Bungie was featured prominently during yesterday’s PlayStation Showcase event. The developer (acquired by Sony for $3.2 billion last year) teased the next Destiny 2 expansion, Final Shape, though the most exciting part was the unveiling of Marathon, their upcoming project.
This isn’t a new IP, as old-school PC gamers will certainly remember the trilogy of first-person shooters released for MacOS by Bungie between 1994 and 1996. Rumors had also correctly predicted the return of Marathon, albeit in a very different form loosely inspired by the extraction shooter games ala Escape from Tarkov.
Of course, a developer like Bungie wouldn’t simply be content with copying what worked in another game. In a Q&A posted on the developer’s website, Game Director Christopher Barrett discussed some of the ambitious design goals of Marathon, such as allowing individual players to affect the game’s persistent zones in a global fashion.
Our design philosophy here is to have players affect the story of the world through their choices and their actions. This approach also lets us shape the overall narrative direction of the game experience while giving players a direct sense of agency and power.
Marathon is designed from the start as a PVP-focused game and won’t have a single-player campaign. Instead, with the PVP experience as our foundation, we’re creating opportunities for player-driven stories to unfold, stories that are integrated with the overarching game narrative. We’re building a world full of persistent, evolving zones, where players create their own journey with every run they take. That might mean an unforgettable firefight against another crew vying for the same loot, or a last-second extraction while beset on all sides.
Beyond just the “story of your last run” however, we want to give players the chance to affect these persistent zones and the larger world as a result. For example, imagine a crew discovering a previously undiscovered artifact that, when activated, opens a new area of the map for all players to explore. In essence, at Bungie, we’re creating a game where the actions of players can have ramifications for the world and players with each unfolding season.
It’s an interesting concept, for sure, though it’s still too early to imagine if it can work in practice. We’ve often heard game developers making similar claims, but the mechanics often couldn’t match the ideas.
Bungie said it’ll be a while before Marathon lands in the hands of gamers. However, they did outline the game’s basics. Players will take the roles of Runners, cybernetic mercenaries bound to explore a lost colony on the planet of Tau Ceti IV in search of treasures. The game is said to be PvP at its core, though the developers already said there would also be AI-controlled enemies, so a more accurate description would be PvPvE.
Confirming Sony’s promise that Bungie would remain multiplatform, Marathon will be released on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X with full cross-play.
