Earlier this month, I finally achieved the elusive goal I had set for myself in Bungie’s Marathon. I collected six of the game’s rarest items, allowing me to attempt and then successfully clear the raid-style Compiler boss. I felt a massive weight lift off my shoulders — nearly 185 hours of playtime and I had managed to complete Marathon’s pinnacle activity. A day later, I took my first break from the game.
I had been playing Marathon virtually every day since it launched in March, and I needed to put it down. Treating a Bungie game like it’s a grueling second job is nothing new. Certainly not for me or the many fellow Destiny players that cut their teeth on repetitive level grinds, randomized gear chases, and the difficult raid encounters of Bungie’s prior looter shooter. I have thousands of collective hours in the Destiny franchise. So I knew to expect from Marathon something generally familiar: a game with which I would develop an addictive and complicated relationship, equally defined by love and frustration. But I wasn’t prepared for just how quickly I’d go through the stages of that relationship.
I’ll admit: Characterizing how you play an online video game as if it’s a toxic relationship is probably an indication that the problem is more with me than the game. But my experience is not unique — three months since Marathon’s launch, its player numbers have plummeted, and its abrasive nature, complex risk-and-reward systems, and sometimes excruciating difficulty are starting to grate on diehard players, too.
Marathon puts unreasonably tall walls in front of its players
The magic of Bungie game design is marrying deep systems with unparalleled gunplay and incredible art direction. When all three work in concert, it’s exhilarating, a near-perfect loop of minute-by-minute sensation inside of a long and rewarding arc of self-directed mastery and aspiration. Marathon nailed the gunplay and the art. But its systems, combined with the high-stakes lose-it-all nature of extraction shooters, keep putting unreasonably tall walls in front of its players.
Season 2 is just a few days away, slated for June 2nd. It will involve a complete reset of every player’s progression: All loot will disappear, faction levels will be reset, and players will be asked to start over again from scratch. It’s also a chance for Bungie to reset the narrative around Marathon.
For the company, the stakes could not be higher. Earlier this month, Bungie announced that it would cease active development on Destiny 2, ending a definitive chapter in the studio’s post-Halo history after more than 12 years. Fans are understandably upset, and many are now directing their ire at Marathon, claiming it pulled resources away from continuing Destiny 2 or from kickstarting a full-fledged Destiny 3. Bloomberg has since reported that Bungie is now planning layoffs as part of the decision to end development on Destiny 2.
The studio’s future now depends more than ever on the success of Marathon, a game that has been defined, almost immediately after launch, by its lackluster performance. The longevity of the live-service title has become the central point of anxiety and contention within the Marathon community, as players debate what went wrong, what could fix it, and whether this downward spiral is an existential threat to their favorite new hobby. It has gotten so extreme that the game’s official subreddit has now banned all discussion about player numbers except those made in a single megathread now dedicated to the subject. Now, Destiny’s demise has only exacerbated every conversation about Marathon and its future.
Image: Bungie
As someone who’s gone all in on Marathon, I feel confident I can diagnose at least one of the central issues at play. Marathon is simply too demanding: It requires too much time, too much wasted effort, and far too much failure. It is simply too hard, not just for new players, but for everyone. Yes, the game has a problem bringing in new people, but it also treats those that do stick around with increasing levels of disregard. I want to feel like the time and effort I dedicate to Marathon is being rewarded, and often I am disappointed.
Every online multiplayer game has to contend with the tension between courting and keeping casual players and maintaining a competitive atmosphere and high skill ceiling. Yet I’ve never seen a game accelerate from its honeymoon phase into struggling to survive this quickly. Visit the game’s Reddit community and you’ll see players penning multi-hundred-word personal essays, analyses, and straight-up confessionals about what they think is wrong with Marathon. These players are not the problem. Marathon has serious flaws that inhibit its ability to be enjoyed like a normal video game.
