Ryan McCaffrey
Guest
If Escape From Tarkov is the PUBG of the extraction shooter, boldly striking out into a new genre despite humble origins, then Bungie’s upcoming shooter, Marathon, is the big-budget refinement that could become the emerging category’s Fortnite. Coming from a studio with a pedigree for first-person shooters that’s virtually unmatched, and which wields the resources to take a good idea and reimagine it in a disturbing, beautifully detailed sci-fi universe, it’s easy to see how Bungie just might pull it off. But with a concept that’s so inherently geared towards the hardcore PvP crowd and such a clear departure from what they’ve done in the past, it’s certainly not without risks, even if they do manage to capture the usual FPS magic they’re known for. Even so, after spending the better part of two days sliding and gunning my way through Tau Ceti’s relentless ruins, I was hooked, and can’t wait to group up with my most tryhard friends and ruin people’s day.
Marathon is an extraction shooter where you and two friends are dropped into an extremely unmerciful wasteland to battle deadly enemies, including rival players, all in the name of loot and glory. If you’ve played Escape From Tarkov, then you’ll be familiar with this PvPvE framing, which forces you to ante up any loot you bring along with you, as it’s permanently lost if you fail to exfiltrate before time runs out or your team is killed. Those distressingly high stakes immediately got my blood pumping and made each match feel like the most important one so far. After fighting tooth and nail against surprisingly challenging AI enemies and ruthless fellow Runners to get a high-level rifle that could down most enemies in two hits, I wasn’t about to let my guard down for even a moment and risk losing it all to some unworthy foe.
If, like me, you bemoaned the quiet, undignified death of PvP’s relevance in Destiny 2, then you might share my eagerness to see Bungie focused squarely on a competitive experience here, and everything I played so far indicates they’ve still more than got what it takes to pull it off. Weapons and movement feels crisp, fluid, and incredibly satisfying in that rarified way that few studios can achieve, and the added element of hero shooter-like abilities, like one that lets you blast enemies with kinetic energy, sending them flying away, gives that extra kick you need to feel like a supernaturally powered badass. Marathon almost immediately feels fantastic to play, and as soon as I took out a robot who took a potshot at me from the window of a nearby building and tried out his weapon for myself on a nearby enemy, it was love at first snipe.
This gets even better once you start to familiarize yourself with the class-based Runners available to you (four of which I got to play extensively, out of the six that will be available at launch). Glitch is all about mobility and controlling positioning, and has abilities that help her move fast, jump up to areas others can’t reach, and push enemies away with a blast of kinetic energy. Locus is a tanky soldier who can pull up a shield to block incoming fire and launch a flurry of homing missiles at enemies, while Blackbird is all about intel and using her gadgets to ping any enemies within an area for the whole team, and sending out little robotic drones to seek and destroy nearby enemies. My personal favorite though, was Void: a deft ninja who can turn invisible for a time and deploy massive clouds of smoke to lose and confuse the enemy within. Each of these characters offers a completely different way to play Marathon, and by coordinating with my teammates, we were able to put together a balanced team of Runners who complemented one another’s strengths and helped make up for any weaknesses.
That came in handy as we explored dark and forgotten places throughout Marathon’s maps, which were filled with deadly creatures, like a species of giant ticks who ran at me frantically, and surprisingly accurate robots who were much, much better at surrounding and overwhelming players than the vast majority of AI enemies found in other games. Fighting these foes was no joke, but the loot was well worth it, whether it was finding a backpack that allowed for more storage space, a weapon that gave me better odds against a rival crew, or just some consumable healing items I could rely upon in a pinch. Some of the extremely rare and powerful items, of which my team only found a handful during our matches, changed things up quite significantly, like a backpack that turned the user invisible whenever they interacted with a container while wearing it – extremely useful in a game where you’re being hunted by everyone else on the map.
Marathon provided me with tons of memorable moments of elation after a narrow victory and the occasionally sour taste of defeat.
Marathon’s tensest moments, though, happen when you encounter enemy crews and inevitably clash in a bid to claim one another’s loot. Maybe we’d spot a crew in the distance and stealthily follow them – waiting for the right moment to stage an ambush – or sometimes we’d hear other players in the distance fighting off security forces and decide to go catch them when their guard was down, scooping up whatever goodies they were about to claim. And, of course, sometimes we found ourselves on the receiving end of that ruthless equation and had to scramble as one of us was downed by sudden gunfire from a rival team. These moments are when the PvP magic really shines and leaves you with stories to tell your friends, like the time my group got entangled in a nine-player free-for-all and came out unscathed thanks to some well-timed smoke grenades, or another time where both of my teammates were killed, but we came back to win it thanks to a clutch revive the other team didn’t see coming. Just like the most epic, heart-pounding moments of a battle royale match, Marathon provided me with tons of memorable moments of elation after a narrow victory and the occasionally sour taste of defeat.
