Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[King Dead]

A problem I personally have with the game is that while I do really enjoy the pvp, the game isn't worth playing for the pvp alone. Killing other players is all well and good, but getting killed totally slams the breaks on your enjoyment. I've actually went back and started playing Titanfall 2 again, its basically the same type of game play but a better experience win or lose. Marathon is at it's peak when you completely stomp out a lobby, do all the raid events, and leave with a back pack full of loot.

At least a dozen other players need to have their hopes dashed and dreams shattered for 3 other people to experience the game at it's best. This is not a sustainable practice or a daily reality for most players. I'm 100% certain that Bungie does not realize that this is the core issue of the game, every match ends with clear winners and clear losers. The winners stay winning and the losers stay quitting.

It's literally Trials of Osiris all over again. Talk about Bungie refusing to learn from their mistakes.

For those unaware, Trials is Destiny's pinnacle/sweatiest PVP mode where you have to win a certain number of matches in a row to get the greatest rewards. I'm simplifying things, but a flawless streak of seven wins with zero losses was necessary to get the best loot. Naturally, anyone can see the problem with this; namely, for a single team to go flawless, seven others are knocked down and forced to start over. And of course, you could still get matched up with people who had already gone flawless, meaning your odds of getting there were even less.

This led to a bunch of issues that all fed into each other over the years. Higher-skilled players could utterly dominate lower-skilled ones who would never get anything from their time in the playlist, and after getting curbstomped a bunch, they'd give up on it entirely. The average skill of those still playing would go up, and now there was a new lowest tier getting farmed and unable to progress. They'd quit, and a new batch would find themselves at the bottom. Repeat until only the turbosweats remain, who aren't finding it fun anymore either because they don't have noobs to curbstomp. Not to mention lower population means longer matchmaking and worse ping.

They did eventually make improvements to the loot distribution, with the week's shiny weapon being guaranteed after seven wins regardless of losses and flawless being more for bragging rights, but those improvements were about a decade too late. The general playerbase still wants nothing to do with Trials due to their perception of it being a sweatfest, and that's how it continues to be.

When your fun is contingent on many other players' sessions being utterly ruined, to the point they feel like they completely wasted their time playing, that is a recipe for disaster.

Ultimately i feel that pulling the plug on Marathon or Destiny feels like the wrong move to me. Whatever Sony decides to do, the priority should be rebuilding trust with the players and fixing the problems that were made, owning the mistakes, and showing a real commitment to making things right before they do anything else.

Anything less than this and we will have another thread full of gleeful chart posting.

I hope you're looking forward to more chartposting, because if the current state of Destiny communication is any indication, Bungie is going to keep on deflecting with weasel words or flat out ignoring the problems. Looking back, I've cut them far too much slack over the years through their constant cycle of fuckups, halfhearted apologies, minor fixes, and then back to fucking up again. I don't think I have it in me to give them one more chance.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Is there any other examples of this? Surely its happened before with other acquisitions.

I'm sure this happened to Arkane after Microsoft forced them to make Redfall and it failed miserably because it was a barely functional mess.

In tangential news I watched this video about what it's like to start Destiny 2 with a fresh account in 2026 and now I'm extremely confused what exactly I played when I returned in 2022 for the first time since launch.

I'm sure I started with a fresh character but got loaded in on one of the snowy maps and immediately tasked with completing dailies.

 

[Disc]

At least a dozen other players need to have their hopes dashed and dreams shattered for 3 other people to experience the game at it's best. This is not a sustainable practice or a daily reality for most players. I'm 100% certain that Bungie does not realize that this is the core issue of the game, every match ends with clear winners and clear losers. The winners stay winning and the losers stay quitting.

I'm starting to think that maybe this genre is just a mistake. Maybe games like Day Z were never meant for the main stream.

I'm going to be honest, this has been my stance since i first learned what extraction shooters are.

"Heavy-consequences PvP" is never going to be something mainstream or even really sustainable because the fact of the matter is that it's multiplayer aspect relies on a stable base population while it's gameplay loop pretty much guarantees massive churn. It's never going to work because the amount of people willing to put enough of their eggs in one multiplayer live-service basket that they'll stick around through getting wiped will never match the desire of the playerbase to go in and crush those eggs purely for the fun of the game. Let alone that someone manages to thread the needle on that - and I think we have a grand total of one in Arc Raiders by creating an environment that treats the trolls like the assholes they are - while still being a solid and fun game without controversies that destroy player retention.

Anything less than this and we will have another thread full of gleeful chart posting.

