The next level isn’t worse by my god what were they thinking
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Yeah Habe Quiddam was kind of a pain to run through over and over.
Somehow, I was super keyed into the logic of these levels when I played through Marathon 1. The switch-platform puzzle in Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap was hardly an obstacle for me. I say this not to show off, but more to illustrate that something happened to me that made Marathon 1 smooth like a game with modern sensibilities. Right time in my life I guess.
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I would loathe Colony Ship… if I didn’t just check the right switch timing online the moment I understood what is being asked of me, it made the experience acceptable. Pfhoraphobia is the only time I really hit the wall in my TC run. Its lack of terminals makes for a frustrating, yet uniquely compelling experience (which sums up a lot of the first game)
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Delay’d
https://www.bungie.net/7/en/News/Article/marathon_update
they are adding proximity chat, and “Doubling down” on the Marathon universe, whatever that means.
Bungie there’s still time to add dual wielding shotguns
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Any Marathon announcement that doesn’t reveal PvE is fundamentally unserious about unfucking the game.
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The three words that would change everything: single-player campaign
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I’m going through the Pfhor levels, after hours of angular corridors and walls of metal the Pfhor levels feel organic in an unsettling way. I get a very foreboding feeling of “I should be here, I don’t know how I’m going to get out, I don’t know where anything goes”. I can also see the massive influence that this game had on the look of The Covenant from Halo. The contrast is really felt when you go back to the Marathon for a mission or two and it feels almost warmly familiar.
That said there’s a mission here without a savepoint, so I’m just supposed to get through this whole thing in one go I guess.
Also it’s very funny to me that, right when FPSes had the capacity to tell any kind of narrative, it immediately goes “you like killing people, don’t you? sicko”
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that’s one of the reasons i hated games that did that trope so much later on, because marathon did it pretty much right at the start lol
they drop it in the second and third games, which try to tell interesting stories with the medium in ways other than just “what if we basically point out this is a game and explore the relationship between designer and player”
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i should play the marathon games again
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Eager to finish Marathon 1 and move onto 2 finally. I have 2 more levels left and Try Again has a bunch of huge flying enemies that are nowhere else in the game and require rockets to basically take down
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Durandal is so far really great. I bet you will like it loads more. I am about ten missions in myself.
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I have finished Marathon. It was pretty ok. Not a fan of having to walk on lava on multiple levels in order to advance through the game. Maze like labyrinths sometimes with good level design and sometimes with bizarre choices. I can’t really complain they were just figuring out what 3d spaces should even look like. Does make me want to play doom as a companion piece after the trilogy is done.
After playing Marathon the new Marathon makes even less sense as a setting. You really can’t have the setting and not have Durandal or the Pfhor and not having them from the outset gets absolutely nobody excited.
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Bungie has always had issues with good level design, their peaks can reach higher heights than the levels of their peers but the median level design of a bungie game is more tekwar than doom (this might seem harsh but consider the airport level in Oni)
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Holy Moley, the upgrade from 1 to 2 is pretty staggering. Just adding in better lighting and ambient sounds to the levels alone makes them feel a lot more vibrant.
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In one of the terminals for Marathon one they’re like “We got 10 hours of sleep in the last 4 days” and I’m like “maybe thats why some of these levels suck IDK”
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Finished the one level of Marathon 2 I remember from childhood, which is “What About Bob” and I remember it because you have to outrun a rising flood of lava that you trigger by punching a control panel. I ran out of rifle ammo so I am stuck using pistols for…ever?
Once again save placement is brutal. I have to repeat whole parts of levels over and over because they don’t save between levels. Not…fun
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lol can’t wait for you to get to marathon infinity, this is all baby stuff. try two vacuum levels back to back baybeeee
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I did skip ahead to the first level of Marathon Infinity because the space ship looked really cool.
Marathon 2 is a much more interesting game and universe than the extraction shooter hints at. It wouldn’t be super-hard to graft parts of it into the existing game (You’re A BOB doing random tasks for Durandal, but you can dress up now)
Some of the levels are really interesting. “Come And Take Your Medicine” is a sprawling complex that you don’t actually have to see all of. There’s usually bits of maps that go unexplored by the time I finish them, it adds a bit of mystery. They also just feel like more lived-in spaces (such that they can be)
I also had to really scrounge for ammo because there’s parts of the game where there just isn’t any and I was down to pistols for a while. There’s also a bunch of “Oh I am done with the level, I better save and heal before going any further so that I’m not dumped into a firefight and die instantly”
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Someone mentioned upthread but for the weaker enemies I almost always just ran at them and punched to death. It was very satisfying and a good way to save ammo.
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