If escape from Tarkov is the PUBG of the extraction shooter and boldly flips into a new genre despite its humble origins, Bungee’s upcoming shooter, Marathon, is a big budget refinement that could become the Fortnite of the emerging category. Coming from a studio with a pedigree for virtually unparalleled first-person shooters, we exercise resources to take good ideas and rethink it in a beautiful, detailed sci-fi universe in the way. But with a concept that is essentially directed towards a hardcore PVP crowd and such a clear departure from what they’ve done in the past, it certainly isn’t without risk, even if they were able to capture the usual FPS magic known to them. Still, I spent most of the two days shooting my way through the relentless ruins of Tau Seti. I was hooked.
The marathon will cause you and two friends to be dropped into a very ruthless wasteland and everything falls in the name of booty and glory, as you and your friends fight deadly enemies, including rivals. If you played Escape from Tarkov, you may be familiar with this pvpve framing. This makes me familiar with this pvpve framing as if exftrate fails before time runs out, it will be lost forever if the team is killed. These miserably high stakes quickly pumped my blood, making each match feel like the most important thing ever. After fighting with amazingly challenging AI enemies and ruthless fellow runners to get a high-level rifle that can defeat most enemies with two hits, I dropped my guard for a while and didn’t risk losing everything to a worthless enemy.
If, like me, you lament the quiet and silent death of PVP’s associations in Destiny 2, you may share my enthusiasm to see Bungee focusing straight on a competitive experience here. Weapons and movements are crisp, fluid, and incredibly satisfying in the rare ways most studios can achieve, and the added elements of hero shooter-like abilities should feel like supernaturally powered malicious, as if blowing away and flying away with kinetic energy. The marathon felt great to play right away, and as soon as I took a pot shot at me from the window of a nearby building and took out a robot that had tried out his weapon with a nearby enemy, it was love in the first snipe.
This gets even better once you start to get used to the class-based runners available (four of which were widely available out of the six available at launch). Glitch is about mobility and positioning control, with the ability to help her move quickly and jump into areas that are unable to reach other regions, pushing her enemies away with an explosion of kinetic energy. Locus is a Tanky soldier who can cut off incoming fires and lift a shield that fires gusts of homing missiles at enemies. Meanwhile, Blackbird is all about Intel, sending small robotic drones to ping enemies within the entire team’s area and destroy them in search of nearby enemies. My personal favorite was invalid: a clever ninja who can no longer see for a while, unfolding clouds of smoke to lose enemies and confuse them. Each of these characters offered a completely different way to play the marathon, and by coordinating with teammates, they were able to bring together a well-balanced team of runners who helped complement each other’s strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.
It was helpful as we explored dark and forgotten places throughout the marathon map. The marathon map is far better than most of the AI enemies found in other games, like the giant tick species that ran through me desperately, and the incredibly accurate robots. Although fighting against these enemies was no joke, the loot was worth it, whether they found a backpack that allowed more storage space, a weapon that gave better odds to rival crews, or a healing item of consumables that they could rely on in a pinch. What my team found only a handful during games, some of the extremely rare and powerful items have changed so dramatically, like backpacks, invisible whenever users interact with containers while wearing them.
However, the most tense moments of the marathon occur when they encounter enemy crews and inevitably collide to assert each other’s booty. Maybe we find the crew in the distance and chase them secretly – waiting for the right moment to ambush – or we hear other players far away fighting the security forces, decide to catch them when their guards go down, scooping up what they are trying to insist on. And of course we had to find ourselves on the receiver of that ruthless equation and scramble as one of us fell down by a sudden shooting from a rival team. These moments were when the PVP magic really shined, and my group came out unharmed thanks to the free of nine players and some timing smoked hand rena bullets, or another time when both of my teammates were killed, but we came back to win because Clutch didn’t revive. Just like the most epic and heart-wrenching moments of Battle Royale matches, the marathon gave us plenty of memorable moments after narrow victory and occasional sourness of defeat.
