Baby's first Extraction Shooter? (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Monday, March 02, 2026, 12:07 (22 hours, 15 minutes ago) @ Cody Miller

1. They pulled off a miracle and made the game actually fun with lots of surprises

Played a bit yesterday, and while the gunplay itself feels nice, that's about the only positive thing I could say about the game It feels like a tutorial on what an Extraction Shooter is rather than a well-conceived entry to challenge or stand strong in the genre. There are three things an extraction shooter needs to be great: Audio as a major focus, gameplay balance and options, and the ability to use the environment.

Point 1-
Audio: Games like Hunt Showdown or Arc Raiders are defined by how great their audio is as a key tool. Hear a flock of birds get spooked to the west? now you know where the closest enemy movement is coming from. Hear footsteps on mud turn into footsteps on metal? Someone just got into a nearby building and will probably be distracted by lootable containers.

Marathon kind of has none of this. Sure, there is directional audio, but none of it really seems to tell you a story about your environment. Locations in this game all seem like big winding tubes that are all placed on foundations made with the same material as the insides of every room (see: Point 3). It's a bit more like Apex where you can hear enemy footsteps that signal an impending firefight more than anything else. In that sense, there's nothing your team can really do with audio other than say "here we go", whereas even in DMZ/Warzone, we used the directional audio in conjunction with the proximity chat to lure, mislead, and track enemies, leading to some hilarious encounters and negotiations. (In Warzone, Fooch and I once had a surviving enemy running around inside a building as Fooch watched from the rooftop, and I was calling out the enemy's position ("I can see you just ran up the stairs to the second floor!") just based on his audio, and he was freaking out thinking I could see him.
Also, given how short TTK is in this game, you can't really do much in the way of being a Third Party, so the sound of distant firefights isn't so much an encouragement to get your team moving that way, since the fight will be over very quickly, and long before you get there, enemy teams will already be done with a fight and scouting the open fields for any team pushing that way (had a teammate rushing ahead of us towards the sound of a fight, only to see him teamshot from rooftops as we approached cover from an opening. Was the enemy down to their final HP points? Irrelevant, they had their sights trained on the horizon already, which leads to point 2:

Gameplay Balance and Options:

In games like Arc Raiders and DMZ, there is always a moment when you and another player meet. Do you shoot? Do you communicate? Do you pass each other peacefully? Do you help? Do you offer trades? What do you do? And if you hesitate to shoot, what will it cost you? How safe do you feel throughout?
This is one of the most exclusive elements of Extraction Shooters: When extraction is your goal, everything else is a choice. Every single decision has a consequence. I had a moment in Arc Raiders where I followed the sounds of a solo player fighting for his life against multiple Wasps. I positioned myself upstairs in a nearby building as the fight moved in my direction. He eventually holed up in a hut below me. I had a clear shot on every Wasp... but after looking at how small his hut was, I thought to myself 'wouldn't it be funnier if I spammed grenades into his refuge?'. Deciding that yes, yes it would, I proceeded to drain him of his healing supplies, before he made a break for it as the Wasps lit him up. Unfortunately, as his flare ascended to meet me at eye level, the Wasps turned their eyes to follow it up to me. As my back was riddled with bullets I wondered: What if I had helped him instead? The enemy all trained on him, it would have been easy. Would he have been grateful? Would he have considered me his next threat? Would we have been able to extract together and forge a real friendship? We'll never know, because of a single decision.

And a big factor for these decisions in Arc Raiders lies in your resources. Enemies don't have to be numerous, because every one of them is an investment. They take up lots of your precious ammo, engaging with them gives you away, and if your team isn't coordinated, they bring more and more pain down on your head. Same as with players, you have to think before you act. Position yourself before you are seen, communicate with your team about enemy numbers, movement, and where you last heard other players engaging. If you get into a fight, healing is slow. Missing your shots costs way more when you only have 20 rounds to your name, but 20 shots is all you technically need to wipe an entire enemy team. So when you run into another team, how confident are you with those 20 shots? How confident are they?

