Become a Runner in Bungie’s upcoming sci-fi PvP extraction shooter, Marathon. You are a cybernetic mercenary venturing into the unknown in a fight for survival and fortune where any run can lead to greatness.
Man, I hate it when they make new games that have exactly the same name as an older game by the same company. And this one's not even a remake. I have no idea if Marathon (1994) and Marathon (upcoming) even play in the same universe but they don't seem to have much in common gameplay-wise. Ugh.
Makes me wanna install M1A1 Aleph One (didn't know it does M1 directly these days) and shoot some Pfhor, though.
Right, the name Marathon should not have been put on a PvP online only game. The real Marathon game series was a major pioneer in the single player FPS genre and this new PvP shit is highly unlikely to be anything like it.
Bungie took a bad wrong turn when they went all-in on online-only games. I bought Destiny 2 before it went F2P and never finished much of it just because it was just too much bullshit to keep up with for me to enjoy the game. I don't have time to organize raid parties and shit, I just want to hop into the game and have fun.
They are in the same universe, and they are both FPS, and that seems as far as similarities go. But maybe it won't be just that, maybe they'll tie the plot of the new game to the old ones somehow, maybe the ship marathon crashed in the alien planet where the whole extraction thing happens, and maybe that's the reason? I've never played the original games, but recently watched a youtube video about them and it seems that it was really loved by bungie, and they took many of the lessons from it to make Halo. My bet is that someone at Bungie has always kept those games in a corner of their memory, thinking about how they could revive them one day. Usually, when old franchises are revived, it's because of some execs trying to make use of their popularity. But it doesn't seem to be the case here, as Marathon was quite an obscure game.
The problem isn't so much the lore connections; everything seems to more or less line up from the rough pitch they've described. It's more that no one who loved the original games for their amazing world building and storytelling is going to be super jazzed about a psuedo sequel in the form of an extraction shooter. That is the absolute antithesis of a story driven game, as far as I can see.
If this was a side project to acompany a new single player Marathon game, I wouldn't care. But announcing this as the continuation of Marathon just feels like a slap in the face.