Speaking of, lets have a slightly different chart this time:



I think this last 24 hours has been the first span where destiny has definitively had more overall players than marathon, as opposed to just the occasional lower peak and higher trough. Marathon's daily trough was just barely 3.1k, btw, and it's peak is sub-11k so I honestly expect we'll see both our first four-digit peak and sub-3k-trough in the coming week.

 

[creaturestorm]

When your fun is contingent on many other players' sessions being utterly ruined, to the point they feel like they completely wasted their time playing, that is a recipe for disaster.

IMO the extraction shooter elements should of saved Marathon from losing the casuals, every raid win or lose should have been a step forward. At an absolute bare minimum you should walk out of every raid with some kind of piece of loot you needed, rep with faction, increased player power, and a sense of having accomplished something despite being sent back to the stash. I don't mean leveling an experience bar by 1% for having died in a raid, i mean actual real progression with noticeable benefits. Player goals should be within their reach.

Instead we got PvP where mistakes are easily punished, PvP can truly never be avoided with aggressive teams, and the actual extraction part is an after thought. There is no loot on the map and what player goals do exist feel so completely out of reach.

In a strange way lower TTKs are more casual friendly, every dog will have his day when 1 bullet to the face can kill you. In Marathon you might get a lucky shot on a player, but you need more than just a lucky shot to win a fight. Too many times I've gotten the jump on a team just for said team to pull a reversal on us. Marathon rewards consistency just enough that it punishes casual players and bush campers.

I prefer the TTK of Marathon to Tarkov, nothing pisses me off more than randomly dying to some guy I didnt see or some guy that I didn't hear hiding in a corner.

I hope you're looking forward to more chartpostin

Funny you should say that

Speaking of, lets have a slightly different chart this time:

This made me laugh so fucking hard, i don't know it just got to me.

 

[Leaf Wage Slave Jr]

Speaking of, lets have a slightly different chart this time:



I think this last 24 hours has been the first span where destiny has definitively had more overall players than marathon, as opposed to just the occasional lower peak and higher trough. Marathon's daily trough was just barely 3.1k, btw, and it's peak is sub-11k so I honestly expect we'll see both our first four-digit peak and sub-3k-trough in the coming week.

I can’t be the only one who finds it funny that they’re only barely meeting D2 numbers after D2 has had what, a decade of churn and burnt goodwill.

Honestly the funnier comparison to me still remains “literally any of these live service games” and TF2. Sure, TF2 to this day is botted to absolute hell, but when a 20 year old game made on a fraction of the budget (even adjusted for inflation) that Valve has essentially left for dead is absolutely mogging you, it’s not a good sign.

 

[creaturestorm]

TF2 to this day is botted to absolute hell, but when a 20 year old game made on a fraction of the budget (even adjusted for inflation) that Valve has essentially left for dead is absolutely mogging you, it’s not a good sign.

Bots or not, I think TF2 is probably just as popular if not more so at this point, if not now then soon. I think PvP games where dying means being sent back to a lobby or queue are doomed to be an unpopular failure.

PvP games will never be as popular as PvE games. That said, we can look to a game like Counter strike and that cope falls apart instantly. It has no right to be this poorly received. Counter strike is no less competitive.

 

[Thomas Talus]

It's literally Trials of Osiris all over again. Talk about Bungie refusing to learn from their mistakes.

Another point about the Trials comparison: For a long time, Bungie insisted that Trials be pre-made fireteams only. It wasn't just that you had to be interested in sweat-heavy PvP, you had to have multiple other people who were interested in doing the same, either friends who are available and similarly inclined, or people found through an especially toxic LFG environment full of choosing beggars demanding that you have proof of a history of going flawless (don't ask about their record). Eventually, begrudgingly, they allowed for solos to be put into matchmade fireteams, and later tweaked the algorithm to disfavor matching 3-man premades against matchmade fireteams. Now, where have we seen that kind of pattern pop up?

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

Instead we got PvP where mistakes are easily punished, PvP can truly never be avoided with aggressive teams, and the actual extraction part is an after thought. There is no loot on the map and what player goals do exist feel so completely out of reach.

This is why I like ARC, with pre planning or stealth I can ghost people or destroy them with tricks and traps, I can have a whole slew of things for the third parties to run into.

Having 4 carefully positionend shock coil traps around the corner or something

 

[Steven Chapman]

Counter strike is no less competitive.

Counter Strike is full of Retarded Slavs and Chinese people and has had 20 years of iteration and genuinely good game design to build up a large fanbase. It also actually makes valve money (unlike half life) so they support it. Its numbers are insane but thats because valve actually knows what they’re doing.

 

[creaturestorm]

This is why I like ARC, with pre planning or stealth I can ghost people or destroy them with tricks and traps, I can have a whole slew of things for the third parties to run into.

