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Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter
One of the guys I started playing with is almost lvl 300 and every time we ran a map there was nothing in it for him. They fucked the loot economy so bad that the only map worth running is Cryo and it's on a lock out timer. So you are basically forced to stop playing the game at some point.
Imagine going to a casino where all of the machines are broken and there are no dealers at the tables.
I'm at a point where I can not run Perimeter or Diremarsh, the third map outpost is slowly slipping out of rotation as well. Supposedly Night Marsh has more opportunities for better loot rolls, but it's on a rotation timer. So you only get to do it a few times before you have to wait an hour and a half.
As a result the map has turned into the most sweaty unfun shit imaginable. People are just camping POIs in full purple gear, there is no flow or rotation on that map anymore. It now plays like ranked which is very miserable.
Every time I played it with the sweat lord crew you could see other teams staring at you from their spawn POI with sniper rifles. a sea of yellow gleaming scope glints waiting for you to leave the safety of cover.
For this next bit, you need to understand how this map works. Every time you kill a robot you get a coin. You need 3 coins to activate a tower which reveals a secret loot location. That secret loot has a chance to spawn an entry ticket to the escape room in upper complex. If you can do the escape room you have multiple condensed opportunities at the best loot.
Those towers which reveal secret loot locations are all incredibly well lit and nearly every class must climb a long ladder sequence to reach the control panel of them. One of the funnier things I saw was a team loaded up on sniper rifles and positioned themselves to watch the ladders of those well lit towers. Once some unlucky bastard started climbing he was met with a firing squad.
Bungie being unable to understand a loot problem, and nerfing something again. Reminds me of destiny 2. The top two comments
on the reddit post sum up how I feel about it.
Update, jannies swept the bad news.
Since you're the most well-versed in the game around here, what exactly do you feel the issues with the loot are? Is there not enough stuff to find on most maps to make them worth playing for an experienced player? Are there too many free kits being given out that make looting irrelevant? Is it just too hard to find something with the rolls you want, to say nothing of keeping hold of it in the long run?
I ask because one of Destiny's biggest issues over the years was extreme stinginess on loot, maybe one or two drops per boss. Even the toughest activities in the game could end up giving you only a single item upon completion, making it take that much longer to hopefully get an item you wanted. And don't even get me started on hoping to get the right roll of that item. This last update has been a big improvement in that regard, with lots more drops and better chances to get what you're after. I'm curious what you think Marathon could do to improve.
Since you're the most well-versed in the game around here, what exactly do you feel the issues with the loot are? Is there not enough stuff to find on most maps to make them worth playing for an experienced player?
In terms of loot, talking strictly about what you find on a map and not what you find on a player's corpse, you pretty much nailed it.
There just isn't enough stuff to find on most maps to make them worth playing for an experienced player. Even if I loaded in with a brand new account I wouldn't be running maps like Perimeter/Diremarsh unless I'm forced to or I'm just doing it for shiggles. I'm not sure how to say this in fewer words, but lets say you bring in a green kit, my expectation is to go from full green to mostly blue and some purple on a successful run where we get 'max victory'. That's just not the case. You won't even score enough green kit loot to replace what you brought in. Kill every player on the map, do every event, and you still get shit loot.
Also keep in mind that you're playing with two other people, so there are three mouths to feed. Also keep in mind that it's common to wipe most of a lobby, but not all. So there are other teams and scavengers sucking up loot as well. Loot you cant pry from their dead hands.
There is a negative expected value, the game demands that players take negative EV fights again and again. Losing feels like the end of the world and winning feels meaningles.
I have like 15 purple shields right now, which is a fuck load for some one who cant currently purchase or barter for them. I cant use them. I could bring them into a map, but I know I can not replace them through the maps I can play at any given time. I'm risking them for nothing. So I'm stuck wearing beginner/intermediate gear because the game is a sucker's bet. All these people saying they see purple/gold shield players are exaggerating. I would love absolutely nothing more to be in these lobbies, sign me up for people who drop end game loot like a pinata.
