It's Just Over For ‘Marathon'
Marathon
I've tried to put this off for a while now, giving Marathon the benefit of the doubt in terms of fixing what ails it, and maybe snagging an audience that's large enough to make it at least sustainable.
But no, it's over. I can't dispute this anymore. This has probably always been true, but the events of the past week have cemented it. I will get into the livestream and plagiarism and all that later, but this is a long, long list of what's gone wrong in the past, what's currently going wrong, and a future that does not look any brighter.
The entire idea of this game was a mistake. Bungie has said that this came from a bunch of them playing Tarkov a while ago, and I heard that among that group, it was one 'good old boy' in leadership who pushed to make this Bungie's biggest non-Destiny project, and hopefully the birth (well, rebirth) of a strong IP for the studio, now under Sony which assumed it would produce another hit like this.
The game attempts to split the difference between casual players who may be new to extraction shooters and existing, hardcore extraction players it would like to pilfer from games like Tarkov. It will do neither.
You are never going to make an extraction shooter that is casual enough, because the concept of being able to lose your loot, potentially your entire vault if you go on bad runs, is exhausting as you try to give the game and genre a chance. Add onto that losing all that gear and all the upgrades you've gotten in a season no matter what, and that may be how this genre is, but it's just not going to be attractive to many players that have not already played this genre.
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It's probably even worse on the hardcore player end, with Tarkov players scoffing at how 'easy' they've made Marathon, everything from gear looting to time-to-kill to double revives on combat. I've seen almost no established extraction shooter players that are eager to jump over to Marathon for anything but a trial run based on what they've seen and played.
Marathon
And what we've seen and played is the next point. Neither are good. Either you've been an outside observer watching gameplay trailers and Twitch streams, or you got into the Closed Alpha and played for yourself.
The game feels uninspired. Shooting is…fine, but considering this is Bungie, a studio that gave us some of the best-feeling shooters of all time, this is not close to comparing to that. It feels like a slower version of Apex Legends with maybe one teamfight per round, and in between, battling with UESC bots (which I do think can actually be fun in some instances).
The idea that this is an extraction shooter that should use a hero model has not landed well at all. It seems woefully unbalanced with full invisibility and wallhacks and things that should just not be in this genre. And it destroys the idea of making a fully custom character like other games, something most players like. It feels like a solution where a problem did not exist. An experiment to make the game stand out, but it's just made it worse.
None of this was helped that at the exact same time, Marathon's Alpha was interrupted by an ARK Raiders Alpha, a much more traditional extraction shooter and a much better one, by all accounts. More polished, more fun, more expected features found in extraction shooters. All you have to do is look at the fact that ARK Raiders' playercount went up every single day of its Alpha where Marathon's almost always went down. By the end, it was sub-20% of what it started with. Twitch viewers were even worse, going from 150,000 at launch as big streamers tried it, crashing to 1-3,000 a few days later near the end, where big chunks of that might even be one or two Destiny streamers alone.
Marathon
It's not just how the game currently feels and plays, it's what it's apparently planning for the future. This was half the problem with the recent livestream where sure, the vibes were bad with the recent plagiarism from the start, but hearing game director Joe Ziegler and others talk about it, the constant refrain was 'we're looking about that, we're thinking about that.' The bulk of the talk was about minor balance changes. Shield health, backpack spawns, stack size, faction differentiation. Asked to name the biggest issue they found coming out of the Alpha, Ziegler rattled off a list of impossibly small issues. Hugely requested things like proximity chat and Solos were handwaved away and relegated to some possible future plan.
It is absolutely insane that Bungie has not taken to heart the feedback about how this game feels to play Solo. It feels like the only way to play is stacked with friends on comms, as playing with randoms is at best a coinflip whether it's awful or fine. Going in Solo and skulking around like a rat avoiding all combat is boring as hell.
Because the game ignores Solos, that means you need to convince two friends to buy it, likely at an upcoming $40 price point. It is too late in development to switch to free-to-play, not that this genre is built for that anyway, but painfully few people have played this game and thought it was worth that price. Without a delay, at launch, it will have two more heroes and 1-2 more maps and that's it. It's a tiny amount of content for that price, on top of a game that as of yet, is not very fun for most players.
Now we arrive at the massive controversy of art theft, the revelation that a supposed ex-Bungie artist outright stole a large amount of art from ANTIREAL, an artist with a portfolio extremely similar to Marathon's vibes. And we're not talking 'inspired by,' these pieces of art are 1:1 rips to the point where Bungie has to audit its entire game to see how many of these there might be. During the livestream they couldn't even show the game because it was being ripped apart internally for this process.
The Marathon comparison
The narrative spread as players realized that a number of Bungie artists, including Art Director Joseph Cross, followed ANTIREAL for years. It's likely true that Marathon's overall style came from any number of sources from years or decades past, though this fact + the direct lifting from ANTIREAL exploded into theorizing that this was a larger problem (on my end too, for a time). But even if the entire 'soul' of Marathon wasn't taken from one artist, art director Joe Cross and members of his team allowed this massive portfolio of plagiarism to make it through from being stolen allegedly five years ago to being plastered all over the current build of the game. Mass incompetence.
This has slit the throat of Marathon. The one thing Marathon had going for it was its unique art style and cool vibes, and now it will be impossible to bring that up without the plagiarism being referenced. Memes were instantly born during the apology portion of the livestream including 'PLAGIARISM WILL MAKE ME GOD' and a renaming of Marathon to 'ART Raiders.' That's going to stick forever.
There is no escaping this now. Not that vibes were good before, but they are dismal now with Marathon a laughing stock after this happened or even worse, outright anger that this was allowed to take place in the game, and players refusing to play and support the game as a result.
Marathon will not fundamentally change enough to be attractive to most players. Community sentiment will not change enough to turn things around on that end. A delay does not significantly change any of this, but it may be the only option.
It would be impressively stupid to actually release this game in four months given both these recent events and that we're only seeing a small amount of new content and some balance and visual polishing for launch. But you simply cannot cancel this game at this point after 5+ years of work, even if it should have died ages ago. Sony alone would never allow that.
A delay is the only real option but I don't think it changes enough to be useful. It will create distance from the current awfulness, but I have seen nothing to indicate this is going to be some transformative rebirth. The core concept of a hero shooter extraction game will not change. It will not erase the plagiarism that happened.
Marathon
I've previously said that Marathon will not be Concord 2.0. While I still technically believe that, it's more a matter of just how brutally this will fail, not whether it will fail at all. I do not expect it to get 700 concurrent Steam players like Concord, nor be scrapped in two weeks by Sony. But it will not do well. That is set in stone right now barring some sort of miracle from the heavens.
This will hurt Bungie and its actual healthy child, Destiny. There will be layoffs. There will be Sony takeover of leadership as they bail out with millions in vested cash. The only thing I don't believe will happen is the complete dissolution of Bungie as that would be a bridge too far in terms of Sony being embarrassed a storied brand has collapsed under its tenure, one they paid $3.6 billion for. And I also think it would be a horrible look to immediately kill another game like they did with Concord, and Marathon will be given some time to fix and improve things. I don't think any amount of time will be enough.
I realize this is an utterly brutal article. It's the longest one I've written in ages. But at this point there is no doubt the writing is on the wall and it is disingenuous to ignore that. I will continue to cover the game. If good things happen, I will write about that. If bad things keep happening, I will write about that. But I think it's overwhelmingly bad things from here.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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