marathon (20XX)

King of Posters
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I uninstalled this earlier after doing a few more runs since it’s almost over. One of the end game zones in the final release is going to be on the Marathon itself and I’m trying to decide if I liked this enough to put in the time and effort required to actually reach that area. I’m kind of 50/50 at the moment.

I liked the visuals and the prefabricated designs of the buildings in the first zone. The level designs were pretty good. These were fun spaces to explore. I also liked the bits of world building you glimpse through the contracts and the other characters you meet through the other companies/groups that try to recruit you as you take on and complete contracts. I could see myself getting into the story.

I did not like the unpredictability of other players. Sometimes they leave you alone or maybe help you but most of the time I encountered other players on a solo run they would just shoot me. Teaming up worked out pretty well the single run I tried it though one of my crew mates was afk the whole time. I could also see teaming up with randos not being so great. Teaming up with friends requires a level of planning that I’m not used to affording a video game and makes the whole thing to me feel like more of a commitment than it’s worth. Basically genres that involve playing with other people aren’t really my thing. Whatever.

On the other hand the price point is attractive. I wouldn’t even be considering this if it were any more expensive than $40. I could see myself picking away at the game over time at my own pace but then due to its nature as a live game there is the risk that everything changes before I get to see it all. Destiny kept getting big updates that would basically rewrite the whole experience so unless you were constantly plugged in you never really knew what was going on and the basic gameplay loops aren’t that compelling enough to me to sustain my interest long term.

So I’m a little conflicted. I hate that they took something I loved and turned it into something I don’t. I can always go back and replay the originals though. Maybe I’ll actually finish Marathon: Infinity one of these days.

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i’m not in love with it but had a good enough time. i’ll probably play more of it. i wish it had duos, but me and my friend have played enough hunt to know how to effectively 2v3 (play cautiously and ensure you get the jump on the one that’s most isolated) so it wasn’t a huge deal i guess.

it’s certainly competent, but the design feels a little too rote and safe in my book. i do like the ability design a lot. there’s a high skill ceiling with all the shell abilities and equipment and modifiers. they all feel very impactful but not overpowered.

the death recap still bugs me a LOT… as a point of comparison, hunt tells you how much damage you took from every single source (gun, dynamite, barrel, AI enemy, whatever), and gives you a list of players you interacted with and what teams they were on, how many times you killed them and they killed you. you can even get a view of where they shot you from.

marathon gives you one damage number per player, and that’s all the information you get. what guns are they using? are they getting headshots? was some of the damage from abilities or equipment? did you get third partied or were they all on the same team? you basically have to be an expert and know everything in the game before you can deduce that information for yourself. it makes it needlessly opaque and frustrating to learn.

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I spend so much of my life having to be on edge that today might be the day someone ruins my week, surviving only by trusting others knowing I am rolling dice every time. Why am I playing a game that mimics this betrayal of trust and gamifies it. I couldn’t handle it. I can’t handle a game who’s primary mode of interaction is to expose them to the constant mental calculus I have to do and tell them there’s a net benefit to hurting the other person. I think there’s an underestimation on how some people don’t need coping mechanisms for this kind of thing, in conversations and approaches to the genre. Most people live in a world where there is no resistance to their existence alone, and the aggression I see mirrored here is invisible to them outside of the game. To many, it’s an unknown and interesting thing to experience instead of an exhausting constant.

found via bearblog

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Im lukewarm on this, I think the game lacks commitment to a meaningful metastructure out of an attempt to please as many kinds of players as possible. I struggle to find any of the motives for play interesting, avoiding people and filling up a backpack feels kind of dull, killing someone who’s being shot by an npc kind of makes me feel bad honestly, like damn sorry ur stuck in a lobby now. I’m most motivated by the faction plots but it’s undercut by the transparent need to stretch the writing out across a live service timeline & painfully thin connections between the narrative framing and the repetitive dailies style generative quest structure.

I thought was interesting the setting seems to semi self-consciously appropriate the political critique of these games. Engaging in aestheticized replications of capitalist precarity with abstracted bodily impact that obfuscates the compounding effect of ‘empty’ violence in search of resources . I do like the gundam style anime npcs and I think the style works in motion and in relation to other games. Honestly the design reads to me as a very mid-late 2010s concept of ‘stylish’ but expensive games r so unimaginative visually it does cut above its lower-tier ilk simply for having a look that isn’t dull pseudo-realism.

I dont care at all about getting one billion mini greeblies & the inventory is nothing but a chore and a really dull form of pseudoknowledge. like great let me strain my eyes to tell the 6 different ammo types. how about one of these games make each ammo type a different musical pitch and when i shoot it shoots in that pitch and i learn a thing from this experience. but no…instead i learn that this icon is an ammo box and this other one is an emp grenade and this health patch is for shields and this one heals status debuffs and etc. etc.

