Marathon
Preview
Bungie’s New Shooter Has Form, But Can It Last The Full 26 Miles?
by Jordan Helsley
previewed on PC
Shooting, Now With Looting
The least surprising thing about Marathon is that it feels good to play. The shooting is smooth, tight, and the guns really pack a punch. Feedback on hits and kills is great, leaving no room for guesswork on the reaction to your action. For comparison's sake, there's at least one sniper and one pistol that feel like direct analogues to those from the first Halo. What is a little more surprising is how effectively they've translated complex loot management, even on a controller. It's not perfect, but I never once felt like it was excessively slow or had trouble putting things where I wanted them.
It will surely take time to get used to, and will probably get tuned further, but the act of identifying which loot should be kept and which you can abandon when space gets tight. There's a colour-coding system, and has a dollar amount by default, but it's currently not immediately clear what's what, especially in the heat of the moment. In this type of extraction-based environment, where the success of your runs is primarily attributed to the quality of the loot you bring back to base, this is a critical component. Likewise, there's a significant amount of attachments for weapons and mods for your character, which will certainly increase inventory management and maybe not for the better, though it remains to be seen how this changes.
A few of the larger pieces of Marathon feel very much close to final, while most do truly feel like an alpha. Map design falls into the former camp, and the two that are present, while visually interesting despite some definitely not-final parts, feel tight. Bungie has said that we shouldn't expect massive maps akin to other extraction shooters, but it's often tough to get the scope of the map you're on just by looking around. So many of the distinct areas feel as if they're nested in a valley or a corridor of mountains, like multiplayer maps stitched together. Because of this, and despite the elements that would suggest otherwise, players can descend upon you in an instant. There are few sightlines that allow you to get a lay of the surrounding land to feel momentarily (even if falsely) safe from other players. Still, it feels good to explore these spaces, to open crates and to land some kills.
The Enemy Of My Enemy...Is Also My Enemy
The environmental enemies can be really tough in Marathon. A small group is usually fine, but between reinforcement calls and world events, they can become an army quickly. They're also not stupid. They'll push when you're behind cover, they'll flank, and they'll simply overwhelm. I had an unreasonably good time fighting these humanoid robots, not just because of the challenge, but also their tendency to satisfyingly explode in sparks and debris upon death and leave behind sometimes-valuable loot. In my time with the game, the PvE portion of the game was much more enticing than the PvP portion, though they often blended together.
Something that Marathon does often is remind players who may not be familiar with the formula: if you fail to extract you will lose everything (they seem to mean everything, as even a genre mainstay, a personal vault of a few items you can take back on death, is absent by default) but your character. The thing it never tells you is that other players are not inherently hostile. Well, they don't have to be, but a combination of every other shooter's mechanics and classic power trips makes them that way. This is exacerbated further by the fact that, especially if you don't have the luxury of taking your time, players and AI can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Players, obviously, are a bit more extreme than the AI enemies, and can truly down each other in an instant. It's one way the game tries to funnel players into playing nice, or at least mitigate things like third-partying (when a third team flanks one of two teams fighting, if you're not aware) while also keeping the tension high. Another feature meant to slow the action down is its heat system. Easily translatable to stamina, heat builds up when you run, slide, and melee. While environmental moisture actually slows down heat buildup, it's a clever way to add intention to action, more so than simply having a stamina bar for sprinting.
Competitive To A Fault
Marathon is relatively unique because it uses classes in its version of an extraction shooter. That comes with abilities and ultimates, and a little of a dependence on visually identifying your enemies and visual ability queues. While this adds to the learning curve, I think it makes a strong first impression. The skills don't feel overpowered, as they're often not directly offensive. You won't see Nova Bombs wiping out entire teams, and that is critical to keeping the action grounded in the gunplay. One of the stronger abilities showcased, an area of effect ping that highlights enemies, is also visible to said enemies, providing them with instant feedback and a chance to reposition as necessary. They feel like smart decisions, especially on the heels of the struggles of PvP Destiny, but their recent history with class-based action means that it’s something to watch closely.
Early examples of Marathon's PvE missions and objectives could be cause for excitement in the right situations, though. The maps feel mysterious in a way that Bungie has historically excelled at, and there are touches of tiny puzzles to solve and secrets to find (like discovering info about a terminal to hunt down for a loot drop) that feels like the tip of the iceberg for where they should invest a majority of their post-launch efforts. Then there are faction contracts, quests you bring into the match with you with a variety of objective types that earn you faction XP for more permanent-ish upgrades, black market purchases, and things like loaner gear you can use if you're empty. Implementing these contracts is a nice enough way to add additional objectives each round, but it breaks the ability to match up with random players. Long gone are the days where a majority of players exist in game chat, and the ping system just isn't up to the task of coordinating, especially when all three players have different missions based in different map locations. The player base is just as early as the game is, but initial impressions confirmed my fear that filling my otherwise solo squad with two other players would lead to immediately splitting up and dying lonely. Team counts are relatively low (and change depending on the map) so there is ample opportunity to get in and get out before even finding anyone, but not without your team. The game's design feels actively tailored against solo play, which is how I spent most of my time, simply because of these contracts.
There's a lot of early satisfaction and intrigue to be found in the factions. Many of them are recognizable from early Marathon, and come with lore bits to fill the space between shooting and dying. Their upgrades also seem very worthwhile, making contracts a critical component to getting marginally stronger. However, each upgrade comes with the language "for the rest of the season," which is something that, if it doesn't push people away, will disappoint many upon their first reset. There doesn't appear to be much that's truly persistent in Marathon at this stage, which ultimately leans a little too close to the competition, if you ask me. Combine all that with the quick time-to-kill, and one of the few alpha patches skewed towards "pro players" and incentivized rush plays, I worry Marathon is on a path of trying to split the difference between something different and more approachable and simply the Bungie version of the status quo in a beautiful, but carnival, sci-fi aesthetic. A prime example of sitting in the middle ground rests in ammo types. Energy weapons feature magazines that cause you to lose the remaining ammo upon an early reload, but everything else I saw allowed me to reload to 2008 Jordan's content.
A Marathon, or A Sprint?
It seems clear to me that this is a snippet of the release version, or of the game they want it to be at the very least. I understand why they initially wanted to hold this test under an NDA, but it's still a telling experience. Bungie is making a bold play, and it could certainly pay off. Despite the general feeling, they're entering a space that is relatively barren, and hoping they can draw new players into not just a niche genre, but one that is punishing, even cruel, by design. They have the benefit of being probably the most prestigious studio to give full focus to an extraction shooter, but very few people would argue that the PvP in Destiny is by far its weakest point, which is going to leave Bungie fans as cautious as those that have been pushed away by others in the genre. Then, of course, outside factors are just naturally working against the game from a perception standpoint.
So, am I going to play Marathon when it releases? Probably not, but not because I don’t want to. As an extraction shooter, it's less accommodating to a solo player than I would like, so it's tricky to navigate for me. I think a crew of three would have a great time with it, though. Team play is brilliant, especially if you're the type to seek engagements. If I were a decision maker, I would have simply made Marathon more of a dedicated co-op experience, and mostly because the balance they're trying to strike seems fraught, though I'd be thrilled to be wrong. Ultimately, shooting feels good enough that FPS fans will surely feel the stickiness that accompanies that. If they can nail the story and the meaningful in-map secrets or mini-objectives, if confident that it will be a quality-enough experience to let the other stuff fall into place, but with an extraction shooter especially, quality doesn't always translate to success.
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