days and wonder

Marathon (Closed Alpha)

It’s probably a good sign that I can’t stop thinking about Marathon.

Bungie, no matter how much its upper management seems intent on death spiraling the company, is unrivaled at creating games with that certain spark that eludes everyone else. You could try and pair it down to their strength in art design or their best-in-class gunplay but there’s a sort of sum-of-its-parts element to their work since 1994 that defies a single “it’s because of this” element.

Marathon (2025)

Marathon is also the first game of theirs that can be sort of bluntly described. “It’s an extraction shooter,” you tell people as they either away screaming or confusingly stare at you. It’s maybe the first time any of their games has had an audience decide ahead of time if they want to play it or not but, like I said, it’s a Bungie game. There’s that spark. Everyone’s curious! They gotta know if the magic’s still there!

There has been some really mixed thoughts about the game since its reveal and subsequent Closed Alpha in a way that's challenged that a bit and it’s not that I think that spark is fading but I think there’s a really awful combination here of biting off more than you can chew and troubled development coming to a head with Marathon that gives this game a ton of asterisks any time I gotta talk to someone about it. After 20-some hours, I’ve come away from the (very feature, polish, and content-limited) closed alpha with tremendously positive feelings but also some really difficult negative feelings to parse.

I gotta emphasize all of this is just, like, my own thoughts about it. I had to write all of this down because it’s been circling my brain for almost two weeks and getting out will maybe help my brain move onto something else. This is gonna be a mess to structure properly but I’m gonna try, sorry in advance if it’s a tad rambly!

An Accessibly Hostile Game

Marathon’s stated goal is to make an extraction game that won’t scare players away. Escape From Tarkov and its ilk are games with a penchant for creating endless clippable situations but they are also absurdly mean games. You died? All your shit’s gone. Everything. Whatever goal you set is rolled back to whenever that started. That could be five minutes ago but it could also be fourty. This immediate and persistent hostility culls the playerbase down to essentially only power users. It’s the contract you accept, especially in 2025, when you start playing one of those games. The people playing them now live and breathe this shit because everyone else got scared off. So how do you get the scared players to try again? How do you give a shot to some (like console players) who’ve yet to get a chance? And how do you maybe also get some of those hardcore guys in who are looking for something new?

Bungie’s trying to do this in a handful of ways, which are most notably: a roster of selectable Hero characters, simple inventory management, squad-based matchmaking, quicker matches overall, and objective progression that carries across deaths.

Going in, I was expecting a game that really would just be “Tarkov with Heroes” and almost immediately I was stunned at how much Apex Legends there is going on in Marathon. It made some of its gameplay language become immediately understandable but it also came with a bunch of preset disappointments because, like, there’s a reason I don’t play Apex anymore. It stopped being fun a long time ago for reasons I’ll get into later but immediately recognizing the systems that fostered tremendous frustration… it’s like remembering the times you and your ex used to fight or something.

The goals Marathon sets for itself are noble and, for the most part, it accomplishes what it’s trying to do. I don’t like the heroes (we’ll get to that) but it gives a popular-enough way for people to jump into the game without understanding the rest yet, the controls are easy, always being in a squad means you’re never entirely at a loss in a fight, and the objective/contracts design is mostly forgiving. I also don’t think any of it works in the long run because you are still playing an extraction shooter. In the end, I can (and have) still lose an entire evening’s progress and walk away not having fun playing the game. “You signed up for this!” is the refrain given by people who love the genre but the thing is…

The Stuff Around The Edges Are The Interesting Parts

The enemies you’ll encounter the most are the UESC—the robotic security forces that occupy the planet and are host to various random events on each map. If you’re familiar with Halo or Destiny then you know what to expect a bit. The enemies vary in size, outgoing damage, overall difficulty, etc. Bungie has always had stellar enemy AI that’s made all of their games a ton of fun to play and Marathon, from what I’ve seen out of the PvE stuff so far, is right up there with the rest. Enemy AI is an essential part of their design sandbox—the way they design gun “feel” is made to be enjoyed with the enemies they know how to best challenge you. It’s a symbiotic thing. So, unsurprisingly, the UESC are a ton of fun to fight. Like, overwhelmingly so. They’re challenging to outmaneuver, behave incredibly intelligently, and hit hard enough to easily knock you out if you aren’t paying full attention.