Yes, this is essential to an extraction shooter.

When youre only pre raid planning is "what is meta right now?" the dev's have lost the plot.

 

[Pod 042]

PvP games will never be as popular as PvE games.

Lol

That said, we can look to a game like Counter strike and that cope falls apart instantly. It has no right to be this poorly received. Counter strike is no less competitive.

How is that a comparison?? The games are nothing alike outside of being pvp. CS is a round based shooter and Marathon is a high stakes extraction looter(might as well just be ToO where it wipes your opponents inventory).

Counterstrike
>You que for a minute
>Get a match
>Everyone starts on the same level with knives/pistols
>Match is round based, die and you'll start again soon
>Win/lose, round ends and one team gets advantage
>Most guns are competitive allowing turn around
>Final round everyone goes all out on gear
>Win or lose the match you'll all start at 0 next time
>This takes 15 minutes max

Marathon
>You decide to take a welfare kit or risk a kit of yours
>Que into match, right off the get go everyone has different load outs of various values
>Lobby is a mix, some max geared some welfare kits
>Die and everything you brought is gone too
>Death mean getting kicked to menus without kit
>Sometimes you'll risk everything and get nothing
>Others you'll risk nothing and come out on top
>This coin is flipped every match

In counterstrike the most you risk if 15 minutes of your time being wasted. Every game starts the same and ends the same, with everyone being at zero again when the next match starts. In Marathon what you risk is what you're willing to bring, which also dictates how well you'll perform in some engagements. While both are competitive games, they have entirely different levels of investment. One is low risk high, short term reward. The other is high risk and indeterminate reward as you could get nothing or lose everything and it persists after the match is over, causing long term impairment or benefit.

 

[creaturestorm]

How is that a comparison??

I think you answered your own question with out realizing it.

The games have a lot of similarities, the biggest difference is one is built for competitive play and the other is a chaotic and unfair mess, but is still played competitively. Information, communication, coordination, positioning, and perfect aim are a requirement for winning in CS and it's no less true for Marathon. To be fair Marathon is also a game where you can get ass fucked by AI or 3rd parties.

They also have similar economies where losing is punished and winning is rewarded, but one of them is self contained to a single match and the other (like you pointed out) has long term impairment or benefit.

Marathon matches are also 25 minutes, if you decide to play the full extent of the raid.

 

[Oliver Onions]

How is that a comparison??

I think it's a fair comparison because your breakdown of both games makes Marathon sound absolutely miserable (to me).

I understand there's an appeal to roguelike games but I don't imagine there are nearly as many people who find it fun to risk losing everything they worked for over and over again versus people who just want to drop into a game where the most they can lose is the match and 15 minutes of their time.

 

[Steven Chapman]

I think it's a fair comparison because your breakdown of both games makes Marathon sound absolutely miserable (to me).

I understand there's an appeal to roguelike games but I don't imagine there are nearly as many people who find it fun to risk losing everything they worked for over and over again versus people who just want to drop into a game where the most they can lose is the match and 15 minutes of their time.

The difference is, a roguelike does have progression; you-
A. Learn the games mechanics, enemies, events, etc. as you play more and more and
B. usually have meta progressions like skills, stat boosts, the ability to choose your loadout or heavily increase the spawn rate of specific weapons you want (synthetik 1 and 2, fantastic games).
This is why shit like Hades and Enter the Gungeon so massively successful and popular, you improve both literally at the game and through the games progression system seamlessly and simultaneously. You can’t do this in marathon because it is PVP(VE, granted, there are bots to be completely fair to the game). You can only improve so much as an individual player versus someone else who has maybe more time, more natural skill, or better teammates.

Marathon DOES have this meta progression though to try and help with this, there’s skill trees and shit and apparently you can increase your rep with the different factions and get access to purchase better gear, ala Tarkov. The problem is, PVP rouge likes, extraction shooters, have the issue the thread has been explaining for a page or so now; when you get your shit rocked, someone got richer and you got poorer. There’s also the issue that a rogue like PVE game can eventually be bent over the table after enough playtime because you can learn in depth every enemy’s animations, attack types, synergy with other enemies, how well your playstyle fits against difficult enemies you might struggle with. You can NEVER predict another person, which is what I believe is the appeal of these games. That risk vs reward is an insane high for the people who enjoy this genre, but as the numbers suggest, the people that stick with it for that said crazy high, that stress and the relief, the feeling of leaving a raid while packed to the gills with loot, is extremely niche.