Once we’d gotten our spoils or completed an objective or two, it was time to haul ass to the exfiltration beacon and stand near it long enough to be pulled out of the firefight and returned safely back to our base in outer space with our bloody bounty. But lighting that beacon also lets everyone else on the map know you’re trying to make off with your goods, via a giant blue light that shoots up into the sky for a prolonged period of time. This makes your last moments in the area pretty intense, or, if you’re like me, offers some exciting opportunities to kill a group right as they’re preparing to leave and benefit from all of their hard work.
The downside of Marathon’s “to the victors go the spoils” reward system is that in a pretty short amount of time, those with skill will enter fresh matches with gear that easily outmatches less skilled players, making them even less likely to be able to pull off a victory. Bungie’s gone out of its way to try and make it so a poorly geared squad still stands a chance against those with better loot if they play well, and you can always simply employ the strategy of avoiding other players until you’ve got a few extractions and some at least decent loot under your belt, but even so, it seems like it could get pretty demoralizing in short order if you run into a bout of bad luck and start to feel like you’ll never catch a break.
I was lucky enough to win the vast majority of my matches, and after the initial hump of stockpiling some basic equipment in my vault and unlocking a few permanent upgrades to make the going easier, I felt like even if I fell in battle and lost all my best stuff, at least I’d have some adequate backup gear to recover with. But that won’t be the case for everyone, and I wonder how big the chunk of players will be who simply run into a brick wall in their first few hours, log off, and never return. At least in Escape from Tarkov you’ve got your Kappa case to hold your most valuable items and protect them from being lost on the battlefield – Marathon has none of those safety measures, instead opting for a system where you’re given a sort of pity loadout, called a sponsored package, which sets you up with some basic gear after you’ve been quite literally bled dry. This definitely helps ice the wound of a string of bad luck, but might not exactly be the most comforting consolation prize.
I wonder how big the chunk of players will be who simply run into a brick wall in their first few hours, log off, and never return.
To be clear, it very well might be a good thing that Marathon seemingly refuses to compromise on its dedication to ensuring each match has real, keenly felt stakes, even if it turns some folks off from it – I certainly count myself among those who enjoy a bit of sweatiness and quite liked how invested I was forced to be every single time I deployed onto a new map. But they definitely risk a situation where it feels like the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, to the detriment of those who are on the unfortunate side of that brutal equation. Time will tell before we know how that will shake out, but even in my short time with it, I already felt a bit of friction emanating from those on the server who kept dying repeatedly and felt like they were getting outclassed by those with quality loadouts.
One thing that could be the key to preventing people from falling off is Marathon’s ongoing meta progression system, which I found surprisingly engaging in my time with it. Even though your loot is probably destined to be stripped off your still-warm corpse and stuffed into some rude opponent’s backpack, you can at least comfort yourself in the various perk trees and ongoing quests you’ll find in the menus between rounds of play. You might not have made it back alive from your most recent escapade, but maybe you were able to loot some chests from a specific part of the map or complete some other objective in your quest log before you went cold. In that case, you can at least still make your way through the faction questlines and upgrade systems, which unlock new bits of story and improve your reputation with each of the three groups who have taken a marked interest in your progress. Doing so grants you perks that make the going a bit easier, like those that let you buy slightly better gear from the vendor, in case you find all your existing loot confiscated by the enemy.
Elsewhere, despite some clear indications that some kind of plot will be included in Marathon even though multiplayer mayhem is plainly the focus, it’s still unclear to me how much that story will matter or deliver something that makes me want to progress, beyond just finding better weapons to use. As a mercenary called a Runner, your consciousness is repeatedly uploaded to a synthetic body and sent into dangerous territory in search of riches. Beyond this basic premise and some really cool details, like how your artificial bodies are sewn together out of synth silk by robotic caterpillars, there wasn’t a whole lot to go off of, and I could easily see this not being an area of particular focus for Marathon. That said, the world Bungie has built is every bit as beautiful as it is creepy and dystopian, and there are moments where they satisfyingly hint at the events of the Marathon trilogy from the ‘90s. But Bungie also told me that they’re not entirely following the events of the original games, and what little I saw did only slightly more than pay lip service to the world.
There’s the question of whether Bungie will add enough content at a fast enough pace to appease ever-ravenous players.
Another question is just how much support and longevity we can expect from Marathon. Bungie has earned its reputation for mastering the live-service model over the past decade of Destiny, and shows no signs of letting players down here, as they told me they already have plans to support Marathon with new maps, weapons, characters, and more as they develop it, but as always, there’s the question of whether they’ll do so at a fast enough pace to appease ever-ravenous players. And importantly, Marathon also plans to use the seasonal reset model found in the likes of Diablo 4, where you’ll be stripped of your loot and progress at the end of each season to do so again with new content and a new meta to mix things up. While I could definitely see this working for Marathon, there’s always the question of how they’ll manage to incentivize making that arduous climb from scratch each season.
After playing enough Marathon to get a pretty good feel for it in its alpha state, I’m already fairly confident it’ll scratch the Bungie PvP itch that’s been left unscratched for a number of years now. Here’s hoping they’ll knock it out of the park when it comes to PC and consoles in September.