The ok, the bad, and the drinkable cheeseburgers. (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, March 02, 2026, 12:26 (21 hours, 59 minutes ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Cody Miller, Monday, March 02, 2026, 12:47

I feel like Marathon is a game that is less than the sum of its parts.

I've seen a lot of discourse regarding the unwillingness of players to learn a new game. I can see both sides to this. You absolutely are going to be lost. Confused. You will get your ass kicked for a while. You won't know what to do or how to do it. But, you'll figure it out. How to play and approach things. How to loot the things you need. At least for me, there was a joy in unraveling the game. It does take some time.

But I see the other side of it too. The tutorial is still absolutely terrible. Most games will let you figure things out in a level or area where the stakes are low. But not Marathon. You are jumping right in. I think it creates a bad first impression and will probably have a lot of players be sour on the game and not give it a chance.

You really do have to play so dramatically differently than other FPS games. People are complaining about running out of ammo. Well, the whole point of the game is that you only have what you take in with you. Either take in more ammo, or save it and don't waste it all on the bots. I didn't get the healing item concerns either, as I usually had a steady supply of depleted ones scavenged from the level, or real ones looted from med containers or other players. To be fair, 'depleted' literally means something that has been used up. I skipped them at first because I thought they were empty. They could have been named better.

The issue I have with the game is that the mechanics don't really support an engaging experience for me. The level of creativity in the activities from the closed alpha has actually decreased. Some contracts used to require you to go to a terminal, then find another on with the corresponding number to extract the data. There is none of that now. It's mostly one and done.

The high value targets used to surround themselves with a dome of energy, requiring you to consume mechanic's kits in order to fight inside without being damaged. Now, they are simply in the level with a purple shield.

The way the story is presented just doesn't do it for me. NuCaloric tells you to access data to find out what happened to the colony. Yet to do it, you go to the same areas of the same map that you've seen a zillion times. In the original Marathon, if Durandal wanted you to gather data, you'd go to a unique level built specifically for that purpose in the story. When you return, you just get a wall of text read to you by your faction liaison. Dude, this is so lame. I don't doubt they put a lot of effort into the story, but this is NOT the way to make me feel like I'm living and doing it.

The UI is horrendous. Want to redeem a contract? Good luck. Want to browse the armory? I didn't realize you could switch between factions on the armory screen until the final day. This is one point where the internet is NOT being overly critical. It's just awful.

Mechanically, everything feels great. But there's only so much of this shoot, loot, extract loop that I can take. It gets old fast. And with the story being presented in a way that is NOT going to satisfy you, doing the priority contracts to see it won't motivate you.

My prediction is that the game will have a modest launch, and retain a smaller dedicated group of players. I think most people probably will have tried the server slam and said it's not for them, or else give up shortly after launch. Among the remaining players, the lowest skilled ones will get trounced, and they'll bounce. Then that will repeat, until only a small group of hardcore players are left. New players won't come in, since the onboarding is really really bad, and you'll be facing other players with more accumulated knowledge and skill.

Sad to see a Bungie game not going on my shelf, but I'll definitely watch the Marathon map on youtube, and read all the lore on the story page once added.

P.S. Schooly D, are you gonna play? This game is HARDCORE!!!