Marathon

Bungie

In a very long, very welcome, very transparent blog post from Marathon director Joe Ziegler yesterday, he laid out what’s working and not in the game, but most importantly, its future plans.

Easily the biggest reveal was the fact that in season 2, which launches in two weeks, there will be a pair of experimental playlists, at least one adding something that some fans have been talking about since day one:

“In Season 2, we will be experimenting with two modes, one at the beginning of the season and one towards the middle/latter half of the season. The experimental mode at the beginning of the season will focus more on PVE, but with a light touch of PVP. The second experimental mode will be a PVE-only mode that’s focused on crews being tasked with completing objectives together and making some progress across matches.”

I’m not sure if “PvP lite” is just a normal map with fewer teams in it, but the obvious standout reveal here is the trial of a purely PvE mode, something that many said Marathon absolutely needed to draw in more players, and others said would run entirely counter to the purpose of the game. Well, it’s happening, and it appears to be more substantive than just eliminating rival teams from the map.

There is another half of this coin as well, as Bungie also indicates that a pure PvP mode may be coming. Again, no details, and fans' minds are wandering as far as this being an arena or battle royale mode, but that would be a little surprising.

Then, the post ends on an interesting note about the plan for where the game might be a year from now:

“Season 5 we're looking at bringing the whole ecosystem of (PV(P)VE) play together and evolving our weird sci-fi world in new ways.”

What this says to me is that the plan for Marathon may be to expand it into what could end up feeling like a very different game, mixing PvE, PvPvE and PvP modes together, with some of those at least potentially maybe not being about extraction at all. Even in season 1 we had sponsored kit events where, while you did extract from the map, it eliminated a core tenet of the genre by disallowing anyone to go in with gear they’d earned. That’s like half of what an extraction shooter is. So, how far is Bungie willing to potentially distance itself from the genre? My guess is far, and they might have to if they want any chance at getting the kind of playercounts they need. It does, of course, bring up glimmers of a game like Destiny, which blends all those types of modes together.

Is this impossible for Marathon to execute? I’d argue it isn’t, albeit some of it depends on Sony’s patience with the game’s current underperformance. We already know over half of Bungie is working on Marathon as opposed to Destiny 2, and there are few indications that Destiny 2 is on some big path to recovery. If more or all resources are shifted toward dramatically expanding Marathon, then yeah, maybe we’re going to see this game become something else entirely down the road.

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