Bungie’s new extraction shooter and new Marathon game, Marathon, now has a release date.
Alongside the first reveal of gameplay was a lock on a release date. It’s coming this September.
New Marathon is a “reimagining” of the world and lore of Bungie’s first-ever FPS series, Marathon. Players can squad up as a team of 3 players (or go solo), pick from a selection of Runners, drop into a map somewhere in the planet of Tau Ceti IV, grab loot and hopefully, get out and extract with all the loot. However, multiple other squads of players are doing the same and will kill you if they have to. It’s a PVPVE extraction shooter.
Marathon, unlike Destiny but like many other multiplayer games published under their current owners PlayStation, is a paid title. It’s not free-to-play. But also not a full-priced title (i.e. not at $70USD/RM299).
The reveal shows a lot of what to expect from the minute-to-minute gunplay. Marathon carries over Bungies’ prowess in making an FPS that feels good. So expect that specific field-of-view and camera where you still see a good chunk of your weapon at hand but still have enough vision of the world like Destiny did. Some runners have abilities that go into third-person. And every time you are killed, you just drop into a down-but-not-out state where teammates can revive, but instead of being a glowing immovable orb in Destiny, standard shooter rules apply in Marathon as DBNO players can wiggle and crawl in hopes of helping getting revived quicker. Until other players take them down permanently, that is.
For the most part, Marathon looks like another one of those extraction shooters. Its big hooks are the ever-changing public events and world state (which some games are doing already), the buildcrafting available on Runners (they are less a hero and more of a customisable class, and you can have a team playing all the same Runner) and its “Graphic Realism” artstyle.
You can argue Bungie reimagining the original Marathon lore into the context of an extraction shooter might be another selling point, though the fans of the original trilogy of Marathon games where it was a single-player FPS series, would say otherwise.
In the showcase livestream, Bungie mentioned they have been working with the Aleph One team, the current custodians that is keeping the now-dubbed Marathon Classic games alive. All three games are now open sourced and available on freeware, playable on modern PC, Mac and Linux systems. And players of new Marathon can expect a similar level of storytelling and lore , which should be just like how Destiny did.
Though it is pretty cool to see one of the most hardest (and blasphemous) lines to be uttered by an AI has been recontextualised as a powerful tagline.
Why Marathon is an extraction shooter now? Because, to quote Durandal, “Escape will make me god”.
Closed Alpha playtest for Marathon is happening this month, but limited to North American servers.
Marathon (the game, not the sport) is ready for extraction on September 23 for the PS5, PC (Steam) and Xbox Series X|S. In Southeast Asia, that would be one day later on September 24.