player reception to Marathon is strong, receiving a Metacritic score of 82 and more than 90% of the player reviews on Steam being positive. Engagement metrics such as retention also remain at a high level. Going forward, we aim to improve the performance of the game by working to retain highly engaged core users through the introduction of additional content, further improvements in the gameplay experience, and expansion of the user base."

The key bit of that is “expansion of the user base” as there are simply not enough people playing Marathon, and overall retention has been poor (the retention Sony refers to is hardcore players putting in a lot of hours).

But what’s happening is likely going beyond recent experiments like sponsored kit modes aimed at more casual “we don’t want to risk gear” players, as Bungie recently said in a lengthy blog post. And the way it’s going to evolve over the course of the next year seems like it’s going to be significant enough where at least potentially, it may expand the game past a single genre if pure, high-level extraction isn’t working out well enough. Among the highlights:

• Season 2 will get a PvP-lite mode that leans more heavily on PvE as an experimental playlist.
• Season 2 will get a second experimental playlist that is purely co-op PvE with mission objectives. I can confirm that this was not originally planned for season 2, and was created in response to some fan feedback about how they’d like such a mode (many players who like the current extraction mode are not on board).
• At some point after season 2, Bungie says that a purely PvP mode will likely be tested in the game.
• By season 5, Marathon Game Director Joe Ziegler said “we're looking at bringing the whole ecosystem of (PV(P)VE) play together and evolving our weird sci-fi world in new ways.”

So, you can see that there may be a new long-term goal, whereas originally the plan was likely to make an extraction shooter, add things you would normally add to an extraction shooter, new shells, enemies, maps, gear, etc, and keep doing just that in perpetuity. It will still do that, but it seems that Bungie wants to transform Marathon into something larger. Something that potentially spans multiple genres, as it’s not 100% clear that the concept of extraction could stick around for all of them. Even in this early sponsored kit playlist, the game is eliminating half the point of an extraction shooter by having players load in with level-playing field, non-extracted gear.

My guess is the goal here may be to pull a rabbit out of a hat like other games have in the past. Most recently, Marathon has been closely compared to Rainbow Six Siege, which started poorly and through a lot of overhauls and additions, became successful. And there are, of course, plenty of examples of games that have expanded the core of what they are over time, most notably No Man’s Sky, a game that is completely unrecognizable from its launch version.

The fear among Bungie fans is that this may come at the cost of Destiny 2, which is in dire straits and many believe there is little hope of recovery for the 11-year-old game that has been starved of investment. A dramatic expansion of Marathon would require more devs and more resources, more than even the half of Bungie that was working on Marathon to this point. And obviously Destiny cannot really stay afloat with even fewer devs working on it, given where it is now.

All of this feels like a bit of a Hail Mary from Bungie, adding a PvE mode a season and a half after the launch of Marathon, which was always pitched as a high-level PvPvE game. Many PvP shooters have added PvE modes eventually, but often years after launch, if their initial plans didn’t fail altogether (Overwatch). But if the goal is to expand the playerbase, the game itself is going to have to expand. And that seems like the plan over the course of the next year.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.