This game is at it's best when you're running purple and gold, so the experience and joy of playing it suffers... since we can never get our hands on it.
The freekits are not a problem at all. I've seen really casual players make this argument and it baffles me. Here are the stat's from a successful game I just played. This was a free kit run, look at my inventory value. Keep in mind you can buy kits from the vendors. Green kits are 4k, blue are 12.5k, and purple are 40k.
I spent 19 minutes in that raid carrying two people, look what I have to show for it:
We cant even split a green kit. Comparatively, I'm running another map with two sweats and were all wearing gear. These guys kill compiler for fun in Cryo and were risking real gear to play this map.
If we added all our gains together then we could afford a single purple kit... I am playing the absolute shit out of this game and it's not coughing up anything, but loose change.
Bungie has nerfed the loot rolls so badly that you very rarely see gold loot, you rarely see purple loot, and the amount that you might see is greatly diminished.
Keep in mind not all loot is equal. Some gold items are just ass and so are some purple. You might find something thats really good, say like a gold mod for an energy rifle or an implant for another class. No one on the team plays with that weapon, no one on the team plays with that class. Bubble shields are purple rarity and occupy a purple loot slot. Bubble shields are a 1 time use consumable.
Imagine you bet 100 USD on a game of black jack, you win, and the dealer slides you a bunch of Kenyan Shillings... what in the fuck are you going to do with that? You took on all the risk, won the game, and got a bunch of nonsense for it.
I ask because one of Destiny's biggest issues over the years was extreme stinginess on loot, maybe one or two drops per boss. Even the toughest activities in the game could end up giving you only a single item upon completion, making it take that much longer to hopefully get an item you wanted. And don't even get me started on hoping to get the right roll of that item. This last update has been a big improvement in that regard, with lots more drops and better chances to get what you're after.
1. Every map needs to shower people in loot. Skipping PvE events, POIs, and even loot boxes need to become unthinkable. The game needs to be exciting and enticing with it's loot.
2. Faction vendors need to sell every item in the game besides unique weapons. Build crafting should be the expected norm, rather than this thing a minority of people engage in.
3. More maps... Maps need to be bigger and they need to scale with player counts. story line needs to be better fleshed out through the tasks your preforming, and enemy types need to reflect that of the OG marathon games.
4. Casual PvP modes so people can learn how to play the game and get a feel for what is to come.
5. Completely abandon any PvE centric game play if it's not in service of community building.
6. Delete bubble shield from the game, rethink Misiriah shotgun and WSTR shotgun.
I was thinking that a lot of this games weapon balance problems could fixed if there were two categories of weapons, we could have 'primary' and 'secondary' weapons. You are allowed to wield one of each.
A weapon like the Misiriah shotgun would be a primary weapon, same as a sniper rifle, or an assault rifle. You could have any one of t hose, but not both. While weapons like the Brrt, WSTR, and battle pistol could be secondaries, same logic follows just pick one.
The problem here is that I don’t know if Sony is willing to give Bungie the resources needed to unfuck the game, and considering Bungie’s successes feel more and more like flukes from being tard wrangled I’m assuming most of those resources would just be wasted on dumb shit anyway. Again, I’m unsure of Console Player counts, but considering the Steam Daily Peaks are now below 10k and that was their biggest player base, I’m assuming that it’s fucking dire.
Sony and Bungie may be retarded enough to throw more money into this pit, but I imagine there’s some behind closed doors talks of having Marathon enter Maintenance Mode sooner rather than later as it continues to flatline. I can’t imagine what playerbase remains spends enough on whatever MTX Marathon has to even cover ongoing development costs - breaking even is such a pipe dream that it isn’t even worth entertaining at this point.
It honestly feels like this is a game that, had almost any other goddamn studio worked on it, it would’ve had a chance. But because Bungie apparently can’t balance either a Game or a Budget, it was fucked from the off. You make it sound like the potential is there, which is honestly the worst part about all of this - there may have been the bones of something good in here, but every wrong decision that could have been made was made.
