The world can be ruthless.
That’s what Marathon (2026) wants you to feel. Everything, and everyone is out to get you.
You can prep all you want but there’s no guarantee you’ll last at least five minutes once you set foot on Tau Ceti IV to investigate and salvage whatever’s left of what supposed to be humanity’s new frontier. It’s not just the environment is hostile, fellow runners, people who absolve of their corporeal human form so that their cloud-based consciousness be uploaded into a fresh homunculi everytime they die, are out to get you. You are out here risking lives, dealing with danger. Nothing is guaranteed. No wonder the game’s codex entries, and even the real people working at developer Bungie regularly wishes you good luck. You’ll need it.
And so do them.
Bungie has been floundering. The state of Destiny 2 is dire. Multiple internal incubator projects were reportedly cancelled and all resources seems to be pushed to make an extraction shooter wearing the shell of the developer’s cult classic FPS series that predated Halo.
Just as MIDA are growing rabid over the UESC’s fixation on prioritising the development of the UESC Marathon colony ship as citizens are in famine, so do the content-famine-struck Destiny fans wishing they would’ve made Destiny 3 instead of this. There are also the members of the Marathon cult lamenting that this isn’t a single-player experience, an understandable phenomenon to happen every time an established series is rebooting and changing genre (see the reception of God Of War (2018) amongst its longtime fans as one of many examples). And there’s also the rise of doom dogpilers, ready to pounce on a Concord 2.0, hoping to see and make history witnessing the next big AAA flop. Because that’s what people do on socials now, wishing on downfalls and seeing it unravel as it happens.
Marathon seemingly is poised for failure after a mixed reception of its early Alpha test last year, which was later compounded with an art plagiarism controversy. Haters are lining up hate posts in hopes to see Marathon, the game, to be as much as a disaster as Marathon, the expansive colony ship the people in the Sol system sent out.
What’s more, they’re now owned by another company. Sony Interactive Entertainment, the entity we usually refer here as PlayStation, acquired the Bellevue, Washington-based developer that once owned by fellow Bellevue, Washington-based console maker Microsoft, the entity we usually refer here as Xbox, during the early 2020s wave of pandemic-induced mergers and acquisitions. Bungie has yet to produce a new game under the SIE banner, Marathon will be their first.
And so far, the results of PlayStation’s M&A spree has been a mess. Firewalk Studios (also based in Bellevue,Washington) produced Concord, touted to be the next big franchise, only to only last two weeks online before the game, and the studio, shuttered. Not even Bluepoint Games was spared, after shipping the remarkable Demon’s Souls remake for the PS5 launch only to be acquired and produced nothing in the next six years.
If new Marathon flops, we all can expect what will happen next. The games industry is undergoing drastic cost-cutting and isn’t afraid of closing down institutions as established as Bungie.
The world can be ruthless.
But after spending some time with the Marathon Server Slam, just a week ahead of the game’s proper launch, I feel like Marathon (2026) has a chance of success.
Marathon Server Slam Impressions
One can make an assumption that Bungie is here just chasing trends. Extraction shooters were the buzzword of the early 2020s, with games like Escape From Tarkov building momentum and amassing large player counts despite not even being on Steam, the de-facto platform for PC games, for the longest time.
It makes sense why, extraction shooters are the natural evolution of the battle royale. If a battle royale has you roam a map to loot random buildings to prep for team fights with a map that grows ever smaller, extraction games asks players to loot random buildings and find a way to get out of dodge, loot in hand. If you die, you lose it all.
If battle royales are multiplayer roguelikes, extraction shooters are its roguelite equivalent, with ways to incrementally progress and be stronger in consecutive runs, but with less safety net as you can gamble and lose an entire build worth of loot to some rando that got the jump on you.
And yes, rather appropriately you do runs in Marathon, rather than participate in a match. And you’ll be running a lot if you want to cover the vast maps available, though maybe you shouldn’t. A Marathon run here in Marathon isn’t as long as a real marathon (25 minutes tops as opposed to the record marathon time of about 2 hours). But you’d be lucky to survive that long. You don’t know exactly how many players will infil into the same map every run, the only inkling we have is the product page on the PlayStation website stating 18 player multiplayer. So at most, 6 3-player squads. Not a lot.
