When Marathon launched, some of us got enamored by its world and systems as we played the game constantly. The review on the website was a product of three of us playing the game regularly. So when news about the game gets updated, we listen. Joe Zielger, the game’s director, placed an update on bungie.net.
If this were a recording, this is where you’d hear me press play, the synth beats with the lulling hum of a playful but elusive baseline would collide with your eardrums and my voice would greet you with a warm and simple “Hello.” So let’s just imagine that’s happening and get started…
Nearly three months have passed since we’ve flung you across the stars and crash landed you onto the dangerous and mysterious lost colony on Tau Ceti IV. For the development team, myself, and all of the talented teams at Bungie and Sony that have been supporting us, it has been quite a wild ride.
From launch to now, we’ve watched you tackle the challenges of Tau Ceti, learn to navigate its threats, discover new ways to engage with one another, and create infinite unique stories of survival. And through it all, we’ve been watching, listening, and trying new things in an effort to learn more about you all.
As we come closer to the end of our first season and the subsequent start of Season 2, we wanted to take some time to reflect on the learnings of Season 1 and how that informs our thoughts about what we want to achieve as we build future seasons.
So please come take a walk with us as we reflect a bit on Marathon.
Marathon Season 1
Essentially, the post’s next sections discuss the original Marathon trilogy, made in the 90’s before Bungie moved on to create Halo. Ziegler also discusses how he created a team to bring out the original game’s world into the game of Marathon as we know it now. It was created as a social survival experience. The current game of Marathon was designed with six core concepts and themes.
- Everything is potentially dangerous: Create an environment where everything is a hazard or threat. This includes fauna and flora indigenous to the planet, weather patterns, NPC enemies, and other players.
- Preparing is important: Feel high value in bringing and utilizing the right resources for the problems you encounter.
- Every run moves you forward: Ensure every run feels like it’s pushing you forward, raising the floor on your possibilities.
- Bigger risk, bigger reward: Create an environment where you can take on more risk of death to gain better rewards.
- Use your judgment: Focus on open-ended decisions. Let players tackle challenges in open-ended ways. Fight, flee, and evade based on your judgment of the scenario. Create loose alliances, compete to gain resources for your own betterment, or wait out the battles and scavenge the field.
- Surviving matters: Prompt players to consider survival as the core win condition and ensure that living feels successful.
Then, once the game was launched, Ziegler’s post talked about what went well in their eyes. The first thing he talked about was the community. The internal teams discuss the community and the experiences they have regularly, it is stated. The other thing that went well, in their opinion, is the improvements they added to the game, such as better sponsored kits, adding duos experimentation, and the launch of the Cryo Archive.
Season 1 was not just a positive evolution. Ziegler also notes that there were some problems they received from the community. He emphasizes that developing a new game is a challenge.
- Marathon is overwhelming to learn.
- Marathon for new players can be an overwhelming experience. After a short tutorial, you’re often thrown into the fire to learn a lot of concepts, navigate a lot of screens, filter through a ton of loot, and build muscle memory with a lot of mechanics fairly quickly in a hostile environment where other players can bring you down and take your stuff.
- It’s easy to hit a wall if you’re not spending lots of time, don’t have a consistent crew, or are not super skilled.
- Matches can feel like a death spiral for some players. You kit up, you go in, you die to a spawn rush, or someone gets the jump on you as you’re looting. Faction progress can feel like a slog, and you struggle to get mats and credits out to upgrade. You rarely get out of that loop, and the endgame of Cryo can feel so far away as you inch your way forward in the precious hours you have to play every week. And doing it solo just makes it all harder…
- Still figuring out the balance mix of the endgame.
- Bubbles, ‘nade spam, and snipers can make it feel like every engagement at the endgame, with all the stuff everyone has accumulated, is chaotic, fast, and stressful in a bad way. Taking time to make important tactical decisions can feel like a luxury. Spawn rushing and lobby clearing are dominant strategies that pull the pacing too far and make matches too predictable. Matchmaking can be a blessing or a curse.
- Sometimes you don’t want to sweat.
- Gripping your precious loot every moment as you creep your way to the exfil while spinning your head around like a chicken to make sure another Runner doesn’t drop on top of you with a shotgun is a fun and intense experience. But after a few runs of that, sometimes you need to power down and just want to frag out or relax and play a different way. It’s hard to find that chill moment in Marathon.
Later Seasons of Marathon
Now, with season 2 of Marathon being the next thing, Joe Ziegler’s team at Bungie is focused on. His post goes into what we can expect with it. The easy things to expect from the post are new zones, zone changes and variants, new shells, new weapons, new equipment, and loot galore. Bungie is also planning to implement new systems to progress in season 2. More contracts to complete. Specific things mentioned in the post are a new challenge to Night Marsh, a new defensive runner shell called a sentinel, new weapons, new equipment, a revamp to acquiring shell stats, and increased progression rates for faction and runner levels.
New things potentially planned for Season two also include
- A new zone that leans into more alien elements and mind-warping debuffs.
- New enemies from Tau Ceti and beyond, big and small alike.
- New weapons that fill out the battery side of the arsenal.
- New ways to exfil that create interesting tradeoffs between how much loot players carry versus how safe they are.
- In Season 2, they’ll be adding a Duos rotating zone queue.
- In Season 2, they’ll be adding a new matchmaking system that helps players find better quality matches with more flex for higher-end players.
- In Season 2, they’ll be expanding the max size of the Vault.
- For Season 2 and beyond, they’re working on a set of UX improvements to help make setting goals and getting into a match smoother.
- For Season 3 and beyond, they’re working on improving our onboarding experience to make it less overwhelming for new players.
- For Season 3 and beyond, they’ll be making changes to the contract system to improve how players interact with Priority and other contracts.
In response to trying to get Marathon to be a place where you can go to for any type of play, Ziegler wants to test different modes in the game. The first new mode they want to try to add to the game to test is a mode heavy on PvE. It will still have some PvP features, however. The second mode will remove PvP features entirely and be only PvE. This is a mode I can get behind personally. It will be geared towards crews that want to focus on completing objectives and tasks together. These are going to be experimental modes, so they may stick or they may not. Ziegler also hints at possibly experimenting with a mode that leans even heavier into PvP.
Season 2 is on the horizon and we’ll be sowing the seeds for a lot of our future plans via new content such as Sentinel and Night Marsh, systems, and experiments around new play modes that may become permanent in the future.
Season 3 we’re planning to introduce a lot (and I mean a lot) of revisions to our early experience, including big updates to Perimeter, alongside a new Runner shell, and additional (no spoilers) content.
Season 4 we’re focusing on building more depth into the existing extraction loop.
Season 5 we’re looking at bringing the whole ecosystem of (PV(P)VE) play together and evolving our weird sci-fi world in new ways.
What Does This Mean?
That was a lot of words written by Joe Ziegler. Though the meaning behind the words essentially is that they have a plan for Marathon that is still far in the future. Players of Marathon don’t have to worry about whether their game is going to die in the near future. Also, one thing that I am curious about wasn’t even touched on, which was the season resets. How are the other seasons going to incentivize coming back after you spent a whole season building up your inventory? Will these PvE modes let you carry gear back from them, adding a place to go once you lose all your gear from a failed extraction? There are still a lot of questions about the future of Marathon, but I will be poised to listen whenever new things get revealed.
Marathon is currently available to buy on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Source: Bungie’s Website
