From the creators of Halo and Destiny comes a new sci-fi PVP extraction shooter: Marathon.
Become a Runner in Bungie’s new sci-fi PvP extraction shooter. Compete for survival, riches, and renown in a world of evolving, persistent zones, where any run can lead to greatness.
A massive ghost ship hangs in low orbit over a lost colony. The 30,000 souls who called this world home have disappeared without a trace. Strange signals hint at rumors of mysterious artifacts, long-dormant AI, and troves of untold riches. You are a cybernetic mercenary – a Runner – and your destination is Tau Ceti IV. You are one of many, working solo or with a crew, venturing into the unknown and facing the unimaginable in a fight for survival, for riches, for fame… and for infamy. Who among you will write their names across the stars?
I’m gonna ramble, this is the first thing I’ve seen in a few years that looks exciting
I don’t think this is their big project, I hadn’t heard about this.
Finally a visual design that feels fresh and appropriately new for new hardware, even as the game design is stuck feeding off the cream of smaller games. We’re way past hardware enabling design and it’s scary for a lot of these places, and a big cause of preproduction hell.
There’s a ton of Craig Mullins’ Marathon fan/concept art in here – obviously Bungie carried that forward into Halo but the James Cameron side overwhelmed a lot of the stillness and elegance of it.
Reaching back harder on Chris Foss. I’m surprised that his style has been back in pop culture for a decade and it doesn’t feel saturated yet
The naively-saturated overlays and ASCII art pull directly from the internal visual language of Marathon, and they don’t read like the '80s monochrome terminal pastiches we’ve been seeing for a while. The intimacy in Marathon is deeply tied to the terminals and I’m getting an interesting pull even as they’re explicitly not promising me a sadistic lonely torture dungeon (I never did write the piece comparing Meet Your Maker and Marathon…).
This reminds me of where Brink wanted to go, but Brink was too early and too crude in that British way to really lead the way. And Brink is about the punk characters crashing against the clean world, but this pulls back to my most important Bungie sympathy: the faceless but embodied avatar. Present but drained.
before i played titanfall and before i played destiny i played neotokyo so i am fucking stoked out of my mind
destiny 2’s pvp has been absurd and capricious the entire time i’ve played it but when they take the weights off i think they’ll excel with something focused
and unlike destiny’s prerelease marketing which was firmly in the realm of bullshit, when they say something like this
Beyond just the “story of your last run” however, we want to give players the chance to affect these persistent zones and the larger world as a result. For example, imagine a crew discovering a previously undiscovered artifact that, when activated, opens a new area of the map for all players to explore. In essence, we’re creating a game where the actions of players can have ramifications for the world and players with each unfolding season.
i’ve seen them actually do this in the game i play today and it’s incredible
Count me completely out for this shit. The phrase “sci-fi pvp extraction shooter” is like an incantation to ward off good spirits. Rip to the single player fps campaign forever, I guess. Cursed to forever play “indie” quake lookin ass throwback boomer shooters until I die of a coronary in my 50s
not sure what the point of bringing marathon back for some multiplayer thing is, but at least the trailer looks cool I guess. didn’t play the first two destiny games, so I can’t see myself playing the third one
zipped to this thread [edit: ok wait THIS thread] when i heard about this to see how @Sykel’s feeling
idk what an extraction shooter is and i don’t think i’ll have anything that can play this for a long time but i guess it’s cool it’s got bright colours. that font is a bit boring though
guess why I’m listening to the Neotokyo soundtrack at the moment
If they’re into it, this game style has a lot of good narrative potential. I’ve seen games start to build escape room puzzles into them. Threat is manageable but can always be surprising – the ticking timer and the NPC spawns can be reasonably predicted but the roaming players are always a chaotic element. There’s space to hide and plan based on how the game is set up, and a little bit of space for narrative, even slow text dumps.
Puzzle setup is constrained but in a similar space as an MMO raid. You can breadcrumb players through repeated attempts and put dense pieces in there and know that it’ll be communicated. It’s a similar storytelling space as roguelikes have, too - the narrative of archeology.
Unlike a singleplayer game CUBA every match is a game that can be won or lost, it’s not a train track of imminent forward motion, and there’s a type of storytelling and progression that instanced, mission-based, and accretive. The real thing you should be mad at is how slowly studios are digging into the structure potential of Rainbow Six-style co-op mission games with the added surprise of random players. A lot of these games build the cover story but leave the game objectives blank, but you can tell any sort of mission goal inside a game with the real possibility of failure from 5 different axes.
Oh! This touches so close to so many things I’m doing
Extraction shooters are really exciting. So many people here play Fortnite, I am entirely certain that some of you could find a game like Hunt: Showdown pretty enjoyable too. They are sweaty, tense, but also just a gas that you have to laugh about sometimes.
It’s funny that after getting mined into battle royales, there was still more to dig into DayZ and something new showed up.
Like battle royales, extraction shooters simplify the interesting social play that was in DayZ – other squads are always your enemy – but because the main goal is effectively a co-op shooter mission, it has a ton of interesting pacing. Most games have a lot of play in them exactly as tight as a any other co-op game, so I’ve found it much easier to get people in and it covers a much broader skill range in a group. Player fights are this neat random encounter and can be terrifying, funny, amazing. I think the best games treat them like Spelunky or Noita. Terrifying and surprising as it happens and the game is too big to be on your toes forevers but hilarious and obvious in hindsight. It really adds a lot of variance and high-end play to a co-op game.