So they're basically doing exactly the same thing they did with Destiny, being stingy with loot in the hopes that it keeps players grinding for longer, only it's worse because you can actually lose the stuff you acquired from a bad run. Incredible.
To play devil's advocate, I do understand that loot needs to be balanced properly. You don't want players to get literally every item they could want within a couple matches because then they have little reason to keep playing afterward. I mean, ideally you want the game to be fun so they want to keep sticking around, but the loot is still integral. But on the other hand, you also don't need to throw them scraps after every activity that don't even make up for their time investment.
Pulling from my Destiny familiarity, take any average gun. Each gun rolls barrels, magazines, two perks, and a masterwork (flat stat boost). Before the tier system implemented in the last year, they rolled two barrels, two magazines, one of each perk, and the masterwork. This made it pretty difficult to get a combo you were looking for, even if you were just focused on the perks; if each column had six options and you wanted one of each, it was a 1/36 chance to get that roll. And if you were also hoping for optimal choices in the other columns, your odds were even lower. And if the activity you were playing only dropped one reward, you were going to need to play it a lot just to get enough chances at getting what you wanted, especially since every activity you didn't get a drop would feel like a waste of time.
With tiered loot, once you have access to the higher-tier stuff, things improve significantly. Tier 3 gives two choices per perk column, and tier 5 gives three, so you have multiple chances per drop to get the combo you want. They also implemented attunement across a lot of activities to greatly increase your chances of getting a specific weapon you're looking for. Coupled with activities being more generous with loot than they used to be and the ability to earn bonus drops, and loot is the most generous it's been pretty much since the start of the game's existence.
(If it sounds like I'm glazing them, the system as it launched was far from perfect. Most of the game's loot had been invalidated by the new systems and not properly updated, and it took dozens, if not hundreds of hours of grinding power levels just to get access to the loot that mattered, making everything from earlier feel like filler loot. And the only way you could do that was by running a small subset of activities ad nauseum, so people got burned out pretty quick. If it had launched like it did in the final update, it would probably have been better received.)
Maybe the Marathon devs can turn it around, but like @Leaf Wage Slave Jr said, the big question is whether they'll even have time to. The game isn't profitable, it isn't even close to breaking even. They clearly don't want to shut it down immediately because of how bad that would look, but there's probably at least a few people in management wondering if they're just throwing good money after bad.
It honestly feels like this is a game that, had almost any other goddamn studio worked on it, it would’ve had a chance. But because Bungie apparently can’t balance either a Game or a Budget, it was fucked from the off. You make it sound like the potential is there, which is honestly the worst part about all of this - there may have been the bones of something good in here, but every wrong decision that could have been made was made.
I can’t imagine Sony dumping more money into this, I don’t think this game can maintenance mode. It’s just that unfinished. There really is no loop anymore.
It’s just so baffling how much the game is just unfinished… Nothing in the cash shop. Only a couple dozen contracts, half a dozen maps, and like 20 guns… while the robot enemies types are diverse, they are so one note… there are only two systems to progress and they aren’t really something you push, they just happen.
Where did all the time they spent working on it go? The seasonal update introduced virtually nothing. What it added was good, but its not going to last 3+ months.
I literally don’t understand how they spend hundreds of millions on this besides acting as woke millennial daycare center.
To play devil's advocate, I do understand that loot needs to be balanced properly. You don't want players to get literally every item they could want within a couple matches because then they have little reason to keep playing afterward. I mean, ideally you want the game to be fun so they want to keep sticking around, but the loot is still integral. But on the other hand, you also don't need to throw them scraps after every activity that don't even make up for their time investment.
There is a map that has loot as I described, it’s Cryo. That map has not had a negative impact on the games loot economy. This map plays no different than the others, one team completely dominates the raid and gets its pick of the loot, and the rest of it goes into the trash. The only thing that separates this map from the others is the loot opportunity and the frequency in which you can play it.
