Curious to know what people think of it now that the game is real and not just a beta, especially those who are bought-in.

Are you having fun? Are you getting phat loots? Dying too much?

Do you see yourself sticking with it in the near-term?

I've just been watching people play it on twitch. It's fun to see people who are way more skilled that you, in the same way it was fun to watch those people play Trials of Osiris... but it's not making me want to pick it up, it looks very stressful (again, much like Trials).

I think it's a solid enough game, I just dunno how long I'm going to stick with it. I'm playing solo 99% of the time (the couple of times I tried Fills it sucked), which isn't bad, but really has only been enjoyable for me on Perimeter. The aggressive player-hunters don't seem to play on that map too much.

I understand why wipes are necessary but my vendor/upgrade progression has been slow enough that I don't think I'll be able to make enough meaningful progress without consistent regular play, and I don't think I'm going to be motivated to keep up that kind of grind in a second season, so my time with the game feels like it'll come to an end sooner rather than later.

I might stick with the game longer term if it was PvE-only, but I'm just not good enough at PvP to overcome the sweats.

I don't have time to write a whole thing, and that same lack of time means I have not played enough for my position to be much changed from what I wrote here before. But, I am liking the game more over time.

As I disconnect my brain from thinking of gear and weapons like I do in Destiny and other games, (Gear Fear, seems to be the term in the subgenre) that's helping. Over the past year I had been playing a bunch of Apex again, and the idea that you die most games was a helpful grounding for getting in the Marathon-compatible mindset. Experience has created more familiarity with what is important for looting, and when it is important for looting. The UI is maybe the biggest delta between how terrible everyone thinks it is on first impression, and how well designed it actually is when I am using it to play the game now. It's a lot of Information, but how many times did I silently beg Bungie to put information I needed in the Destiny UI instead of needing to look something up online and then store it in my head?

I'd be curious how many people who are saying something similar to "I'm not a PVP person" played a lot of Halo competitive Multiplayer. I'm not trying to prove a point here, to be clear. Measured by hours played I did a lot more of that than solo story or co-op. It's not until D2 and the meat grinder of Trials that I started thinking of myself as more into PvE and I think that's because I was able to do well (or it felt like it anyway) at the endgame PvE (raids) but not at the endgame PvP (Trials). But I was never amazing at Halo multi, I just had fun with people messing around, even when we got our butts handed to us. Oh well, hop back in the queue and try again. Marathon is certainly designed to feel more "important" and "tense" in the moment of play than H3 Multi, but I don't think it should be thought of as any more durable. Rinse and repeat, it's just a fun thing to do, not a long-term goal to achieve. Or, at least more in that direction than Destiny. And you're never more than 3 months behind in progress because everything resets anyway - again a sort of in-between concept for investment.
This also means it neither needs nor rewards vast amounts of time being put into it. But I think it's probably good for it to not take over my whole free time like Destiny 2 did. I did that willingly, but I didn't always have the time to give, really.

Well, look at that. I guess I did have things to say. What's the old line? "I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write you a short one."?

- No text -

I'm watching streamers play and the game looks so fun. But I've played the game too...and my experience greatly differed....but it looks so fun!!

I'm still hoping for that one moment that makes me get the game and give it a go. Originally I had no interest in Arc Raiders, but all they hype made me buy it and I love it.

C'mon Marathon....get me.

I definitely want to play more than I've currently been able. I've had a blast playing with some full teams of friends, we had one run last weekend where each of us was at different times the last man standing and revived the other two after the fight was over. I'd like to spend some more time with the different characters and maps as well.

If you don't have headphones and a quiet environment, forget about it. You need to be able to hear and your teammates need to be able to hear.

Like squid, I want to play it more than I have time for. I've had the most fun with friends. Solo can be painful, but victory is sweeter.

I've been playing it as if it were beyond Elite level Splinter Cell, as if the enemies are always better than you, because they almost always are--even the AI. I'm training myself to ignore gear fear. I suspect that that is the secret to enjoying yourself.

Kerm

Once I got myself to a place where I was okay with the constant inflow/outflow of gear (non-attachment!), a lot of the FOMO went away and I've just been learning to ride the waves, enjoy the wins, and roll on the losses as they happen. Sometimes you have zero gear and are poor as hell, then a couple runs later your Vault is overflowing with an embarrassment of riches.

I'm a middle-of-the-road PvP player. Good enough to have occasional moments of glory, but I get steamrolled more often than not and I'm waaay negative on my total gear win/loss record. Sometimes the game is infuriating, sometimes it's amazing. I definitely get Trials vibes from the PvP, which honestly, I love. Classic Trials was a damn good time and made me better at Destiny. I expect that I'll get a few passes at the Marathon, lose a bunch of gear, and eventually come out on top once or twice.

Headphones are a must. Last year's Public Alpha was really lacking in the audio cue department (and Bungie said as much when it came out), but the amount of information that can be gleaned from just audio is pretty astounding. I've definitely hunted down other players (and have been hunted) based solely on audio cues.

The world and story they're building here feels a lot more intentional than Destiny did when it first came out. We're all just sleuthing about and finding out information once piece at a time, but it all seems to be going somewhere, at least. And I absolutely love that my OG Mac gaming franchise is back with a vengeance after 30 years. Feels good, man.

If anyone is looking to team up, definitely send me a Bungie friend request. I'm Beorn#9530. Would love to play with some of the old guard. :)

I don't know how long I'll stick with it, but I'm loving it right now. I felt the same about ARC Raiders, and I ended up dropping it after a month or so. I'm just not sure the loop will hold me for a super long time.

