Bungie's Marathon extraction shooter reboot - PC/PS5/Xbox

[ind33d]

Of all the things I didn't expect in 2023, a Marathon reboot/remake/sequel wasn't one of them.

I'm not entirely sure it's going to work. Marathon is a weird beast, you play it more for the.... ambience, the banter and some weapons. Some of its design choices are good, but the basic maps are often obtuse and boring.

Also, who the fuck is left of the original talent at Bungie? Aren't they going from failure to failure? Who knows. Marathon's fanbase is obsessive, even if small. I'm curious about the reactions.

EDIT: Oh god it's a PvP battle royale

Dead in three weeks

What the FUCK they are thinking

It's actually sick, but the trailer doesn't do it justice. They said it's like running a Destiny raid but you can get invaded by enemy teams

 

[ADL]

Thanks for the thread merge. My OP was better and would've actually been maintained.

 

[Dayyālu]

as a game it's not that interesting and there's a reason why it's never part of the vernacular when discussing 90s shooters.

It has some neat ideas for a 90ies shooter, but it's more often than not a chore to play. I still remember frustration in Marathon II in running circles trying to get what the fuck was I supposed to do.
As usual for such "cult" titles, the discussions are more interesting than the game itself. I'd say tho that Marathon did lay a lot of the groundwork for the Halo gunplay, and I find the Halo tactical fight design good.

It's actually sick, but the trailer doesn't do it justice. They said it's like running a Destiny raid but you can get invaded by enemy teams

I'll reveal myself as a ignorant fool, but I have no idea how Destiny plays. Don't have much time nowadays to check MP shooters, and the only stuff I weakly hear is that Bungie didn't stick the landing after Microsoft. But I don't know.

 

[Alienman]

Think if PUBG got knocked up by Arma and both drank heavily during the pregnancy.

I think the latest Arma game is a bit like that. Bohemia was certainly drunk when they released it at least.

 

[Zariusz]

Its an extraction shoo... But fucking why? Did the last decade of working on Destiny made their brains unable to conceive non multiplayer focused game? Marathon is literally the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about extraction shooters.

 

[Morenatsu.]

marathon is that uhhhh like some game about running or something

uuhhhhhhhhhhh its a shooter? is that uhhhhhhhhh like uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh one of those uhh fortnight things or somethin

 

[Baron Dupek]

 

[ind33d]

This will be the most successful game of all time

 

[blessed king of longing]

Hold up. Marathon as an extraction shooter? Is Bungie serious?

technically marathon was always an extraction shooter. you get beamed in, do shit, get beamed out, if you survive. the bad news so far is the art direction looks like complete ass, and android bodies are a shitty idea lore wise

 

[Morenatsu.]

only way this will be good is if you have a random chance to be abducted by AI irl whenever you win

 

[ind33d]

Hold up. Marathon as an extraction shooter? Is Bungie serious?

technically marathon was always an extraction shooter. you get beamed in, do shit, get beamed out, if you survive. the bad news so far is the art direction looks like complete ass, and android bodies are a shitty idea lore wise

Bungie always has a lore reason for respawning like Destiny ghosts

 

[blessed king of longing]

Hold up. Marathon as an extraction shooter? Is Bungie serious?

technically marathon was always an extraction shooter. you get beamed in, do shit, get beamed out, if you survive. the bad news so far is the art direction looks like complete ass, and android bodies are a shitty idea lore wise

Bungie always has a lore reason for respawning like Destiny ghosts

well destiny fucking sucks. in marathon they knew it was gay and just handwaved it as "reincarnation" for pvp

 

[Zombra]

Wow, I'm fucking pissed off that they would flip and burn a beloved IP like this. Why not just make it a Destiny spinoff? To wake up old folks like me and get a bunch of angry letters?

 

[v1c70r14]

What's the best way to play Marathon (aka Pathways Into Uranus) on PC these days?

Its an extraction shoo... But fucking why? Did the last decade of working on Destiny made their brains unable to conceive non multiplayer focused game? Marathon is literally the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about extraction shooters.

SP focused games aren't financially viable, especially not shooters. When was the last time any company released an AAA shooter focused on the SP? They were on the decline even in the late 00's. Multiplayer was already the way to play once people had decent internet connections all over the globe and discovered games were more fun to play with friends and games were going fully multiplayer. Where there was previously a demand for at least a decent chunk of SP content companies started going fully multiplayer with the arrival of the new millennium, Quake 3, UT99, and games like that. Bungie slowly moved their focus too, from the cinematic blockbuster that was the first Halo to being more and more multiplayer focused, with the campaigns being seen as filler content or extended tutorials at that point.