But just facing one enemy squad is already a harrowing experience. Time-to-kill is fast, less Apex Legends and a bit more Call Of Duty in this regard despite having health and shield consumables derived out of Apex (which derived out of battle royales like PUBG and Fortnite), and any mistake you make you will regret it. So often I got jumped by another runner that I hit both the trigger to shoot but also thumbed down the analog stick to accidentally melee. So often I died out of that.
During the first five hours of play dealing with at most green rarity loot, encounters seem so rare and compound by how quick these can resolve, it can feel dull. There’s some dead air that I feel was intentionally done so new players are not getting immediately overwhelmed, but I think the game can tighten up. I want a bit more action, because when the action is ratcheted up, it gets insanely intense and I feel a bunch of people that came to the jam that is the server slam only played two or three runs after the tutorial and ended up with an underwhelmed impression. I would’ve too, but I pressed on to play another five hours despite knowing I have to restart everything again as progression during the server slam isn’t carried over.
Shoot First, Loot Later
Marathon is a PVPVE rather than a PVEVP. Compare this to The Division’s Dark Zone, the primodial extraction shooter. In that game, every player is expected to co-operate together to deal with the tough enemies so you can get the rare loot from the quarantined part of town. But you can opt to betray against your fellow players. Doing so regularly will put a bounty on your head. This design philosophy makes it that you’re expected to work together with players initially, backstabbing PVP is opt-in.
Now compare this to a modern extraction shooter experience like Marathon. You’re expected to be duelling other players more than the NPC enemies. Everyone out there are killers by default, if you want an alliance, you have to somehow convince random players that you’re friendly, preferably through proximity chat.
Prox chat was one of the features the community asked for Bungie to include as part of the feedback of last year’s public alpha, and while it’s nice it’s there, don’t expect larpers around if you’re playing in Asia servers. Between the language barrier problem and folks generally don’t use proximity chat, you’re unlikely to form pacts with randos. Everyone just shoots each other on sight, at least that’s what I’ve experienced.
And why would you be friendly in Marathon other than just out of the goodness of your heart? Are you sure that other crew won’t backstab you while in the last 10 seconds before exfil? Are you sure that Rook player isn’t just a veteran player being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, ready to pounce you at any given moment? There are no incentives for being nice in Marathon, by design. The world can be ruthless, and it usually is. And this will likely scare off people thinking this game is a casual hobby shooter in the vein of Destiny. It’s not.
Interestingly, Marathon has a subtle way of getting players to congregate to the same area in the zone. Every player can assign a contract (missions/quests), some of which are integral to not only story progression, but also important unlocks to make you more powerful in the long run. Often regularly I find myself encountering a crew heading to the same objective point, likely doing the same contract as you (and your crew) are. It’s a fun decision-making process where you and your crew should either go to the closest area which the contract can be completed at risk of getting into a hot zone from the get-go, or play it low-and-slow by going to points further out where you can potentially loot more stuff and gear up better for the eventual fights.
Is there contract-based matchmaking in Marathon? It feels like it.
Player Hostile Environment
If players aren’t already ruthless, the UESC robots that are the enemy NPCs you encounter regularly in the early game are just as savage. They can flank, make use of the multi-level buildings, get out of dodge using slick booster skates straight out of Armored Core VI, and they can even masquerade as another runner, going invisible and emit runner-like footsteps, making people overreact against the opps by making them think they’re facing a runner team instead of just the UESC, throwing you in a loop.
These robots mean business and in large numbers, they’ll overwhelm a cocky squad in seconds. Try unlocking some of those priority packages where you are promised good loot if you can survive the onslaught of UESC robots that comes in waves and waves. You better have enough ammo.
The world of Marathon is hostile in many ways, and the one I do like is how you have to be absolute frugal with your resources. Lack of ammo is a regular issue, and I don’t think this needs fixing. Forget about player feedback on this one. This is emblematic of Marathon’s design choices, the world is ruthless, and you really need to scavenge for ammo. They do drop on dead bodies and even boxes where loot is to be found, but they drop so rarely. You either buy and bring a few more stacks than you should, or make every bullet count. You don’t need to be shooting the ticks individually when shooting the nest saves you precious ammo. And for the love of everything do not just mindlessly reload, weapons using batteries as ammos follow the drop-the-whole-clip philosophy of realistic weaponry. Marathon makes you uncomfortable, forces you to make intentful, consequential decisions rather than just let you go autopilot. The world is ruthless, and you won’t survive if you don’t… get good.