They’re spread apart in the map and called in as reinforcements, often as a means to throw in a variable at various player groups. Trying to sneak by? Here’s a UESC patrol that spotted you and now another team knows someone’s around. In a fight with other players? Here comes some guys who don’t care who’s on what team and can knock you all the fuck down. They also are the primary enemy in map events like Incursions, a wave-based survival event that sends stronger and tougher enemies at you to protect some Extremely Rare Loot.

I really can’t stress this enough: every time I fought the UESC, I had a blast. It never got old. With barebones equipment or fully kitted from a few runs, I was always on my toes and whatever conversation my friends and I had going comes to a halt as we gotta deal with enemies that can very quickly get us on our asses. They are the shining star of Marathon’s combat.

The Masters of Worldbuilding Are At It Again

Bungie, you know, the insanely good single-player campaign and decade-spanning epic sci-fi story folks, have created a game that they have marketed from the start as wanting to create “player stories.” I am happy to tell you in my 20+ hours of playtime that I have exactly one and it’s not worth recounting here because you will not get why it was great, because you were not there. That’s the thing with “player stories”. They’re anecdotes. They are the videogame version of telling someone about a dream you had. It is an impossible-to-relate experience, even if I’m relaying it to another friend who’s played the game. It’s a marketing speak, a veil covering what is ultimately two people telling each other 40 seconds of recent gameplay and going “cool”.

It’s wild to me that this was their, at least initial, focus because it’s fucking Marathon, man. Marathon 2: Durandal-ass Marathon. And the worst part is: Marathon 2025 has the juice! It’s hard to say what is final, what is cut out, and what the true focus of the story might be, but what’s there is already so interesting that it was the thing ultimately propelling me through the closed alpha once I got used to the “loop”. Briefly:

The colony that the UESC Marathon established on Tau Ceti IV has failed and the UESC has put a full planetary lockdown in place. Various corporations who participated in the colony’s development, either wanting their shit back or wanting to know what went wrong or both, have hired a bunch of mercenaries (runners) to enter the planet, circumventing an agreement with the UESC that prevents them from doing so. The corporations (called Factions, each represented by a unique AI mascot) task you with objectives on each run that help get them the information they need as you start to uncover bizarre ecology circumstances on the planet and failures of systems that had several failsafes in place. You are guided by your own personal AI, ONI, who is showing early signs of rampancy. Above all of this, the Marathon hangs in the sky, taunting the player with possible answers as to whatever the hell happened here.

A good “player story”, to me, will never ever come even close to what kinda neurons my brain starts firing when I think of the story bits they’ve already introduced. This stuff is awesome. Bungie’s strengths, even when forcefully pushed into the margins, can’t do anything but overwhelm and impress. And the thing is that a lot of that stuff comes from it being an extraction game. The run-based loop where you talk to the Factions, get some objectives, do a high-pressure run to collect the info they need and get answers works! There’s stuff in the world to supplement all of this and, best of all, it’s structurally inspired by the original games! I’m taking orders from the computer, I go out and complete them, I come back for them to quietly mock me while they explain why what I did was so important. It’s all centered in a world with secrets and map puzzles and all this very Bungie-core stuff that showcases their ability to tell a story through more than just a cutscene.

The Candle is Supposed to Burn Out For Me

For all of the crazy cool worldbuilding, there’s one element that sticks out: the heroes. Or, Runners if you’re using the game’s lingo but, like, they’re heroes. They are there to have Kits and sell you Skins. My understanding is that the game shifted focus to this, from its original “you’re just a guy” format, to make the game more accessible by giving every player an inherent role no matter what they enter a match with. I think there’s a lot of ways that you can accomplish this outside of the dullest trend in multiplayer games but I also can’t deny that it does create a lower barrier to entry for players. You might be learning to shoot a gun or learn a map but you can at least have some baseline abilities that will give you something to contribute in any given situation.

From what I’ve experienced, though, that’s kind of all they bring. They lower the barrier to entry for some but provide nothing else meaningful to the experience. Their “kits” so far are barebones and bog-standard for multiplayer shooters in 2025. (Scans, double jumps, dashes, invisibility, etc.) Their cooldowns are massive and the abilities short-lived. They’re designed in a way to absolutely under-no-conditions turn the tide of battle because the game needs to maintain a ‘competitive integrity’ (more on that later) so every hero feels functionally impotent.

