Remember Marathon, the new extraction shooter Bungie announced last year? The new game set in the same universe as Bungie’s shooter series from the 90’s have emerged from going dark after the big reveal and the release of the (now delisted) dev diary video detailing its gameplay systems.
And now we have a short developer update from current game director Joe Ziegler, saying that development of the extraction shooter is still going but nothing much to show as of yet.
Ziegler has addressed some of the rumours regarding Marathon’s gameplay mechanics. There were reports that Marathon will be a hero shooter of sorts, a no-no for a new game after the recent failure of a hero shooter published by Bungie’s current owner.
According to Ziegler, Marathon will allow you to acquire weapons, but also stat-changing equipment and consumables that heal and provide utility. And on top of this, there’s Runners, a “template by which you equip all that stuff to.” Runners, the characters in this Marathon game, have “a small subset of abilities” but you can customise them freely.
So Runners are less of a predefined hero and more of a class system with customisable loadouts. That said, the update revealed concept art for two different Runners, Thief and Stealth, and presentation-wise Runners might still feel like heroes.
Here are other tidbits about the new Marathon mentioned in the video:
- The “eerie” and “psychological kind of creepiness” from the original Marathon games is preserved, now layered on top of “some elements that we think really help modernise it”. Expect new stories to unfold in this new Marathon.
- Bungie has made “aggressive changes to the game” over the years. Marathon has been tested by players and content creators. “There’s so many people who’ve just contributed by telling us, ‘Hey, this thing sucks’ or ‘This thing is great.'”
- Development of environment assets have been going well, character models are still being iterated, enemy models are still early in development. As such, it’s too early to show gameplay of Marathon. But development progress is still on track.
Marathon, the extraction shooter game, has no release date yet. Though it should be available on PS5, PC and Xbox Series X|S.