That's just a small part of the story though, the number one reason why everything has to be Fortnite these days is because of this now dead jewish guy named Robert A. Altman, who got Bethesda to pioneer selling digital game items for real money. In an open world SP game like Oblivion there was little incentive to get horse armor or a new house, with the robust modding tools that's the sort of mod that are the easiest ones to make, but once this concept was introduced to multiplayer games it was a money printing formula. Social posturing by in-game purchases appeals to kids and Arab oil princes alike.

To stay competitive developers also need to think of video games as a service, since the easiest method to fleece customers is to get them into an online Skinner box where FOMO and sunk cost fallacies bring in massive amounts of cash along with the above mentioned cosmetics and all that junk. You need to keep players in the game, thinking about the game and talking about the game constantly. You don't get that with SP games, which they will play a couple of times and then move on to the next thing. If they want to partake in the next event that costs extra, if they want ricer equipment, that's extra too, and the game balance might change next week, so they need to keep up with the meta and invest more time and money. AAA video games must be a second job to customers, that they pay for the privilege to do.

There is no place for games like the original Marathon in that sort of market. This thread is also proof that using old IPs and titles work great as far as attention and marketing is concerned. If they would have called it Escape From Uranus they wouldn't get this kind of buzz.

 

[Zariusz]

What's the best way to play Marathon (aka Pathways Into Uranus) on PC these days?

Whole trilogy can be played using free open source version called Aleph One, i think it also supports custom scenarios though i never played any. There is also finished fan remake of original Marathon in the form of UT mod called Marathon: Resurrection.

 

[blessed king of longing]

What's the best way to play Marathon (aka Pathways Into Uranus) on PC these days?

Aleph One emulation
https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/releases/tag/release-20230529 emulator, one of the main features i like is 60+fps and better mouse input than the original game
https://alephone.lhowon.org/?title=Get_Marathon game files, but i don't recommend playing with the shitty XBLA graphics, you can get AI upscaled original graphics on the community addon website

 

[ADL]

Why was this moved to general? Tarkov and Dark and Darker are still in MMORPG.

 

[v1c70r14]

Thanks for the heads up on Aleph One, it's been ages since I got to play the game on a Mac and there's some nostalgia in it for me.

At least the name kinda fits the game genre/type/whatever, but otherwise I'm confused by the idea of them digging up the Marathon IP of all things. Not that there was much of of a legacy to be trampled anyway. Marathon was never that great of a series to begin with. I agree with Dayyālu that Marathon has some neat ambience but as a game it's not that interesting and there's a reason why it's never part of the vernacular when discussing 90s shooters.

It was more due to being tied to the Apple ecosystem. The game is also less of a pure shooter places more emphasis on storyfaggotry, puzzles and mood, simpler than System Shock but with more going on than in Doom. It was the game that made Bungie, when they made Halo and got bought by Microsoft it was more or less just a more casual repeat for console gamers.

Looking up what the devs have been up to and if anyone is working on the live-service game with the same name as Marathon but that doesn't have anything to do with it seems it was all downhill from there.

Alexander Seropian who was the founder of Bungie and wrote the music for the first game and was heavily involved in the series overall oversaw Microsoft's acquisition of the company and then tried to start another company. That new company was Wideload Games and they made Stubbs the Zombie, which crashed and burned, before turning to developing shovelware.

Greg Kirkpatrick who wrote the story of the trilogy self-ejected from the industry after Infinity.

J. Reginald Dujour who made all the textures and sprites for the first game and to a large extent the sequels and gave the games so much of their character made additional art for Halo before disappearing from the industry. He also worked on the obscure title Dark Vengeance in the interim, which Steve Jobs used to demo the graphic capabilities of Macs with. Game had a great soundtrack by Alexander Brandon of Deus Ex and Unreal fame.



Craig Mullins, the guy who drew the slick chapter screens and additional art, had a great career, working on Halo, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Age of Empires, among other things and recently did the art for Crusader Kings 3 static screens. He got his start in the industry with Marathon 2 stayed in demand.

Spoiler

The only guy lame enough to stick around to run the formula into the ground with first endless sequels to Halo and then the live service series Destiny was Jason Jones, no idea what he is up to these days.