Which I think is great, to be clear! The gunplay is the part that is supposed to feel good and be fun anyway! It’s the thing you cannot undermine because it’s the reason you’re playing a game with gear fear. You are supposed to do everything you can to hold onto the gun you worked hard to escape with. Why, then, am I even picking a ‘hero’ in the first place? What am I gaining here? What does this contribute outside of an initial onboarding that it’s worth diluting and compromising so many other parts of the experience for?

They also are largely voiceless (you’ll only ever hear them saying “reloading!” from afar, really) and so far have no impact on the story whatsoever. The “lore” behind Runners is that they are consciousness stored in a databank that is put into a body built on-the-spot and sent to Tau Ceti IV. When you extract, you transmat all of your matter out of there and your consciousness is reuploaded and updated. The catch is that these Runners, going by the eight-minute cinematic they released, are different personalities/consciousnesses. If a Runner is a representation of a single consciousness then why are their multiple of them in a map, sometimes multiple in my own team? Am I here twice? Are other mercenaries downloading a separate consciousness but controlling it from the outside? And maybe most importantly, why do the Factions talk to me like I am a unique Main Character and not a roster of individuals. It creates a vortex for double-narrative that is already frustrating as someone who cares about story because The Main Story is not about them! It makes the heroes personify the identity crises the game seems to be facing overall.

Something I’ve seen repeatedly happen with hero shooters is also that those heroes eventually need a story for you to care enough to buy skins and if the story becomes about them, it is no longer about the Marathon, or Tau Ceti, or the UESC, or the S’pht, or ONI, or any of that shit. It’s the Apex Legends thing where the worldbuilding of the Apex Games are in service of telling the characters’ stories, which inevitably end up mired in the “everyone knows everyone” hell because that’s where all of these stories go under duress of deadlines and budgeting. You only have so much time and hires to write story and if you have to pick between “vector for monetization” and “long-term storytelling”, you’re never going to guess which one the Corporation With Shareholders picks every time. The eight-minute cinematic they released for Marathon currently sidesteps this whole problem by having Blackbird and Void immediately write off any consideration to this—“What happened to everyone here?” “Not my problem.”—Great. You’re bringing a lot to the table, I’m glad you’re here.

Marathon was never about “your guy”, even when you discover you’re Mjolnir 54. Marathon is about you taking orders from a computer that fucking hates you. It is about artificial intelligence reading poetry to you before they humiliate your mortality. It’s about you being a pawn in a war between civilizations and powers that tower above you in importance and history. You are not the Master Chief or a Guardian, you are nothing in the eyes of the Phfor, of Durandal, of Tycho, of the greater fates of anyone destined to the series’ events.

I don’t want to sound like I hold any of this sacred (I know the above paragraph reads like that LEAVE ME ALONE) but it’s… like… show me you care. Show me that you want to commit to this thing you’re bringing back that you know brings this baggage with it because why bother at all in the first place. I’ll always have the old Marathon games to go back to, I know that. That’s not what I’m arguing. If you’re using those games as a “reimagining” yet heading into the same pratfall that every other shooter in the Battle Royale-adjacent space has found itself in—where it has to constantly backseat story in favor of Whatever Retains Players This Month—then why do any of this in the first place. What do you get out of Marathon that isn’t just IP?

At Least the Game is Fun*

This was always droning in the back of my mind whenever playing but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t quick to forget it any time I shot a gun. I don’t know how long I need to make this section because man, it’s a Bungie game. It’s really fucking fun to shoot the guns. It’s really fun to move around, traverse, shoot guys, and complete objectives. The developers that gave you a gun so good it has its own Wikipedia page made a really fun shooter to play. Surprise! Rolling around in a squad of three friends fighting the UESC was always a great time. At its best it reminds me of the good times I’ve had doing harder dungeons or Nightfalls in Destiny 2. In more common context, it reminds me of why people find so much fun in experiences like Helldivers 2 or Call of Duty: Zombies.

Helldivers 2 is an experience that is wholly PvE and the duress of challenge is what creates these goofy entertaining moments. The game’s “dungeon master” of sorts exists alongside the (optionally!) punishing difficulty to direct the playerbase and collaboratively build out an ongoing narrative. Zombies is a repeatable activity built on layers and layers of meta-puzzles, objectives, and secrets that require increasingly precise and coordinated efforts to solve together. Both are games playable solo or matchmade but they are defined by the co-operative “friends game” experiences.