I’m sorry, I have to bring this up. Yes, a lot of what makes Marathon (2026) and extraction shooters in general appealing is its hardcore nature. This isn’t a game for everyone. You will die. You will fail tremendously. You will face setbacks. Thankfully, you won’t get to the point of accruing debt like pre-Armored Core VI Armored Cores do. But it can be as tough as facing against Armored Core VI bosses and rival ACs.
At the very least, you’ll get a free supply of what’s dubbed a sponsor kit, a basic, themed loadout enough to get you by when the going gets tough (or you just don’t want to risk your stash). And if you really need to build back your vault of loot, the option to run a scavenger run as the much-weaker runner shell Rook is also a fun (but risky) experience. From what I encountered, no one is offering an olive branch. It’s all shoot on sight in the servers I play in. Even fellow Rooks are ruthless!
UI Woes
But there is an element of friction that I’m not too keen on and it’s the UI. Not the way it looks, however. I think that its take on the polished Designer Republic-influenced minimalism but not quite right—like how there’s an odd serif font used for the biggest title headers in contrast to the 70’s computer terminal vibe of its other serif fonts or even the colour choice—is fantastic and in line with the vision of nu Marathon having a rough edge to its pristine surfaces. It’s also not that it feels overwhelming and require some time to use. The Marathon UI problem is that the user experience feels cumbersome. Things that should be brain-dead simple required some brainpower. That kind of unwanted friction.
Bungie single-handedly changed the brain chemistry of all video game UI/UX designers with what I like to call the Destiny cursor, a mouse-like pointer tuned to feel intuitive to use with an analog stick, and as it turns out when Destiny 2 was released on PC, works well with regular mouse input. However, Destiny 2 (and Destiny) has the UI layout designed around that limitation, around the peculiar acceleration pattern and stickiness the Destiny cursor employs to feel good, whereas Marathon feels like a UI designed for PC first with mouse control in mind. Navigating menus feel sluggish. Managing inventory is agonisingly unintuitive (you press L2 to pick up an item, but you also have to press L2 again to drop them into the inventory slot of your choice, when I assumed a face button would do the same thing—I argue it should!).
There’s also the contract selection menu. The area you need to press the face button to select that button is a drop-down thing that you need to highlight before it appears, and regularly I have trouble pressing it down. The screen instead provide a big button to switch between the contract description and objectives, which I find less utility to have it be a permanent button where you don’t need to highlight a specific, dynamic box to press. Apparently, you can just press on the large, empty space in the middle of the contract box, something that I think should be obvious with a mouse, not so much with this cursor.
I personally despise the over-reliance of the Destiny cursor in modern video game UI design especially when it’s designed haphazardly (see Borderlands 4) but it works in Destiny 2. You don’t need to move the cursor that much, you don’t need to move to the edge of the screen. There’s enough tabs that you can quickly go through using triggers, bumpers and d-pads. Every little box of interaction is built and designed around the specific ways the Destiny cursor operates. But Marathon relies on the mouse/cursor movement way more than Destiny, and the default settings for the cursor (which to my knowledge cannot be adjusted in any way) is a compromised user experience compared to those with access to a mouse. I feel like if the menu is fully designed for d-pad use I feel like I could loot and manage loot faster. Somehow, even Bungie themselves can fumble the implementation of a Destiny cursor.
And why is the settings button so tiny and at the very edge of the screen? And you have to press another button that pops up after before you can go into the settings proper where I can set my camera axis inversion. Not having invert x-axis and y-axis on the startup screen of options is one thing, to have it be a struggle to adjust what should be a simple settings option to adjust is an oversight I must call out.
I don’t mind the aesthetics of the UI, I’m willing to learn and adapt. But Marathon needs to make the essential menu usage experience hassle-free, and right now it’s quite the hassle to do the simplest task that you’ve seen done simply in other games. This doesn’t account the more gameplay-specific UI changes the community has so far suggested. Things like making cores/mods be easier to glance through with more icon usage, having the runner shell customisation in the runner shell select screen, and more. More work needs to be done in the UI department.