I understand it’s not economically viable but i guess i do just wish this was like a single player game…in the end…

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For what it’s worth, this game’s only like 20GB. I doubt that major content vaulting will be a thing here. Even the battle passes don’t expire.

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The tonal whiplash between that and her much more positive first article on the closed alpha is totally wild. Without knowing, I’d think it was two different people. Can’t figure out what happened. Props to her for playing the game more than I have!

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yeah it kind of feels like “how do you maintain an aesthetic of an outsider critique of capitalism in your narrative while still being hypercapitalist to the core with your live service model” and the answer is “present a Mark Fisher there-is-no-alternative capitalist realist perspective through your narrative, splashed with neon paint and daubed with the same aesthetic drive that drove vaporwave, businessweek magazine, etc”

so in essence, nothing can ever get better economically or politically, but the paint gets shinier and our avenue for liberatory expression is which charms we can stick on our guns, or in the front pockets of our loadout, or what our magazine covers look like, etc. or what pieces of genuine pre-collapse art (library music) we can retreat to for dissociation from our present state of affairs. a thoroughly demobilized and depoliticized body politic. and this jives perfectly with the business model of the game itself! convenient

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and aesthetically we should note that the genuine fascists appropriated vaporwave aesthetics without any difficulty, and so.

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Following her on blusky, they also increasingly balanced the game towards hyper competition instead of a more chill experience. She was hoping it would get pushed more PVE with some player interaction as opposed to what it ended up being.

I co-sign everything she says about voice chat btw. It’s a huge part of the reason I never want to touch games I gotta voice chat with randos.

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when the xbox 360 added party chat i was very happy to never have to talk to the average gamer ever again. i’m happiest with games where i only have to talk to people in my party.

competition being the default in marathon is a big plus for me because it means i don’t have to communicate with people outside my group. and when you fight people it’s clear that they also want to fight you, or at least want to fight to survive.

arc raiders promoted this weird middle ground where people may have their guard down entirely, because they either assume you’re friendly or they hesitate because you might be friendly. it’s extremely dissatisfying to shoot someone and then learn they’re operating under a different social contract than you. it’s likewise dissatisfying to hesitate to try and check if someone is friendly and then they shoot you for free.

that environment is much less inviting to me than one where everyone shoots on sight, because in the latter case everyone is playing with the same understanding of the rules and entering into that competition willingly.

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Confession time: I don’t know if Marathon is a good game yet. I’m assuming it is. I want it to be. I didn’t play much of this server slam; only got to a piddly level 12 or so. My buddy wanted to keep playing, but all there was to do in the face of impending wipe was to just “do PvP”, and the idea of traipsing these psychedelic landfills hoping to see people before they see us is hideously dull to me. It’s not really the point of these games.

One thing I’m excited for is that each faction is tied to a different point of interest on each map, with their own upgrade materials to be found there. This means each map is waiting to be broken down into five or six flexible Attack/Defend situations, and you can run whichever whenever however you want. There’s a stronger emphasis on PoIs than in Arc Raiders, wherein you can just lamely fill up the bag from random lockers and bins anywhere and dip out. I think the PoI caches will install structure, anticipation, and intrinsic reward (owning the spot) to the PvP fights which wasn’t really present in the demo we played. But then again, maybe it will still be a mess.

The point of an extraction shooter is the loot. In this demo, of course there’s no reason to care about the loot, and without that, what is there to care about? Well, a lot of people in this thread put up a good effort at trying to find out, and I don’t blame anybody for not finding very satisfying answers.

The point of a good loot game, to me, is being able to lose it. I exclusively play Diablolikes in Hardcore, where you lose your character and your equipped gear (but crucially, not your stash) when you die, usually as a result of a random knowledge check or a blip of inattention. I would scream, and wail, and sometimes laugh. So much bullshit. It took me over 200 hours to beat each Path of Exile campaign my first time this way: Ruthless, Hardcore, Solo Self Found. I was convinced both times it was a profoundly meaningful accomplishment. It wasn’t, but it was good gaming.

A lot of you focus on the sadists who play these games. Please consider the masochists too.

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the graphic designs of the loading screens and computer interfaces in this got me to watch neon genesis evangelion again

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I played through the tutorial to get a taste of the artwork, but then I couldn’t find in my heart enough courage to actually risk a first real match with strangers.

The prospect of PvP-as-a-jump-scare is the main thing I’m anxious about, but peculiarly enough, the prominent and detailed quest rewards screen really disheartened me too. That’s presumably there to give players a dopamine rush, but it had the exact opposite effect on me.

