Marathon game director Joe Ziegler has shared some of Bungie’s plans to improve its divisive extraction shooter, which include the introduction of PvE and PvP-lite game modes as alternatives to the “overwhelming” core experience.
This comes from a lengthy article written by Ziegler, breaking down what went well, what Bungie has learned, and where the team wants to go with future updates.
As for what went well, Ziegler highlighted the launch of several game modes and features, including the end game Cryo Archive map, a ranked mode, experimental duo queues and the C.A.R.R.I system. He also pointed toward the “core community” which has formed around the game, expressing gratitude for players’ passionate enthusiasm.
Moving on to what the team had learned, Ziegler began with the admission “Marathon is overwhelming to learn”, and that 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”. He also acknowledged the desire from players to not want to “sweat” (try hard) all the time, and the challenges the team has faced balancing the end game with issues like grenade spam. Later in the article, Ziegler noted season three is where much of the revisions to Marathon’s early experience will take place.
From here Ziegler highlighted where the Marathon development team wants to take the game starting with Season 2, writing: “First and foremost, we want to continue to evolve the challenging and tense experience that our players have come to love while leaning further into the wild world we’ve created.” To that end, Bungie is adding a new Runner Shell, a new nighttime Dire Marsh map variant, new weapons and equipment, a tweak to the Runner stat system, and increased progression rates for your faction and runner levels.
Season two brings other substantial shifts for Marathon. Its duo queue – which had been an experimental feature throughout season one – will now be finalised as a rotating game mode. In its place will come two new experimental alternatives to the core extraction shooter: a PvE-focused mode where several crews collaborate to achieve objectives, and a PvP-lite mode where fighting other players takes a lesser focus.
Near the end of the piece, a few additional interesting breadcrumbs are scattered, including a note that season four will focus on “building more depth into the existing extraction loop”, while season five will focus on “the whole ecosystem of (PV(P)VE) play together and evolving our weird sci-fi world in new ways.”
All in all, it’s a chunky bit of insight into the thought process going on at Bungie, which comes at a time when concerns are floating freely about the game’s longevity. After all, Ziegler’s post comes only days after Bungie’s owner Sony announced it had incurred a $765m impairment loss from its ownership of the studio.