But at this exact moment, holy shit, this game is fun. I've done a good mix of solos and playing in trios with randoms, and it's fun either way. I usually play solo if I have a specific quest I'm working on, as it's usually fairly easy to just get in, activate the thing, and get out. If I'm going to queue up with randos, I just grab a white quest that's usually about killing runners or UESC and jump in. I just finished a match where all of us just happened to have a quest for killing Runners, and we went on a tear and wiped three teams and extracted with a bunch of blue weapons and gear.

It feels incredible, as is expected from a Bungie shooter. The UESC enemies are engaging to fight, and the PvP is some of the most fun I've had in ages.

My only gripe, and it is very minor, is that it seems clear that the actual progression system seems tuned for playing with a team, as you share some of your squad's XP as they complete objectives. It can be pretty slow if you're playing alone. And some of the upgrade materials for the skill trees can be painfully rare, even some of the basic ones.

I cannot say enough about how awesome the game looks and sounds. It's just cool.

Now that the Marathon is out, and people have been doing it, it seems like the idea of 'raid mechanics' was an oversell. Most people have equated it to a dungeon. But everyone doing Cryo Archive seems to be loving it.

I think my biggest complaint is it's pretty hard to join up with people.

It's hard to tell if someone is in a group, and if the group is full. The join button is there even when people are not joinable (which is most of the time) there's no ability to join a crew if they are in a match (Apex and others will just have you waiting in a lobby until they are done.) Invites are buried and easy to miss. People show as bungie friends online when they are in D2 (I think that is what that means? either way my attempts to invite them are not working)

I feel weird just busting into someone's crew or party just to find out I'm not welcome. They could really improve this part of it.

What's everyone running? This is the rare game where I think I actually enjoy playing every shell. Vandal is my favorite so far, though--I love her mobility. Although, I spent a few matches in solos last night as Recon to great success. So many people try to rat as Assassin in solos, so being able to just ping them and hunt them down works really well. I had a match last night with 7 Runner kills and ended up basically alone on the map towards the end. Thief is the only shell I'm not absolutely in love with. I had the same problem with the Apex character that had the drone--I just don't like leaving my actual character to control something else. The grapple is great, though.

Also, minor nitpick, but I hate the name changes. Glitch and Void and Blackbird were just much cooler names.

If anyone else is looking for a teammate, feel free to add me. F000CH #3449. This game has grabbed me in a way that no multiplayer game has in quite a while, like maybe not since the launch of Apex Legends.

I have no idea how accurate that is, given how difficult it must be to try and track digital sales, but that's the number I've seen reported.

Who knows what goals Bungie and Playstation have, but that doesn't seem like a lot. I try not to care about that sort of thing (beyond it just being interesting information), but I really hope Marathon can sustain. I hope it does well enough to justify continued support beyond just next season or something, because damn I really love the game, and I'm excited to see how they use seasons to continue the story and keep the game fresh with new stuff.

https://jeff.zone/posts/marathon-review-153863027

I just thought this was a decent read. I credit Jeff with convincing me to give the game another shot after the open test weekend. He's a bit of an old curmudgeon at this point in some ways--he doesn't really seem to like most of the big AAA video games, so I tend to sit up and take note when he just straight up says "this game fucking rules," which he's been doing on his podcast every week since the game launched.

The more I play, the better the game gets. I'm honestly kind of blown away by just how good the game is. Everything in the game just meshes so well, it's really impressive how well designed everything is.

The thing that made me quit Arc Raiders was just that the loop got stale. It felt like it lost its purpose a bit. I know everyone loves how cooperative that game became, and while it was interesting and fun at first, it ultimately made the game sort of boring. It got to where you could load into a solo lobby and join basically every player in taking down the Queen or whatever. Add to that that the upgrade tree was just not interesting, nothing felt like it made a meaningful difference. The only driving force of the game became collecting trash to level up your workbenches and finding blueprints, and it sort of just became a slog.

Marathon feels like the total opposite experience. The faction upgrade trees feel super meaningful, both in terms of leveling up your runners and unlocking vendor stock, and there's a lot of choice for the player to decide what the focus should be. Want easy access to healing items and consumables? Focus on NuCaloric. Want to be a grenade throwing maniac? Mainline MIDA. Add in the fact that literally everything you do from killing enemies and runners to looting specific containers will give you XP for one faction or another, and you're always making progress for something no matter what you do.

More importantly, though, are the contracts. While the main loop is definitely resource and gear acquisition, I'm impressed by how much the contracts add. I really feel like the factions are sending me out to do something specific to further their goals. While they do all sort of end up being, "go here, hit the button, kill the commander, go somewhere else, hit the button," there's enough flavor in all of it to make them end up not feeling like I'm just doing the same thing over and over.

That standout is just how fun the game feels. I honestly think this may be the best PvP Bungie has ever made, even if that maybe takes a bit to show itself. At the beginning it was easy to feel like it was too easy to just die without even realizing what was going on, but as I've learned the maps and become more comfortable with the different weapons and shells, that doesn't feel like the reality. Even with the quick time to kill, there's enough cover in the maps that you can pretty much always reposition and reset an encounter. I've had quite a few really drawn out squad fights that were really fun. Honestly, it feels a lot like Apex Legends, and that's a good thing. And things can get really chaotic if everything converges the right way with multiple squads and a bunch of UESC in the area.

My only complaint remains investment time for the upgrades. I'm sure part of it is that I just don't play super efficiently--the combat in the game is so fun that I sort of don't care what's in my backpack, I'm always down to take on that other squad if the opportunity presents itself. But it still feels like progress is maybe a touch on the slow side. That is ultimately a minor complaint, though, as I don't feel like I'm a huge disadvantage because of it.