In Marathon at its best, I see elements of both of those experiences. It always involved moments with my friends and I sweating about what we’d do next or how we’d pivot off a completed objective or impending world event. Faction objectives and map puzzles created a dynamism in our early playthroughs that was exciting. That is…

Player vs. Player

…until we’d repeatedly run into other teams.

PvP encounters sometimes provided the thrill of the unexpected, I can’t deny that, but it was never the fights themselves as much as the threat of them. They’re so frequently unenjoyable that they became a thing I explicitly wanted to avoid and it started to kneecap my ability to always just be like “what’s next” or “what’s over there”. I hated thinking that way!

Marathon has smaller maps and player counts, mandatory squad-based gameplay, infinite teammate revives, and a time-to-kill (TTK) forgiving enough that being engaged does not mean being immediately killed. I can’t break down the minutiae of all the design decisions that lead to this but the experience of a Marathon match is not unlike Apex Legends where the intended mode of play is ultimately ignored in favor of something resembling Team Deathmatch. The maps are small so players memorize the spawn locations and sound carries far enough that any scattered gunfire in the distance is a queue to “jump” those players. Why? Because then the risk is gone right? No more players, no more risk apart from the UESC.

Like Apex Legends, though, I think part of the problem is more that the game is really fun to play. People want blood because getting into combat is satisfying. A bunch of folks have sort of jokingly said that this would be the first extraction game that wouldn’t feel like shit to play and I think it’s what lends so much fear and anxiety to experiences like Escape From Tarkov. The gunplay fucking sucks. It’s a milsim (military simulator), it’s meant to be punishing, it’s meant for a single bullet to kill you. Reloading and stance changes are cumbersome. Movement is unsatisfying. Everything is brown. Apex learned really quickly that if a Battle Royale plays like Titanfall 2, the first-person shooter equivalent of Jesus Christ come back to Earth, then people want to get into fights all the time because that’s the fun part! You’ve made the act of play inherently more satisfying than any kind of “victory” or end-of-match reward screen.

While I don’t think that Marathon has yet proven players to become as bloodthirsty as Apex players, the formula is there, and it’s mixed into a game that has all this other stuff going on in a way that makes this forced mode of interaction incredibly frustrating. Faction objectives can require you to go to specific locations or exfil with specific items and very frequently were situations where I couldn’t complete my objective because we’d get killed halfway there. I learned to make peace with losing my gear but losing progress in that way was infuriating. The more the game did to introduce new and interesting ideas while providing a less frustrating experience, the worse the actually frustrating parts felt.

I’m more than likely getting some of this wrong but there’s talk that, in the final game, the UESC Marathon is a mostly-PvE map that you load into with your best stuff and take on incredibly difficult enemies that ends in a Final Boss of sorts. A Destiny 2 raid spread across several dozen hours of practise and preparation. A roguelike shooter experience with an intended “this is the run” final objective. It’s hard not to imagine the game that goes all-in on this kind of idea.

Competitive Integrity

On the day the alpha went live, a bunch of high-profile streamers got access to the game and played on Twitch, which naturally caused a tidal wave of insufferable armchair design in the usual places. The biggest criticism went towards Mouse Magnetism, essentially a form of aim assist for mouse-and-keyboard players. This is pretty unheard of! PC games don’t usually do that. I play on controller so I couldn’t tell you how it felt or how much it contributed to making the game “easier” or whatever but they (the streamer/audience crowd) got pretty up in arms over it and it was disabled a week later. It wasn’t the only thing or missing feature people were complaining about but it was certainly the biggest.

I’m not holding it against Bungie for trying something out and disabling it in a closed alpha, that’s what the alpha is there for, but more that it came alongside some other balance tweaks involving health, shield, and weapon damage. It’s dipping toes into maintaining a competitive environment, which scares me because competitive environments are not fun. Like, they’re fun for some! I like watching Counter-Strike 2 plenty but the act of play in Marathon isn’t fun because it’s competitive, it’s fun because the guns feel good to shoot, enemies are challenging to engage, and the level design creates a space for interesting moment-to-moment decisions. It’s fun because I’m playing with friends, because I’m making progress on an interesting story, and I’m making progress on building upgrades that will let me tackle challenges better.

I feel panicked about what feels like different definitions of “fun” because if you’re trying to make a game where every player can range from barebones to fully-kitted, and hero abilities are also in play, you start to squash the possibility space of your ideas. You can’t make a gun that’s too strong, you can’t make an ability that’s too silly, you can’t make a level that’s too crazy, you can’t set objectives for players that are too complex or too time-consuming. You are designing a space where you have to consistently concede to a playerbase who wants everything balanced as flat and linearly as possible.