In Marathon, you run into players so rarely that an encounter inevitably devolves into gunfire. Tell me you have ever had a moment where you see a cloaked player scurrying around and you don't immediately open fire on him. He's a rare threat, and a threat at all times. Balance-wise, any hesitation to fire is almost guaranteed to get you killed, because guns are super accurate (even the slow-traveling bolts seem to have some lock-on). Because of this, there is zero incentive to separate from your teammates, and zero incentive to hesitate if you can get the first shots off.
In DMZ, we had a scenario where Fooch was gunned down as we pushed across a street. His killer turned a corner and met my shotgun against his nose. TTK was short, but now we had an encounter on our hands. Hearing his teammates running to get high ground in the building across the street, Sammy and I quickly took low cover. And what followed was... We talked. They claimed to be working on their shotgunned partner's quest, which required him extracting alive. Knowing they had better positioning, one of them came out of cover slowly as a sign of goodwill. We agreed to let them revive their teammate if they let us revive Fooch first. They agreed. Tensions were high, but everyone was soon standing and both teams were face to face. They asked if we wanted to team up to knock out our own quests. We agreed, and one of them called in an APC. What followed was some of the most fun we had in DMZ, rolling up on enemy bases as a heavily armored platoon, knocking out quest after quest, before extracting together and going our separate ways.
In Arc Raiders, you see clips of people even setting up shops in matches, because people are often relieved to find a moment of respite and comradery in an environment where the AI enemies are a bad enough threat as it is.

I just don't see this happening in Marathon. The game is too... aggressive. Had a teammate downstairs from myself and our Third, and when he got gunned down in under a second, he immediately triggered his bleedout. my teammate clocked the enemy approach, but got gunned down shortly after as I repositioned to get a solid angle against the entrances. The entire enemy team rushed in, and I dropped them one after the other. The last guy even held out his hands, though I don't know if that's a gesture, or if he was trying to pop his Ult. Didn't help him anyway, but that's the thing. There was no warning, my low teammate had no chance, and everything happened so fast (about fifteen seconds total), that "FIGHT" was the only option. Even after it ended, Sammy was still like "That was an enemy team?". And every encounter against other players follow this same level of aggression. If you see a vulnerable player (especially Rooks), there's zero reason not to gun them down and get the advantage, because if you hesitate, you lose. No leverage, nobody wants to use proximity chat to create encounters, and no resource consideration.

FIGHT.

Point 3-
The Ability To Use The Environment:

Tying those first two points together, Environment is everything. Positioning is everything. Every angle of a fight can be used as leverage, and can determine the outcome of the fight.
In these games, you listen to the environment, then you position yourself according to your resources. There is no one-size-fits-all.
At the same time, once things go bad, failure to use your environment, or be aware of it can lead to easily preventable outcomes... Or hilarious moments.
Fooch and I were playing Arc Raiders during their own Beta, and we had a moment where an enemy team had already called in the extraction, but they repositioned to a nearby building to wait it out. We pushed on them and had them at a disadvantage, but in the final moments, they threw a smoke grenade, and booked it to the Elevator as we fired blindly. Having made it safely, they all exposed themselves and unloaded at us just as it was going to shut, knocking me and Fooch. A final humiliation. Had they stayed inside the Elevator the whole time, we would have had them. If they hadn't brought a smoke grenade, we would have had them. If we had approached from a different angle to put ourselves between them and the elevator? Yup. But they used their resources and environment to their advantage, and what followed after they left? Well:

So far in Marathon, buildings are just, as I said, winding tubes with the same floors. If your teammate is in a fight, you don't really have time to reposition because you have to trek to three other rooms before you find a window or door leading out, and firefights are over by then. And the extraction is just out in the open, so you can't really plan around it other than making sure the area is clear, then spamming your abilities and hoping the AI or other players don't pop you from a distance. And maybe it's just me, but the way the Stamina meter works makes momentum-based clambering and platforming feel really bad.

2. The story isn't bullshit

I've always said, Lore Isn't Story.
Lore can supplement story and enrich the world, but it can not replace a narrative. Marathon has shot itself in the foot by tying its lore to the existing Marathon universe, then being set way after it, so you can only really look into the past. Even Apex Legends, which takes place decades after Titanfall, follows a narrative. Characters have evolving dialogue and relationships. They have ups and downs, the game world is affected by the ongoing story, and the world feels alive and ongoing.
Where do you see Marathon's story going when everything is disembodied voices and audiologs?

3. There are people here whom I could play with

I don't see too many people getting pulled into the inherent high-stress and low-gameplay elements of Extraction shooters for long. We're all old folks around here now. The free Server slam peaked at 75k on Steamcharts. About 30% of Arc Raders' peak just today. I just don't see it as something Bungie will be investing in long-term given all of the baggage it has, and how far it still has to go. Everything feels like an Alpha still, and we're already on the cusp of launch day.

If you're picking it up, post in this thread.

It's just not what I wanted next from Bungie, and it doesn't feel like they've learned anything from what has made extraction shooters popular in the past decade. It definitely feels like something designed to train people on the idea of an extraction shooter before they look for a better one, but they're charging money for this. In that regard, DMZ is leagues above it in that regard, and is way more fun in the moment-to-moment gameplay.

I hope it finds it audience, but man. This is why Destiny just got all-but-dropped since Beyond Light? If it's not a smash hit, will Sony kill it and Bungie as a studio before it has time to develop and grow?

I dunno, but I'm good without jumping in.