Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[creaturestorm]

Got another survey today, i didnt screen cap it because it's just not that interesting.

Basically every question was about gear fear... I dont know what the fuck they are cooking up over there, but I dont think i like it.

Questions like:

"how do you feel about losing gear to players"

"how do you feel about losing gear to PvE enemies"

"describe which one feels worse and why"

"How much gear fear do you have generally"

"when do you wear your best gear and why?"

etc etc etc

 

[Fucker Carlson]

Glad to see cyraxx is still doing well

 

[Focken Kiwi]

Got another survey today, i didnt screen cap it because it's just not that interesting.

Basically every question was about gear fear... I dont know what the fuck they are cooking up over there, but I dont think i like it.

Questions like:

"how do you feel about losing gear to players"

"how do you feel about losing gear to PvE enemies"

"describe which one feels worse and why"

"How much gear fear do you have generally"

"when do you wear your best gear and why?"

etc etc etc

Are they going to turn Marathon into Destiny but with no risk, open pvp patrols and gay robots? How long has the Marathon reboot been out before considering abandoning its looter shooter identity in its entirety?

 

[creaturestorm]

Are they going to turn Marathon into Destiny but with no risk, open pvp patrols and gay robots? How long has the Marathon reboot been out before considering abandoning its looter shooter identity in its entirety?

It's a shooter that has very lite extraction shooter mechanics, with Hunt show down style pve, and Apex legends style Battle royale combat.

Destiny is a looter shooter, they are probably going to try and swap all that for it to become a looter shooter. I think you probably meant that, though and im being autistic.

 

[dame dudi jench]

Sony even wrote off about 775 million off Bungies 'value' this year over its massive mishandling of Destiny and Marathon flopping. Nearly a billion dollars of investors money vanished into smoke.

Yeah that's a mechanical consequence of how valuations work tho - public accounting principles has you valuing a business by assign some multiple. generally 5x-10x annual EBITDA or maybe revenue for a startup, i'm not sure how accountants land on the exact multiple for any business. sony paid a big premium over bungie's 10x revenue, the amount you pay for a business beyond the valuation formula is called "goodwill". they knew there was a big goodwill component. the way bungie had negotiated its way to $3.6 billion was by positioning their value proposition in a way that would really appeal to Sony: (1) they bought Activision out of their profit-sharing arrangement in D2. In valuing Bungie, Sony would not care at all about cash on hand, they're going to care about future revenue; (2) they pitched themselves on being able to turn Sony's stable of livegame projects into Destiny-scale successes. so they were going to earn Sony billions by consulting on Concord (made by bungie people ps) and the rest of sony's stable of about a dozen now-failed liveservice projects. if you're sony you can easily convince yourself bungie would bring in way more than $3.6 billion of revenue by creating a dozen destiny-style successes.

for that goodwill to not be written down as an impairment, revenue would have had to gone up to be 1/10th (or whatever the multiple used) of the valuation figure. they told themselves that was going to happen because Bungie was going to be a big success across the portfolio. but that doesn't mean that they're going to be in a hurry to pull the plug on Marathon or Bungie. if Sony kills Bungie off completely they are admitting to the world not only that they grossly overpaid for a shitshow of a studio that was throwing off red flags - msft and activision had already walked away from them - but they would also be forced to confront that bungie took the rest of Sony's live service lineup with it. if you look at it that way the total damage has to be closer to $10 billion than $5 billion. if they can salvage marathon, gummy bears and fairgame$, and the horizon MMO is good, they have a much better future-looking story to tell. i think they'll at least give marathon a few more seasons so they can say they had started to turn the game around, but GTA VI came through like a hurricane and there was nothing more Sony could have done. but they need to give it at least until then because they would face a shareholder lawsuit if it looked like they were giving up on Bungie and Marathon too soon, plus they face consumer lawsuit risks if they cancel the game too early after launch - i'm betting their lawyers told them that there's no bright line rule on this, but to avoid litigation and regulatory risk they should let the game live at least a year. e.g. sony didn't have a legal obligation to refund anyone who bought concord, the TOS gives them the legal right to turn off servers at any time. but if sony had done that a few days after launch and kept the $$ there would now be an EU directive forcing companies to pay pro-rata refunds for cancelled live service games.