I don’t think every box should have a epic or legendary item in it, but I do think every POI should have some purple and blue loot.
This whole “do a 10 minute PvP encounter for some blues and maybe a purple” just doesn’t cut it. There really is no reason to visit POIs in this game. There is no reason to do really anything other than murder other players for the gear they brought in.
If the game actually had progression systems then this game wouldn’t devolve into hoping the guy I just killed or the locked room has a Mizzy shotgun in it, may as well immediately extract either way.
Realistically it's just revisions and committees - which does turn into woke millennial daycare.
Once a team gets to a certain size - it's next to impossible to keep any kind of speed and focus across everyone because they're all doing so much different work, at different speeds, for different reasons. A good and/or brutal project manager can make this number larger (Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind) but Triple A studios are all learning that Video Game Development does not scale the same way a normal business does and more investment does not mean larger return. I personally think that anything over 250 is insane and should only be attempted by seasoned Directors/PMs, and Marathon likely had 1,000 at it's peak.
Who knows what Marathon started as - but with 1,000 people putting input in, it probably got sanded down from the shooter you (personally) feel it should be with deep builds/gear synergy into what it seems to be now - Arc Raiders but Bungie.
Realistically it's just revisions and committees - which does turn into woke millennial daycare.
Once a team gets to a certain size - it's next to impossible to keep any kind of speed and focus across everyone because they're all doing so much different work, at different speeds, for different reasons. A good and/or brutal project manager can make this number larger (Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind) but Triple A studios are all learning that Video Game Development does not scale the same way a normal business does and more investment does not mean larger return. I personally think that anything over 250 is insane and should only be attempted by seasoned Directors/PMs, and Marathon likely had 1,000 at it's peak.
Who knows what Marathon started as - but with 1,000 people putting input in, it probably got sanded down from the shooter you (personally) feel it should be with deep builds/gear synergy into what it seems to be now - Arc Raiders but Bungie.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the credits for Halo 3. Not including support from Microsoft studios, just counting the devs, artists, and writers, about 100 people are credited as working on that game. A team of roughly 100 people created a full cinematic campaign, a multiplayer with about a dozen maps (and more with DLC) and dozens of modes with nearly infinite ways to customize them, an in-game map editor, and a theater mode. One of the most iconic and biggest games of all time, built by a core of about 100 people.
And then you have modern Bungie, which took hundreds of devs and years of development time to create a game with a single gametype and a handful of maps to play it on.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the credits for Halo 3. Not including support from Microsoft studios, just counting the devs, artists, and writers, about 100 people are credited as working on that game. A team of roughly 100 people created a full cinematic campaign, a multiplayer with about a dozen maps (and more with DLC) and dozens of modes with nearly infinite ways to customize them, an in-game map editor, and a theater mode. One of the most iconic and biggest games of all time, built by a core of about 100 people.
And then you have modern Bungie, which took hundreds of devs and years of development time to create a game with a single gametype and a handful of maps to play it on.
It's likely due to what you said before. When there are hundreds and hundreds of people all working on the same project, that's a lot of opinions and preferences that all get added to the mix, and anything unique that stands out will get iterated on to the point of being bland and unremarkable. You also have tons of people that don't really know anyone else outside of their small handful, so any individual won't really be able to see the whole picture. Contrast that with a small team, where everyone knows each other and (hopefully) meshes well together, where you don't have to run every single thing you do by a dozen committees, and where you can quickly pivot your work if you decide you need to take it in another direction.
That's not to say that a big studio can't produce a memorable game, nor that a small team can't make absolute dreck. But generally speaking, I think most games really don't need to have hundreds of developers working on them at any given time, and if they do, then they really need to look like it. With all the resources thrown at it, especially at the expense of Destiny, Marathon has no excuse for launching in such a lackluster state, and drip-feeding a tiny amount of content is not likely to turn things around.
