It’s still early days in my time with Marathon, but thus far I’ve been thoroughly impressed. Beyond the fluorescent art style and sicko deployment of fonts is a fundamentally great Bungie shooter with real depth and flexibility of play. In fact, what I’m currently enjoying most about Marathon is experimenting with its Shells, the combat avatars that, according to Marathon’s fiction, you pilot remotely across the battlefields of Tau Ceti IV.
There are a couple of layers to my appreciation for Marathon’s Shells. The first is how different they are to play, while all feeling equally useful. For much of the server slam I spent time with Recon relying on her ability to track enemy players to keep ahead of the competition as I learned the ropes. When the full game launched, I spent the weekend embracing my devious side with Assassin’s cloaking powers, and am currently experimenting with Thief, whose ability to track loot and pickpocket players facilitates a very different mode of play.
There’s an inherent pragmatism to the design of Marathon’s shells, right down to their highly determinist names. This emphasis on function is a big part of the appeal for me. Indeed, I think there’s something to learn from Bungie here, especially in light of some recent, high profile FPS failures.
In the last decade, there’s been a general shift in multiplayer shooters from classes to characters, to transform avatars from generic soldier-dudes to recognisable individuals with their own personality and (typically) backstory to boot. It started with hero shooters like Overwatch (though it arguably stretches back to Team Fortress 2) but the model has spread to tactical shooters like Valorant, and Battle Royale in Apex Legends. Even DICE toyed with the idea in Battlefield 2042.
This strategy has witnessed considerable success. Overwatch, Apex and Valorant have all built major fandoms around their characters. Lately though, we’ve seen more instances where this approach has backfired spectacularly, first in 2024 with Concord, and in the last few months with Highguard.
It’s important here to emphasise that neither Concord nor Highguard were bad games. There’s a tendency among gaming audiences to conflate success with quality, and the scale of failure in these instances has led to the assumption that Concord and Highguard played far worse than they actually did. They weren’t great games – both suffered from numerous problems with things like pacing and level design – but they had decent bones, and probably could have become great with some work.
Unfortunately, they never got the chance to, largely because players reacted with such visceral negativity to how they were marketed (although there is an awful lot going on with how and why that happened). As hero shooters, both games relied heavily on their universes and characters to sell their ideas, and struggled to convince audiences in each case.
Now, I don’t believe people should judge a game before they’ve played it. But I also understand why players noped out on Concord and Highguard before they’d arrived. It ties into why the MCU has sputtered since Avengers: Endgame – people are tired of feeling obliged to care about characters at face value.
There is something inherently presumptive about hero shooters, the way they present audiences with a dozen characters simultaneously then expect people to like them based on appearance and a few voice lines alone. Normally, we come to love fictional characters over time through the context of a story. Their adventures, their interactions with other characters, their conflicts, struggles and personal growth.
Round-based multiplayer shooters don’t have that arc, so they are forced to approach character from the opposite direction. They require players to buy into characters up front, with the promise that you’ll become familiar with them over the course of a season or whatever. This means a lot more rides on your first impression of them, to the point where developers may only have one chance to get it right.
This can work, as Blizzard and Valve have shown. Yet even here, both companies had the advantage of being first to the table on hero shooters, when the concept was fresh and exciting. It’s telling that Valve’s latest shooter, Deadlock, is being developed in a semi-open alpha, introducing characters piecemeal and slowly building players’ relationships with them every step of the way.
When it doesn’t work, the effect is like being introduced to a dozen Blorkos at once. Not in the post-credits sequence, but in the pre-release trailer for the game. That’s how I felt about Concord’s initial marketing, even though I thought the game itself was alright. Likewise, one major part of the negative response to Highguard basically came down to “Who’s this guy?”.
Marathon feels different, even as it employs many of the same tricks as hero shooters. Each Shell has a distinctive appearance and abilities tailored toward a specific playstyle. Yet it openly acknowledges that the Shells are just vessels for the player to inhabit, which feels more honest about the relationship you’ll have with this character in this type of shooter. Which is why it works so well. It splits the difference between character and class, giving you a distinct avatar to live through, but letting its playstyle – and yours – do the talking.