The game director on the new game has been at the company since the Myth days, but he has painted nails and dyed hair. The creative director joined Bungie by Halo 2, looks like a normal dude. The senior producer is a troon. The executive producer was responsible for Dungeon Keeper on mobile. In the promo they released everyone have their pronouns listed. Reading the first page of this thread it's amusing that people seem to think the genre they are going for is the problem, when even if they were to make a quaint singleplayer focused cinematic blockbuster game it would still be something else wearing the brand as a skinsuit.

 

[v1c70r14]

marathon is that uhhhh like some game about running or something

uuhhhhhhhhhhh its a shooter? is that uhhhhhhhhh like uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh one of those uhh fortnight things or somethin

The new game's art direction is literally inspired by runners.

Not a single thing about this game's trailer speaks "Marathon" to me, it looks like a more fluorescent NeoTokyo more than anything.

I only vaguely recalled what NeoTokyo looked like, so I searched for gameplay on youtube and found Morenatsu.'s channel.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Thanks for the heads up on Aleph One, it's been ages since I got to play the game on a Mac and there's some nostalgia in it for me.

At least the name kinda fits the game genre/type/whatever, but otherwise I'm confused by the idea of them digging up the Marathon IP of all things. Not that there was much of of a legacy to be trampled anyway. Marathon was never that great of a series to begin with. I agree with Dayyālu that Marathon has some neat ambience but as a game it's not that interesting and there's a reason why it's never part of the vernacular when discussing 90s shooters.

It was more due to being tied to the Apple ecosystem. The game is also less of a pure shooter places more emphasis on storyfaggotry, puzzles and mood, simpler than System Shock but with more going on than in Doom. It was the game that made Bungie, when they made Halo and got bought by Microsoft it was more or less just a more casual repeat for console gamers.

Kinda, although I owned a boxed copy of Marathon 2 which was released on Windows in.. 96? So it's not only platform availability that is the issue. The game is well and truly mediocre if not kind of bad and it just couldn't stand up to the competition that was available on Windows. It toyed with some big ideas but I don't think they materialized in a meaningful way that made it a fun game to play.

 

[Morenatsu.]

J. Reginald Dujour who made all the textures and sprites for the first game and to a large extent the sequels and gave the games so much of their character made additional art for Halo before disappearing from the industry. He also worked on the obscure title Dark Vengeance in the interim, which Steve Jobs used to demo the graphic capabilities of Macs with. Game had a great soundtrack by Alexander Brandon of Deus Ex and Unreal fame.

whoa someone other than me acknowledge the existence of this game? based beyond base

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

The game is well and truly mediocre if not kind of bad and it just couldn't stand up to the competition that was available on Windows.

Marathon was huge, it innovated in many ways with the dual wielding, the Half-Life life stations, Marathon 2 had water you could swim in long before DN3D came out, and even if it hadn't been mostly a Mac exclusive series it would have stood up among the best shooters on PC. In 1994 when the first Marathon came out what competition was there? Doom, sure, but I'd put Marathon above Doom 2. CyClones? It was a clunker. Blake Stone: Planet Strike!? Get real, it was aping Wolfenstein in the Doom era. Heretic was alright but the series didn't come into its own until Hexen. Rise of the Triad was always bottom of the barrel and Marathon was much better than that. Bethesda's The Terminator: Rampage was Elder Scrolls: Arena with guns, a very blocky shooter that was also trying to be Wolfenstein while id Software was doing a genre domination victory lap with Doom 2.

Out of the competition of the time I'd put Marathon in the top 3 of that year.

 

[Morenatsu.]

The game is well and truly mediocre if not kind of bad and it just couldn't stand up to the competition that was available on Windows.

Marathon was huge, it innovated in many ways with the dual wielding, the Half-Life life stations, Marathon 2 had water you could swim in long before DN3D came out, and even if it hadn't been mostly a Mac exclusive series it would have stood up among the best shooters on PC. In 1994 when the first Marathon came out what competition was there? Doom, sure, but I'd put Marathon above Doom 2. CyClones? It was a clunker. Blake Stone: Planet Strike!? Get real, it was aping Wolfenstein in the Doom era. Heretic was alright but the series didn't come into its own until Hexen. Rise of the Triad was always bottom of the barrel and Marathon was much better than that. Bethesda's The Terminator: Rampage was Elder Scrolls: Arena with guns, a very blocky shooter that was also trying to be Wolfenstein while id Software was doing a genre domination victory lap with Doom 2.

Out of the competition of the time I'd put Marathon in the top 3 of that year.

Lmao marathon is a cool atmosfag reading simulator but the game completely and utterly fails to match Doom in any way that's actually relevant

 

[Eisen]

Meh, i prefer Marathon

 

[Morenatsu.]

You misspelt Half-Life