While I have covered developments with Marathon for years now, it has been ten months since I actually played it, back in the now somewhat-infamous alpha. I haven’t participated in the closed NDA-ed alphas since, but now I’m back and diving into the big free, Marathon server slam like hundreds of thousands of others.
I’m still not sold.
Marathon has improved, certainly, since almost a year ago. The unfinished outdoor visuals look much better, and I am never going to join the chorus of complainers that this unique art style looks bad or busy or like… Roblox, an unfortunately common point of comparison. I still think it looks great, as does the overall “lore” aesthetic angle with these wild-looking faction leaders and what intermittent cutscenes we do stumble across.
Gunplay has improved. The weapons feel less unwieldy and more accurate. Many feel good to shoot, albeit I think this clearly falls short of Halo and Destiny standards. However, I have seen things like gold weapons and mods that really, really seem to elevate things to a new level. These are not going to be accessible to almost all players during this test, however.
You can see the beginnings of depth here, as gear starts to advance, putting together a “build” is something that makes the class idea seem more coherent. And I know that Bungie has put together a pretty hardcore endgame, not yet on display here, which is something to look forward to.
But that’s all still not enough to get me over the hill here yet. I am coming in with my own biases, sure. On the positive side, I love Bungie games and have spent 5,000 hours in Destiny 2 over the last decade. Halo 3 is one of my favorite games of all time. On the negative side, I simply have never liked the extraction shooter genre, and I was hoping that Marathon might change that with its new additions and seemingly more unique approach. So far, that hasn’t happened, even with what are supposed to be hugely substantive changes from nearly a year ago. I can see some, but they hardly feel transformative. The game still isn’t drawing me in.
I agree with the most common player complaint about Marathon, its UI. Some of this is font choice, some of this is the way characters are awkwardly splayed out on its screens. Menu navigation is not intuitive, though I have been dealing with that for years in Destiny, so I suppose that’s no surprise. The biggest sin are these items, and how hard it is to parse them between consumables, crafting materials, sellable materials, quest materials and more. Everything is just in a very little square and half the things are rectangles. You have to go in and read the tiny text to see what each one is, and even then, it’s not always clear. Sure, I suppose in time you’ll memorize a few dozen of these on sight, but right now, it feels incoherent.
Marathon runs are… odd. This is a game that is supposed to be mainly focused on PvP, but you are usually herded into wandering around for ages and are lucky to see one, maybe two teams a run. Usually, you are fighting the UESC AI, often in very difficult battles between their sheer numbers and some of their insane abilities at higher ranks. I actually like those encounters, though in the context of the actual point of the game, they burn through resources quickly and barely give you anything to restock. You need to bring huge amounts of ammo and heals to these runs, that is clear.
As for actual PvP fights, at least for now, when everyone is on one or two-bar shields, time-to-kill is extremely low, and you often have little recourse when getting shot and not being able to find who’s attacking you in the next 0.75 seconds. Fights are better when you’re able to figure out calculated approaches and use gear and powers to have real slugfests. But I was getting “fun” fights maybe once every four games, if that. The much-lauded solos concept is not better, as everyone mainly hides using the invisible Void and camps, which is something Bungie said they were concerned about when people were asking them to add the playlist in the first place.
Another “must-have” request from players was proximity chat. At least in this test, in a dozen games, I heard exactly one enemy team on prox chat. It was funny, we trapped them in a room on all sides, and they were pondering their imminent death. But past that, I have also only had one game that even had team chat, which almost feels necessary in both this genre, but especially in Marathon when you load in, and everyone has different multi-stage faction quests to complete in opposite directions. There may be some bug with this however, and we’re waiting for an update on that, so I’ll reserve judgement for now.
Again, Marathon has so far failed to get me on board with the extraction shooter genre, albeit, sure, it’s early, and I need to give it more of a chance. The genre, to me, has always felt like a big time-waster. One bad run, possibly with deaths you couldn’t even avoid, and you can lose that great gear it took a zillion games to find. Even the “easy” Rook runs of pure scavenging can be annoying if you step on a UESC mine or something, and you’ve just wasted 10-15 minutes. Maybe you didn’t lose anything, but you sure didn’t gain anything, not even XP in that case. I don’t find any of that fun.
When you do manage to get out with good gear, it’s a rush, but the “why” of all this still doesn’t land for me. You get better gear to do runs to get better gear which, sure, is a looter, but the looters I play don’t have those exhausting stakes of full losses. There’s not even a “safe pocket” here to return with at least one thing you wanted. I cannot blame my dislike of the genre on Marathon alone, but this has done nothing to change my mind, and it can feel more time-wasty than ARC quite often.
I’ll do a separate article on the overall picture of how this Marathon test is doing from player numbers to wider player sentiment (hint: it’s not amazing), but for now, those are my early thoughts. I will be playing all weekend, of course, and will have more to say later.
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