Today, Bungie shared a small video developer update for their upcoming extraction shooter based on the sci-fi Marathon IP. New Game Director Joe Ziegler (who previously worked on The Saboteur at Pandemic and Valorant at Riot) talked a bit about how the game is going to work:
We give you a lot of different tools to do a lot of different things inside the game. There is a ton of loot that you can find: weapons, equipment that you can equip that changes your stats or tweaks some of the things that you can do inside the game. There are utility consumables akin to mines or grenades, and there are even consumables to heal yourself and give you utility in that way.
Beyond that, there is also another layer: Runners. They are the template by which you equip all that stuff to. Each Runner has a small subset of abilities and on top of that, you get to customize however you want, thinking about what you want to accomplish. You might equip different types of gear to your Runner and then go on those runs with that gear in mind.
There’s a lot of different ways a Marathon session can unfold with all those different pieces. There are also many objectives and things like that that exist inside the game. But of course, every single one comes with its own risk. And the risk is always present that if you don’t get out alive, you will lose the things that you have on you.
In the latter half of the video, Ziegler said that Bungie has collaborated with some players and creators to iterate on the game over the past two years. Next year, fans can expect to learn a lot more about the game toward the middle of the year, likely during the regular May PlayStation Showcase. In 2025, Marathon will also greatly expand its player testing with each new milestone.