Apex Legends, its closest point of comparison, has three primary modes of play: Public matches (pubs), ranked play, and competitive play (Esports). All three of those modes play wildly differently. Pubs are incredibly fast-paced deathmatches, ranked encourages more thoughtful play that often results in fast-paced strategic killing and tense final bouts, and competitive play is deeply strategical where thoughtless action is immediately punished. All of these modes are played on the same maps, with the same guns, with the same heroes. Apex is a game that forcefully has to be balanced for three entirely different games at once. No one is ever happy and it is a problem that’s plagued the game for years and years.

That’s already what I feel like I see in Marathon, which is a little demoralizing. I don’t know how you fix it. I don’t think making a game that alienates higher-skill players is a good idea but there’s already a clear schism in experiences. The way it gets to me most is that in Apex if I lose a night to Ranked or I’m having a bad time or whatever I can just go play pubs with my friend or something. I have a mode that’s the “this doesn’t count/this is for fun.” You don’t get that in Marathon. The only mode is the one where you might just have a bad time because no matter how approachable you make the game or how much Other Compelling Content you add around the conceit, you also made a game where a skilled player can dome someone from a distance and instantly knock them out. It’s not a game where I can play with my friends and catch up or hang out that evening because if my attention is split by telling them about seeing Sinners the other night while shooting UESC, then I’m not paying attention to the squad that rolled up and subsequently mows us down.

The way Bungie has tried to solve this problem is something like Crucible, Destiny’s PVP mode, which is balanced and designed differently than the PvE/less competitive mode. Certain guns can be disabled, some stats are squashed and your light level is disabled. That said, there is maybe no bunch unhappier than Crucible players so, who can say. I never said I had answers!!

Competitive Meta

The hero shooter stuff also lends itself to this where I’m really exhausted with the idea of “meta”. As mentioned above, I don’t think the heroes in their current form really lend themselves to this because they have such a minimal impact on fights overall but the idea of having to deal with more character-based meta sucks because I already don’t get to play as a character I like.

You’re never gonna believe this but, as a trans girl, I really like to play as women in games. I like character creators because I can make myself (or my OC!) but, more importantly, it’s a venue for free expression which is something I really deeply care about. I like it even more when I can do that in a game that lets me figure out a playstyle I like best. Marathon completely dropping the context of playing as a unique individual (in active gameplay, it’s still there in the writing?) really irks me since it’s the perfect avenue for it. Heroes are effectively the worst of both worlds, where I can’t always pick the character I like best and I can’t pick the playstyle I like best. I have to make a choice—do I pick the girl character or do I pick the one that plays the way I want to play. They rarely overlap in most games and in Marathon they don’t for me, so I’ve been extra cranky about it. But even beyond that I also see similar behavior that brought out the worst of Apex’s comp(osition) meta. In Marathon, pretty much everyone plays Void because everyone likes to go invisible or throw smoke bombs. I don’t want to invent a problem and say that’s where Marathon is headed but it’s hard to imagine any hero-based game in 2025 magically circumventing a problem that’s persisted in every other. No game should ever have to deal with “the Seer meta” again.

I also don’t know how it’s more satisfying long-term in a game like this where loot extremely matters. There’s gear fear!! At least, there’s supposed to be! I realized towards the end of my time with the alpha that I… sort of didn’t care about the gear. The Apexification of so many systems meant that I didn’t really need to care about retaining my gear or having good “upgrades” all that much. I’d start fresh one way or another and the baseline was so averaged for everyone already. The risk was mostly gone, the only thing I ever had to be on the lookout for was better shield because it’s the only thing that noticeably made a difference in the heat of battle. This also had the side-effect of making downtime between matches really rough. I couldn’t just “go again”, the squad had to kit up, transfer stuff from our vaults, maybe buy stuff on the black market, think about what upgrades we had to get and all that. It can make a loss or lack of accomplishing goals much more deflating. Whether that’s an inherent feeling to extraction games or because of this game’s specific pace, I don’t know, but the feeling was there and I think realizing we’d have to kit up again after a loss is what lead most often to “I think I’m done for tonight” moments.