The callbacks to classic Marathon? Keep those. The codex being all green with grainy, noisy images to look like the terminal logs of the OG games is class.
Not A Sprint, But A Marathon
But what makes Marathon more than the average extraction shooter? Some folks may feel that way after playing the server slam and I get it, especially if you haven’t put in more than five hours. Marathon is a slow burn.
Not a sprint, but a Marathon.
The faction progression throughout Season 1 will see you getting access to more options to start a run stronger through access to weapons directly purchasable in the Armoury, as well as subtle across-the-aboard improvement like less heat (stamina) consumption. Interestingly, some of these upgrades are mentioned to only last the season. Extraction shooters have the concept of a server wipe so everyone starts from scratch again after some time, so Bungie has a perfect excuse to do something akin to Vaulting, a controversial but seemingly necessary evil to keep Destiny 2’s size from continue bloat at the cost of losing access to previously purchased and supposedly evergreen past content. That’s perfectly acceptable here.
Destiny fans have known the depth of lore Bungie can produce, and this is part of their DNA not just from Destiny, but also dating back as far as Pathways Into Darkness, their first game some believe to have strong narrative ties to the classic Marathon trilogy. The lore drops from working with the six factions should intrigue some players, not only from a narrative standpoint, but also from its presentation. These factions have over-the-top cinematics that feels like high-fidelity artsy FMVs from the late 90s-early 2000s. Between the philosophical prose of the faction contacts and the cyber dystopian ambiance, it reminds of Alpha Centauri, in a good way. Also a little bit of that Armored Core feel where you’re essentially throwaway contractors to these factions, doing mostly small jobs at the start.
Marathon’s true colours only unravels itself when you get proper gear where you start making builds. Gun mods and runner cores can drastically change the way you play, making fights with high value gear more interesting just as it is more tense, with stakes on the line. Who knows how long until you encounter that specific gear again so you better make it count. And of course, Bungie is teasing the Cryo Chamber, the first floor of the UESC Marathon, as the endgame for Season 1. You will be going into the Marathon ship just like Classic Marathon. And if some of the promo art is of any indication, we might be facing enemies even more challenging that the UESC bots.
Facing the S’pht as part of the “raid” where you solve puzzles, fight tough enemies and also deal with oncoming enemy squads looking to third party you? That either sounds like the next coolest thing Bungie has made since they introduced raids in Destiny, or a real sweatfest only the bold dare enter. But that is the carrot on a stick, and if the current lore and storytelling we can see is any indication, that’s one tantalising carrot that’ll get you to keep doing one more run.
Closing Thoughts
I came into Marathon with little to no experience of extraction shooters, with little to no interest on competitive multiplayer games. I was hoping that the cool art (which has just as many friction as to its game design and that makes it awesome) and the cool story to hard-carry my experience on a game I probably will bounce off at the moment’s notice.
But no, I’m captivated.
This game is ruthless. It’s demanding. Failure stings, which makes the rare run where luck is on your side where it was me and my crew that is looting a whole build worth of loot feeling bad they lost it all, satisfying. Marathon isn’t for everyone, and that is its greatest strength, in that it allows its game design to feed into a different fantasy. Destiny is a power trip fantasy where you grow mightier in a relaxing way with only minor sweat moments. Marathon is a whole sweatshop, demanding you to scrape every little advantage and give no quarter. It’s quite the fluke that this desperate feel of the game somewhat echoes the current situation, as I see it, of the development team. Maybe this is art, in that it’s a mirror of the creator(s).
That said, Marathon (2026) isn’t perfect as it stands, and could serve some tweaks here and there to really shine. But we’ll reserve until the full game launches and see how Season 1 shapes up. There’s a good game somewhere in here, and if it can nurture a community like Bungie’s previous games can, it may have staying power. It’s a live service game after all where you can’t measure launch reception alone, so it’s not a sprint, but a marathon.
And despite everything that has led up to this, Marathon (2026) has the chance to run the distance.
Played on base PS5.