I assume the only reason they haven't pulled the plug is some sort of legal obligation, at no point is it worth it it keep the game going, it will never be worth it, they won't suddenly 10x their active user base, and the funny thing is, even if they did 10x their user base, it still wouldn't make them on the path to being profitable, not even close, its that dire, everyone at the Studio is fully aware they have months to go before they get whacked, Bungie takes eons to make games so Sony has no reason to even keep these fags around, just absorb the licenses and dice them up.

Sony owns Bungie, they can do whatever they want to them. My take is that Sony is reluctant to kill Bungie for the reasons i went into above. you're totally correct that the game is not going to be profitable, which i think points to sony keeping the game alive for other reasons

news from the subreddit:

a guy going through the stages of rampancy (realizing bungie sucks). surely this isn't the intended relaunch of the game, because a relaunch would introduce meaningful new features and they didn't do jack shit in s2. surely the guy didn't actually mean it when he said his goal was to underdeliver all the time?

as the response below noted, them firing the lead sound and some of the other creative leads is really dire, the environmental graphics and effects were done perfectly. the sound and animation when you wander through plastic sheetflaps going into the spooky empty quarantine area is the best environmental effect i've seen in a game and sound design more than anything else works to immerse the player in the sense of being on a haunted planet. this is as close to a truly modern system shock as we're going to get i'm afraid, it would have been such a good single player campaign. anyway point is if they're cutting those people there's no intention of turning thing around. they're just going to run the clock for a few more seasons before killing it or switching to maintenance mode

 

[Snekposter]

Might be premature, but fuck it. We know its just a matter of time at this point.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Basically every question was about gear fear... I dont know what the fuck they are cooking up over there, but I dont think i like it.

Is it normal to be asking questions like this 3 months into launch? This seems like the sort of thing I'd have wanted to know during the alpha/beta if I was a dev.

 

[creaturestorm]

Is it normal to be asking questions like this 3 months into launch? This seems like the sort of thing I'd have wanted to know during the alpha/beta if I was a dev.

I think it depends on the intention. Longer answer than what you were wanting:

Tarkov combat really isn’t dependent on the gear you’re wearing, it’s the same shit if your dressed like a hobo or an elite pmc. It’s all a matter of lethality and survivability.

In Marathon the gear is completely transformative to how you play and what that play looks like. For example you could build a kit that effectively turns you invisible any time you do something. Loot a box (you can bring your own loot boxes and deploy them strategically for this), reload a mag, slide, take incoming dmg, and other things can make you invis. A class like Destroyer who is supposed to play like the Kool Aid Man, can play like an ambush class like the Assasin.

This is where the game stands out amongst its extraction peers, but 99.9% of people will never see any of it or get to experience any of it due to how the in game economy/player storage functions.

There are all these different possible builds, but the puzzle pieces you need to fit it all together rarely drop. You don’t have the vault space to sit on all this shit for a rainy day. Even when you do get lucky and assemble the build you’re just one bad decision away from losing it immediately.

I think part of why this game died immediately is because they took every new player and funneled them into the absolute worst map, with next to no PvE, with next to no loot, with the absolute worst gear possible, with the hardest enemies possible.

The people who stuck around, like me, saw potential in it and were holding out for an update or change that would fix some of the short comings that prevent the game from delivering on stuff like the build craft.

The reality is that the build crafting is so infrequent that most people just slap on gear based on rarity instead of functionality. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve killed in full purple loot and decided to just keep wearing my green/blue gear. People don’t even read what shit does, they go purely off color.

The people who played this game at launch and the server slam experienced the absolute worst version of the game possible. The only people who regularly experience the game as it’s supposed to be are people who play it for a living and even then they are slaves to the meta, they can’t innovate, just imitate what they are see their peers do.

Did I mention this is retarded?

 

[Oliver Onions]

There are all these different possible builds, but the puzzle pieces you need to fit it all together rarely drop. You don’t have the vault space to sit on all this shit for a rainy day. Even when you do get lucky and assemble the build you’re just one bad decision away from losing it immediately.