Balancing this stuff for this genre specifically seems like a nightmare. I don’t know how you make people genuinely give a shit about the loot they’re trying to collect if you also want to make sure that everyone at all skill levels can have a good time. At least in games like Destiny, equipping a helmet shows a different helmet on my guy. That’s something everyone can latch onto, and I miss being given the opportunity to be Me in a game where I am the central conduit for the narrative in the first place.

Best Value

Cynically, it’s hard to believe that the hero stuff is motivated by much other than having an easier vector for microtransactions. I don’t know how well the piece-meal transmog/cosmetic stuff in Destiny 2 does for Bungie but I do know that basically every other multiplayer shooter right now will happily charge $20 for a character skin. It’s not for me, I’m aware some folks are more than happy to indulge in that form of appearance changing but it’s like… it’s not customization to me? It’s not expression in any way that I think is meaningful. Skins aren’t a form of expression, they are a form of vanity. They by design are made to show to other players that you spent money on this game to look different, which makes you feel bad because we all, inherent to our beings, want to be different. In games like Destiny 2, the problem is lessened because you can still make your guy! You don’t have to spend money to make your character look like you want it to and, better yet, some of that gear and appearance is a direct result of your trials and accomplishments. Your options might be more limited but you still made a decision to look the way you do.

If I spend $20 on a skin for Blackbird, all that shows is that I spent $20 to look the same as every other player who spent the same $20. We have a little “same hat” moment and then I get upset because I want to look different again. It’s been five months since release, everyone has that skin, I need a different skin, so I shell out another $20 and… Argh. This is not an experience designed by people who want a diverse and expressive playerbase, it’s an experience designed by suits and parent companies insisting that every negative emotion should be a source of monetization.

It’s also, just, a borderline-criminal misuse of a studio with some of the best artists in the industry? Halo: Reach and Destiny spent a collective 15 years establishing Bungie as one of the foremost “make your dude look awesome” studios, powered by a collective of incredible concept and character artists. Dozens of variations on Spartans and hundreds of unique, weird, interesting, unmistakably-Bungie Exotics, a legacy potentially now relegated to fully-paywalled access. This doesn’t have to be a “reality of modern AAA/live service”. We can still have good things.

I Hate Those Fucking Sneakers, Dude

The art overall in Marathon for me oscillates somewhere between “fucking phenomenal and potentially incredibly influential” to, quite frankly, “NFT-core”. I feel very conflicted.

The environment art, weapon design, and in-match UI design is terrific. It’s Bungie at their best. The futurist aesthetics of Destiny 2’s Braytech are cranked to x1000 where props and buildings look like a vibrant mixture of 3D printing and function-first industry. The in-game UI taking so many cues from modern interpretations of terminal-based computing rocks, though it’s hardly surprising that it slaps given Bungie’s incredible track record with graphic design.

I can’t talk positively enough about the way “things” look in Marathon. It’s really something else. There’s some incredibly forward thinking design going on in a way I think we’ll see trickle down to other games in the next several years. There is thought, intent, and care into how things are put together, how they exist in this world, and how they are interacted with. Things like keyboards having buttons laid out like a hand palm or scopes being a barcode that your runner “reads” to see through the scope’s camera. The stuff that builds this world with small bricks is what makes the whole foundation so impressive.

While parts of the game’s rendering still feel unfinished, there’s also some incredible “on their shit” environment art in both maps featured in the alpha. Perimeter, though mostly brown and muddy, has some absolutely stunning interiors and shortcuts. Dire Marsh has similarly stunning interiors and varied architecture but is most striking for its Classic Bungie skybox.

There’s also parts of it that are very… different. They do not come from the same thought or design space. They come from the modern viral internet-driven space of hypebeast/esports/crypto culture with a healthy mixture of techwear/military fetishism, where “rule of cool” pushes far past its noble idea and appropriates design into contextless loudness.

Glitch is maybe the worst of this in the alpha, a character devoid of any grounded ideas designed around the silhouette of sweater sleeves-as-a-cape. Looking less like a mercenary runner shell and more like a StockX-inspired, Jon Hendren’s shoes-ass Yeezy-wearing amalgamation of overexplored and borderline-stereotypical aesthetics, she stands out as one of two heroes that you can’t accidentally mistake for a UESC soldier in the heat of battle. Void, the other of the two, is so lanky that he’s hard to mistake as anything other than “the stealth guy” but is also thankfully so muted in design that you kind of forget he’s a capital-C ‘Character’.

