Baby's first Extraction Shooter? (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, March 02, 2026, 12:42 (21 hours, 43 minutes ago) @ Korny

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:

This is interesting, thanks. Marathon was the FIRST extraction shooter I've played, and while I found the audio to be invaluable, it seems wild that the hostile nature of the game precludes such interactions as you describe above.

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.

None of this is possible in Marathon. In theory yes, but 1. The enemies don't seem varied enough, and 2. It's basically shoot on sight.

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.

Never. When you see a player it's either kill, or run. Nothing else.

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.

I just don't see this happening in Marathon. The game is too... aggressive.

You are correct. Even for the things like the high value commanders, I've never seen a single team, or groups of solos team up to take it down. Mostly they are just left alone and alive.

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?

There basically is no story. What you are unlocking is lore. After visiting the same place over and over… with 4 maps how much 'story' do you think there can really be, when each is designed only as a playground to loot and fight?

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.

Kahzgul loves extraction shooters, particularly DMZ. He hated Marathon. If you can't get the extraction shooter fans, and you can't get the casuals… I dunno man.