Marathon has serious flaws that inhibit its ability to be enjoyed like a normal video game
In many ways, the extraction genre Marathon occupies is built on failure. You cannot let so-called “gear fear” — the anxiety of losing rare and hard-fought items — control your experience. You’re conditioned to not care about the guns and mods you lose, the time you waste, and the opportunities you squander because of bad luck or another better team or a lobby of high-level streamers. One tiny split-second decision can ultimately ruin an entire run, and that’s just how it goes. What one team does to you, you can always do to another. A free kit in Marathon can also turn into a backpack of purple gear if you play your cards right.
Yet Marathon takes these genre staples several steps too far. It does with the soul-killing brutality of its ranked play (which is also plagued by cheating, including teams collaborating over proximity chat); the incomprehensible uphill battle of its complex and confusing progression system; its stinginess around upgrade materials; and its overreliance on randomness.
Marathon also gets harder the longer you play, thanks to features like level-based matchmaking and by increasingly upping the ante of the risk-reward loop required for high-level activities. Take for instance the vaults needed to access the Compiler boss. Each one requires a key that must be earned from another map, meaning you must fight other teams for it and successfully exfil. You then must take that key into the endgame Cryo Archive map to attempt to unlock a vault, an elaborate puzzle room that broadcasts your location to nearby teams and invites them to try and take you down. You must do this six times, with six different vaults of increasing complexity, to even access the Compiler, which itself requires a rare consumable keycard upon every attempt. This is so grueling that high-skill players are selling Compiler runs on eBay.
The game’s progression and loot system ensure that the less you play, the lower your chances of survival, a problem that compounds as a season drags on because other players quite literally have better stats, better guns, and more funds to purchase items necessary for success, like healing consumables and ammo. One particularly mind-boggling design choice is a season-long grind to unlock the ability to simply purchase purple shields, a feat I have yet to accomplish after more than 200 hours. The more you feel like each run is fruitless — a slot machine pull at best and an inevitable failure at worst — the more likely you are to give up. This shrinks the player base even further and accelerates what some in the community have come to call Marathon’s “skill-based death spiral.”
The more you feel like each run is fruitless — a slot machine pull at best and an inevitable failure at worst — the more likely you are to give up
Bungie, to its credit, has gone to great lengths acknowledging Marathon’s shortcomings. Game director Joe Ziegler penned a refreshingly reflective and self-aware season 1 postmortem. He called the game “overwhelming to learn,” admitted that its overall vibe was too intense, and said it was “hard to find that chill moment in Marathon” that would make it a place you wanted to hang out in, instead of one that singularly rewarded ruthless competition.
The developer has also promised major changes in season 2. In one particularly telling blog post, Bungie said progression in Marathon “should feel more like a staircase where you take one step after another, not like a wall you must climb.” With season 2, Bungie promises to speed up that faction progression, move runner upgrades to a new buildcrafting system called the Cradle, and enact a slew of changes designed to make the game feel more intuitive and rewarding and at the same time less brutal.
Perhaps the most monumental change on the way is the addition of experimental queues that will reduce or remove competitive PvP, in a bid to win over Destiny fans. It’s also an acknowledgment that though Marathon does exist primarily as an extraction shooter, the game may need to move, and do so quickly, beyond the limitations of the genre to achieve something even remotely close to the mass appeal of Destiny. And in a sign of just how serious Bungie is taking these issues, it announced that it would offer the game for free to all players for the first week of season 2, with your progress carrying over if you buy a copy of Marathon.
These are all great starts, and if Bungie is able to make the core loop of Marathon feel quicker, less punishing, and more streamlined, I have no doubt I’ll want to sink back in. Whether these changes will be enough to bring in jaded Destiny fans or players who steadfastly profess that extraction shooters are just not for them is a big question mark. What I do know is that Marathon is a game with an amazing foundation that deserves a fighting chance to become something greater, especially now that the studio has wagered more of its future on the game. The ingredients are all there — Bungie just needs to stop getting in its own way.