Do you think the game would be better/more successful if they removed the permadeath aspect of losing gear and just let you put together whatever build you found fun then ride into battle? Or even made it optional, like how Diablo has a Hardcore mode where you only get one life?

Because what you describe sounds like something I'd enjoy if I could experiment without the fear of losing everything I'd worked for thanks to one bad match.

 

[creaturestorm]

Do you think the game would be better/more successful if they removed the permadeath aspect of losing gear and just let you put together whatever build you found fun then ride into battle? Or even made it optional, like how Diablo has a Hardcore mode where you only get one life?

I think about this a lot. I think perma loud outs could be made to work if that’s the direction they wanted to go, because the game plays like an arena shooter. You could almost turn this into something TF2. The PvP in this game is good enough to be something besides an extraction shooter, but it would have to stop being an ES to do it.

Part of what makes ES exciting is killing someone and then getting to loot them. It’s the video game equivalent to a piñata stuffed with candy, it’s really fun. Then there is the ‘come up’ and ‘zero to hero’ aspect where if you get lucky or just completely outperform the competition you start snowballing in success. Marathon has the best snowball type game play, no other game I’ve played has that sort of feeling of maximum victory and winning harder. Once you’re on a roll it’s a rush and it turns into a race against the clock. At the best of times the game starts feeling like one of those 90s game shows like Super Market sweep where you have 60 seconds to fill a shopping cart with as much shit as you can all free of charge. You are sprinting across the map to open rooms, kill high value targets, and stuffing your bags with purple and gold loot with just seconds left.

Winning stuff loses its appeal when you can’t lose stuff.

I was thinking that maybe some loot should be protected and off limits, like the cores/implants and maybe even shields. I think this though would fundamentally change the game and would require some kind of rework for such a small change.

This game adopted the worst parts of the extraction shooter and none of the good, the things that could fix it are already present in other extraction shooters, they just need to implement them. One of the things I really miss from Tarkov was the availability of gear. You could buy nearly every item in the game from the traders or other players. You just had to earn it first through tasks or experience gained.

Marathon’s vendors offer next to nothing and you can’t trade with players. If you want to build you have to painstakingly find it or kill for it 90% of the time.

In Takrov you could get lucky and find an item worth several million and finance budget kits for many, many, many raids to come. You’re chilling until another exciting run happens. Marathon doesn’t have anything like that, there are no lucky finds that can turn a bad day around and take the pressure off.

In Tarkov you could create theoretical load out, save it, and with the click of a button the game would either buy what was missing from the traders or equip you from what you already had in your inventory. If neither you or the traders had it, you could turn to the player ran economy and buy it. In Marathon if you lose something chances are it’s just gone. Keep in mind that in an ES a 50% survival rate means you’re a real gamer. What ever fancy shit you found in the last raid won’t statistically stick around for more than a run or two even for the best players. They have to fix this some how or the build crafting is largely pointless.

 

[dame dudi jench]

Bungie (1) can't figure out how to tell its players about a double XP weekend and (2) ran the weekend thursday-saturday.



somehow the UI lead wasn't laid off

 

[creaturestorm]

Bungie (1) can't figure out how to tell its players about a double XP weekend and (2) ran the weekend thursday-saturday.

Wyświetl załącznik 9208838Wyświetl załącznik 9208841

somehow the UI lead wasn't laid off

Wyświetl załącznik 9208843

I knew about it because I used my fucking eyes, it’s on the opening menu page. Full fucking screen, picture related.

“Change the game for me, I’m too fucking retarded to read.”- Reddit Casuals

Every fucking time.

Also there is a lock out timer for every map in the map select and raid prep screen. These retards just adhd through menus instead of actually looking at them.

 

[StacticShock]

Bungie (1) can't figure out how to tell its players about a double XP weekend and (2) ran the weekend thursday-saturday.

the funny part in this is that bungo literally does their announcements in the most cancerous way possible in destiny 2, new light UI tutorials are horribly intrusive, to see them fuck up for marathong is just hilarious.

somehow the UI lead wasn't laid off

why would the UI lead be laid off? if you do not say anything chuddy you get to stay on the sinking ship.