Marathon May Never Be Popular, And That’s Why It’s So Good

Marathon is burdened with the past. Its twin namesakes, the titular colony ship and the trilogy of classic boomer shooters for the Apple Macintosh, are both corpses plundered for new life. The protagonists of this new, rebooted game are scavengers, quite literally picking over the bones of what came before.  This fact has colored the reception of Marathon from its very first announcement. The fact that Marathon was set to be a pure live-service game, with no single-player component, was a blow to franchise fans. Sony's acquisition of Bungie fueled speculation. Was Marathon a corporate-mandated multiplayer game?  Just a couple months after release, the announcement of Destiny 2's final update, as well as the revelation that Bungie had no "Destiny 3" or any other tentpole project waiting in the wings, have put Marathon in a difficult and unfair position. But part of the skepticism about the game exists because Marathon, unlike every Bungie game since Halo: Combat Evolved, is not a game expertly tuned for mass-market success. Instead, it is something altogether stranger and more exciting. Marathon is sometimes harsh and unfair, and all the more thrilling for the exchange. Perhaps the best way to articulate this shift is the difference in themes. In Destiny and its sequel, the player character is special. She is a warrior of light, one of the absolute guardians of humanity. She gathers legendary weapons that do not tarnish or vanish. She charts new worlds, venturing boldly into fights with gods and demons alike.  In Marathon, the player character is nobody: a floating consciousness uploaded into readily disposable bodies. She's a freelancer for massive corporations, which freely experiment with her, risking her well-being for ever-slimmer margins of profit. Even the Compiler, the raid boss that presents one of the new game's most daunting challenges, is a regularly encountered foe in the original trilogy.  In Destiny, even in the competitive Crucible modes, the player is a key part of an organization that works together. In Marathon, she is just one soldier on the edge of space, fighting her own kind to tick down a debt she can never fully pay. But these differences go beyond Marathon's writing, and into the brass tacks of how it feels to play; it is friction-forward in a way multiplayer games at its budget and scale rarely are. In contrast to the nigh-infinite vaults of Destiny 2, Marathon players have limited space to store their goods. They can horde, but eventually, if they want more, they have to stake some of their hard-worn gear. With each season, like in other extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov, each player's gear fully resets. Absolutely nothing is permanent. The only thing that any player can carry from season to season, and match to match, is what they have learned. This includes the regular skills of any first-person shooter: what guns suit a particular playstyle, where is best to flank enemies, find cover, or avoid the sight lines of enemy snipers.  But Marathon's sprawling maps make the simple act of learning more difficult than it might appear. For one, the alien world of Tau Ceti IV is awash with unfamiliar sounds. Players opening loot-laden locked rooms, starting specific events, gaining the attention of patrolling robots, even simply dying–each of these things carries with it a unique sound cue. Learning what each sound means and how to get in position in relation to it is its own battle.  In short, Marathon throws a lot at new players. Getting proficient takes time and knowledge. Everyone in Marathon will lose; everyone in Marathon will live to win some future day. A lot of the discourse around Marathon has posited essentially one of two things about it: that it is a money-grubbing cash-in on a popular trend, or that it fails at being a mainstream title at the scale of Destiny 2.The graveyard of live-service games like Highguard and Concord have prompted constant comparison. But Marathon is not a shotgun blast, trying for the broadest possible appeal; it is a knife's edge, cutting away at a well-defined niche. Take the Compiler, the game's ultimate PvE challenge. To get there, players must successfully raid each of the Cryo Archive map’s six vaults and exfil with their goods intact, which they will need special keys to attempt in the first place. After doing so, they must use a separate key to activate a set of challenges, which will lead to the boss room. These things would be significant time investments in any game, but in Marathon, the threat of an ambush by other players is constant, making a team lose both progress and loot in a single fiery enchange.  In contrast, a casual Destiny player could "beat" the game, at least in the sense of completing its many campaigns, without spending hundreds of hours on it. With a little dedication, she could even see some endgame bosses. Marathon demands more. If not more time, at least more skill. Still, Marathon has become mor

Marathon is burdened with the past. Its twin namesakes, the titular colony ship and the trilogy of classic boomer shooters for the Apple Macintosh, are both corpses plundered for new life. The protagonists of this new, rebooted game are scavengers, quite literally picking over the bones of what came before.  This fact has colored the…

Marathon is burdened with the past. Its twin namesakes, the titular colony ship and the trilogy of classic boomer shooters for the Apple Macintosh, are both corpses plundered for new life. The protagonists of this new, rebooted game are scavengers, quite literally picking over the bones of what came before.  This fact has colored the reception of Marathon from its very first announcement. The fact that Marathon was set to be a pure live-service game, with no single-player component, was a blow to franchise fans.…