Once you’ve got loot or completed a goal or two, it’s time to carry your butt into the hair removal beacon and stand long enough to pull out of the firefight and safely return to your space base with bloody bounty. But by illuminating that beacon, everyone else on the map can know that you want to create your product via the huge blue light that uses your product and shoots into the sky for a long time. This makes the final moments in the area quite intense. Or, if you’re like me, it offers an exciting opportunity to kill the group as they are ready to leave all of their efforts and earn profits.
The downside of the marathon’s “To to the Victors Go the Sails” reward system is that in a rather short time, skilled people are even less likely to enter gear and fresh matches that easily outperform less skilled players, resulting in even less chances of bringing out victory. Bungie didn’t get in the way trying to try it.
I was lucky enough to win most of the match. And after the first hump of stockpiling some basic equipment in my safe and unleashing some permanent upgrades to unlock some permanent upgrades, I had at least the right backup gear to recover, even if I fell into the fight and lost the best. But that’s not for everyone. And I wonder how big a mass of players who hit a brick wall in the first few hours, log off and never return. At least in the escape from Tarkov, there is a kappa case that holds the most valuable items and protects them from being lost on the battlefield. There are no safety measures for marathons. Instead, you choose a system that is given a kind of pathetic loadout called a sponsor package. This definitely helps to ice a series of bad luck wounds, but it may not be the most comforting comfort prize.
To be clear, it may be good that the marathon seems to refuse to compromise on its commitment to ensuring that each match is keen and feel keen even if people have caused some people from it. But they certainly put a risk in situations where the rich become rich and the poor feel at a disadvantage to those on the unfortunate side of that brutal equation. I know time before I know how it shakes, but even in a short time with it, I was already feeling a bit of friction from people on the server who felt like they were covered in people who kept dying repeatedly and had quality loadouts.
One of the things that could be key to preventing people from dropping out is the ongoing meta-progression system of marathons. Your booty is probably destined to be stripped of your stationary corpse and stuffed into your rude opponent’s backpack, but you can at least comfort yourself with the trees of various perks and the ongoing quests you’ll find on the menu during rounds of play. You may not have brought it back to life from your latest escape, but you may have been able to loot some breasts from certain parts of the map or complete other purposes in your quest log before you get cold. In that case, you can unlock new stories, at least through the Faction Action Questline and upgrade system, and improve your reputation with each of the three groups that have a significant interest in progress. Doing so can make it a little easier so you can buy slightly better gear from the vendor in case they’re confiscated by the enemy.
Elsewhere, despite the obvious focus of multiplayer Mayhem, despite the clear indication that some kind of plot will be included in the marathon, it is still unknown how important that story is, or would like to advance, as well as find a better weapon. As a mercenary called a runner, your consciousness is repeatedly uploaded to composites and sent to dangerous territory in search of wealth. There wasn’t much beyond this basic premise and some really cool details like how your artificial body is sewn from synthesis silk by a robotic caterpillar. That said, the world Bungee has built is as beautiful as creepy and dystopian, with moments satisfying the events of the 90s marathon trilogy. However, Bungee also said they were not completely following the events of the original game, and that little I have seen was a little more than paying lip service to the world.
Another question is how much support and longevity can you expect from a marathon? Bungie has gained a reputation for mastering live service models over the past decade and has said that he already has plans to support the marathon with new maps, weapons, characters and more, so he has no indication to put players here. And importantly, Marathon also plans to use seasonal reset models like the Diablo 4. There, they plan to do it again at the end of each season, stripped of looting and progress, mixing new content with new meta. I have definitely seen this work in a marathon, but there is always the question of how to encourage that difficult climb from scratch every season.
After playing enough marathons to get a pretty good feel in Alpha condition, I’m sure it hurts the itching of the uncensored bungee PVP for years already. As for the PC and console in September, I hope they will knock it out of the park.