I’ve stated it before here-It would’ve been a fun mode inside of a more traditional marathon game or hell, even inside something like Destiny; alongside maybe a co-op campaign and a traditional arena mode. You want to know how I know? The Divison. They added an extraction mode called survival in 2017 that was (at launch btw) both PVE or opt in PVP that awarded you with how far you got in a match, up to fully extracting with gear collected and rewards based on things like kills, locations visited, side objectives; so you never left empty handed and if you did make it out, you were rewarded with gear you could only use for the main game. You never got to keep your loot from a previous run to use in the mode itself, you just started up another match and started all over again with loot you found in the match, but you learned the map, the loot spots, cheese camping locations, etc etc etc. it was so successful and beloved by the community that people are still begging Massive Entertainment to either add a similar mode to The Division 2 OR add it at launch in the upcoming third game.

By itself, with both the lack of content and the already niche genre they were getting themselves into, this iteration of Marathon was a complete and utter failure. Maybe a PVE mode could work, niggers like Tassi and Cross are glazing the new MTX skins that Bungie previewed like the good snake oil salesman they are, but I don’t think that’s enough. I think this needed to be something more than essentially one mode.

 

[Oliver Onions]

That risk vs reward is an insane high for the people who enjoy this genre, but as the numbers suggest, the people that stick with it for that said crazy high, that stress and the relief, the feeling of leaving a raid while packed to the gills with loot, is extremely niche.

This is what I mean, and why I agree with whoever it was pages ago that said extraction shooters are too niche to be the next big thing.

It's the BossmanJack of game genres: you need a very specific psychology to be able to tolerate the crushing losses as you chase those insane highs. The majority of people are never going to buy a game that's nothing but that, and a lot that do are probably only ever one bad session away from saying fuck it and dropping the game for something less stressful.

 

[Civillian 18]

Was there downtime this week? It has started 'trending' back up and did not crater to 0 (I do not recall it doing it last week either).

 

[Onepumpplumpchump]

I give it another 3 months before its abandoned or they try to save it with a big update.

 

[creaturestorm]

I think it's a fair comparison because your breakdown of both games makes Marathon sound absolutely miserable (to me).

Marathon is in a bad spot, it's neither competitive nor casual.

Since I already mentioned it, Mario Kart is a game which has a rubber banding mechanic where the further pack leaders get from the pack the faster the pack can catch back up to them. The game is seemingly chaotic and random, but it's all purposeful leverage for the worst drivers.

The worst players in Marathon cant take advantage of the chaos and random elements, they just get repeatedly fucked by them. It's just an added layer of difficulty for the sake of it.

In Marathon, and Much like in CS, the more you lose the harder it is to start winning. Every defeat digs you further down and solidifies you as a loser, but unlike CS the hole in marathon has no bottom (it never resets) youre digging that hole straight to china.

Get shit on by better players, get shit on by the AI, lose, keep losing, stay losing. dead game.

 

[big pauper]

This is what I mean, and why I agree with whoever it was pages ago that said extraction shooters are too niche to be the next big thing.

It's the BossmanJack of game genres: you need a very specific psychology to be able to tolerate the crushing losses as you chase those insane highs. The majority of people are never going to buy a game that's nothing but that, and a lot that do are probably only ever one bad session away from saying fuck it and dropping the game for something less stressful.

tarkov was insanely insanely popular and fun in 2021 but nikkita made the purposeful decision to pivot the game towards hackers and whales instead of the mass market, and everybody who tried to copy tarkov's popularity just fell for the trap nikkita obviously set out to bear trap anyone trying to cargo cult his idea. It's a great framework for a game if your goal is FUN, but nobody making extraction shooters is attempting to channel fun, they're channeling cock and ball torture.

If you give your game an economy, the economy just soaks up all of the difference. you don't really get stressed the fuck out when you lose all your shit, because you know you're one good reserve raid away from 2 million roubles and a full inventory of raider loot. You can claw your way back in a few scav raids, worst comes to worst. They removed all of those things years ago. The game requires orders of magnitude more EXP to unlock the flea market than it used to. literally 100x more. not joking, and switched to a shitty soviet style command economy with fixed prices and flea market restrictions, and the game has been completely intolerable since then.

the game is so strictly controlled now that if you find four light bulbs in raid you can only drop 2 of them to your friends. A bitcoin? a VPX processor? the game just deletes them if you try and drop them after picking it up now.

 

[creaturestorm]

the purposeful decision to pivot the game towards hackers

I'd probably still be playing this game if not for this.

Marathon has killed pretty much any form of boosting or RMT, they have cheaters, but ive only crossed a few.

BSG has created a job market for the third world and streamers, I'm not interested in participating.

The game requires orders of magnitude more EXP to unlock the flea market than it used to

lol you even mention the thing that stops me from playing beyond early wipe.