At some level, I think what I was hoping for was a game more purely about overcoming my fears and exploring the hostile unknown. It might be possible to convince me to undergo some stress for the sake of curiosity and forging my character, but I certainly won’t do it for 4 healing patches and 20% of progress towards my first permanent shell upgrade.

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https://hearoursilence.com/zine

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I think this is really interesting because that’s almost the exact opposite of what I desire in a “good loot game”.

What makes for a good looter to me is that feeling of discovery which accompanies getting some new synergistic item. Or the feeling of putting effort into something “productive” (five billion air quotes around productive, obviously being on the treadmill is not remotely productive) with direction and purpose and eventually reaching that goal.

All good loot games IMO are constructed around buildcrafting. This is actually where Destiny 2 excels far above the rest of its kin. All encounters are designed to accommodate any cross-section of classes, and all classes can use all weapons, so the joy one feels getting a good new gun that expands your horizons is very addicting.

Being able to lose the thing that makes my build work? Not really that interesting to me, at least in an action looter game. I don’t like having to rebuild what works in an environment where it’s possible to metaprogress your way to greater strength. Rogue-likes and similar (like Hardcore Diablo) are excepted for the obvious reason that they are deliberately constructed around being set back to zero all the time.

This isn’t to say it’s wrong to feel excitement from that tension, or wrong to like looter games in this way. I’m just rambling because I find the perspective interesting. I used to play a lot of these kinds of games, but the tension of “I might lose my stuff to another player” lost its appeal after a while, since I didn’t really find much enjoyment in being someone else’s loot pinata (as good players of Battle Royales will tell you: all other players are basically just filters for the good loot).

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d2 is kind of an embarrassment of riches for build fuckarounds now, it’s pretty intimidating. i’ve tended to just pick an obvious titan meta thing and stick to it until something better emerges and doesn’t ask me to be particularly brilliant to execute the core loop

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i think the current plan is to fully wipe all your loot & faction progress every 3 months with the new season so that plus being able to lose key pieces in matches will make optimal build crafting pretty hard.

it’s sort of exciting to me because it means you need to make do with what you have and hopefully that means you see more build variety on the field. i tend to dislike building toward an online guide so i typically do better in games where you have to make imperfect builds on the fly.

the loot for me isn’t so that i play off-meta because i already do that in most games. it’s to force other people to play off-meta too.

of course this is also very dependant on how tight the economy is which is hard to get a sense of in a weekend.

traditional rouguelikes appeal to me in this same way. many of them are about crafting builds with the random hodgepodge of shit you have access to.

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Introducing Seasons

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it’s not just about what you loot, it’s about maximizing DAU metrics and FOMO mechanics to recoup investment.

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While yes, Bungie has been very predatory about things like seasonal resets in the past, and that’s certainly part of why they are doing this for Marathon, it’s also an attempted solution for an unsolved problem in the design space of extraction shooters.

To wit: Players who extract will grow in power faster because their gear will be better. This allows them to kill lower-power players more consistently, which allows them to use those players as loot pinatas (see previous post), which allows them to get better gear, and the cycle repeats. The end result is a sort of tiered hierarchy of players: those with multiple sets of the best gear effortlessly killing players at the top, and those struggling to get even basic kits at the bottom. The difference between someone who can consistently kill other players with better gear and someone running around in a freebie because they don’t have shit is enormous.

There’s a variety of attempts to address this issue:

Resets are the most common. Set all the high-gear and low-gear players back to the start, put them on even footing, and see what happens after. This is what Tarkov does and now what Marathon is doing. It works but it’s a bit like trying to defuse a minefield with a nuclear bomb: it’s blunt and insanely destructive.

Hunt Showdown circumvents this by not having anything you actually extract with anything other than the bounty and your life. There’s no loot to be had, just XP/cash, and there’s not that much reason to engage in a fight with another player unless you’re both attempting the full bounty run.

ARC Raiders allows you to permanently upgrade your home base so you can just make the gear you want with the loot you pull out. Even if you can’t find the good stuff in the field, you can eventually become consistent and build a stash via crafting.

Every one of these games has a “free kit” setup also to address this problem. If you die all the time as a player, and everything costs money or items, then you will eventually run out of runway and have no way to actually play anymore. It’s the completely necessary safety net to the whole endeavor; without it, literally none of these games would be playable.

I don’t think Bungie will reasonably solve any of these design issues, given that Destiny 2 has the easiest fixes for their investment / incentives design structure and they have consistently failed at fixing it by trying to do everything except what works and makes players happy.

To summarize Bungie’s approach:

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