This dichotomy doesn’t exist only its in character design but it’s definitely the most potent space for it. There’s other little bits of it here and there, like where the Traxus intro video goes hard in a way where you’re left thinking “wait what does any of that mean, though.” The kinda thing that feels very brand advertising-adjacent, which at least for Factions makes some sorta sense, but taking alongside other cues gives it a nasty contextual aftertaste. I’d be paraphrasing a lot here so I’ll just link to Mikhail Klimentov’s excellent short post on the eight-minute Marathon cinematic and following through on the themes it presents. A great read that sums up a lot of my more conflicted ideas with regards to the art direction, specifically.

It’s a recurring thing in this post but it’s… there’s two ideas at conflict here. There is an identity crisis. There’s one thing that’s immensely appealing, built on a foundation of decades of worldbuilding experience and the ability to innovate new approaches to pre-existing genres. It clashes with the other thing, inspired by What’s Hot Right Now, fixating on extracting the short term gains of a fickle, ephemeral, ever-shifting culture.

“And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.”

Halo created the blueprint for the console first-person shooter by cracking a code that dumbfounded developers for years. The Halo series became the gold standard for multiplayer arena shooters across several console generations. They defined co-op campaign experiences. Destiny took the groundwork built by games like Diablo and Phantasy Star: Online and created something that fundamentally changed live service games forever, also turning it around into one of the most compelling stories in the AAA space. It took wide swings, blending complex ARGs into unlockable in-game quests and stories, and built the groundwork for some of the singular best experiences in gaming maybe ever. They’re even still doing the ARG stuff! They added a giant chessboard puzzle to the game and it took the whole community to solve it! Even Marathon (1994) singled itself out from other shooters for being a heavily narrative-driven experience in a time where you were lucky if you even got a single screen dedicated to letting you know what was going on.

Marathon is the first thing I’ve seen of theirs where it seems to stubbornly be latching onto the things holding it back, completely unconfident that it can transcend the very idea it came from. I can see it in its more reserved ideas about gameplay balance, I can see it in how dull its streamer-focused marketing has been, I can see it in holding onto the idea that a few concessions can make a hostile experience more welcoming, I can see it in deciding regardless of those concessions that it wants to do immensely mean things like wiping your upgrades/progress every season, and I can see it in some of its artistic ideas that feel designed for virality instead of meaning and depth. It still very much wants to be the thing it took inspiration from—Escape from Tarkov—in a way that is crazy to me because even the Tarkov players don’t want Tarkov. The only reason they look for alternate experiences is because they bounce back-and-forth between loving the game and hating it, depending on what balance changes and seasonal wipes just occurred. You can already see some of that, as of this writing, with the launch of the Arc Raiders technical test. The people who couldn’t find what they were looking for in Marathon have turned their attention there because there’s a slightly closer version of the thing they want next door.

Bungie’s strength, always, has been to build on an idea and create something new and interesting out of it. That “spark” I talked about at the beginning. I can see it in Marathon plain as day. It’s there in the story, in the art, in the level design, in the gun play, in the stage they’re setting for how it wants you to progress through all of it. The parts of it that are using the extraction genre to play with ideas and try new things with their unique skillset are exciting and could make for one of the coolest shooters around. And the most satisfying part of it, to me, is that they are leveraging the part of Marathon I care a lot about! I’m taking orders from the computer! The Faction and progression system is essentially the loop of the ‘94-’96 games! I take orders, I do them, and then I’m told why it mattered while also being reminded of how insignificant I am to everyone and everything around me. It’s doing that in new and interesting ways informed by the unique knowledge fostered at Bungie, even if hundreds of those minds were axed to ensure the studio and its parent company can repeatedly fail to learn any lesson whatsoever.

I can’t stop thinking about Marathon. I can’t stop thinking about how repelling some of its ideas are and yet still being so eager to see and play the final version of it. The parts that are deeply an extraction shooter are devoid of fun but to lose that would lose a lot of what makes everything else around it so interesting. It is maybe the most I've seen a game have an active identity crisis. It’s an impossible problem to solve, one no doubt made harder by a tumultuous development period and an uncertain multiplayer/live service market. I hold onto the silver living that Bungie has always faced similarly impossible scenarios and in the end we got games like Halo 3, Destiny: The Taken King, D2: Forsaken, and D2: The Witch Queen.

The spark is definitely still there and I hope it gets to shine bright when it’s out, man.

Some after-notes.