With the start of “Marathon” and Bungie’s closed alpha, the game opening up helps explore how Bungie intends to help us become desensitized to death and failure with humorous tone and roguelite mechanics.
Today’s the big day: the closed alpha playtest for Bungie’s new extraction shooter “Marathon” is available to those lucky to receive a key, myself included. The beta began about 3 hours ago from when I’m writing this article, and I’ve logged 3 hours into it with a bit of that time spent in the login queue. I’ve taken a break solely to write this article, a quick respite before I hop back in during the peak hours they’ve referred to on bluesky. I want to take a short moment to share my thoughts early on before discussing what I think is the true draw and unique element of Marathon.
Primarily, the game plays exactly like a bungie shooter would. Crisp gunplay, amazing sounds, and a style of handling only even rivaled by Respawn Entertainment in my eyes. The visuals are unfinished, but the art direction and spaces are incredibly cohesive and feel mesmerizing. The UESC and AI combatants are tuned for powerful combat that can catch even experienced shooter players off guard, and combats are fast and tense with each move possibly being your last before an execution. My only personal hang-ups are around queuing for objectives or contracts making it difficult to focus on specific goals in queue with randoms as well as visual clarity of items and their use is difficult to adjust to during early play. Overall, the game holds a lot of potential to become a mainstay in my library when it releases fully.
It was some of the smaller details during my idle musing about ideas that I finally realized what was scratching at the back of my mind whenever I was wandering Tau Ceti on an aimless run. At some point when I was playing, I had some specific connections to my time spent in “Hunt: Showdown” with avoiding crow-like soundtraps and flinching whenever I broke a window to cut into a building. The tension of previous extraction shooters was still there—each silent pause acting as a heart-pounding anticipation of sudden gunfire as well as the fights a thrilling ride with my body tensing up as damage was sustained. It was the very thing that drove me away from the genre in the first place, but there was a specific lacking fear that I recognized immediately as my experience wasn’t impeded. With my generalized anxiety disorder, I usually find this pressure almost unbearable in Hunt: Showdown but in Marathon I was almost begging for more. It was that realization when I learned what Marathon did differently—Marathon was de-emphasizing death.
Death is inevitable and integral to the extraction shooter genre. The games rely on it as the risk and reward of every match—extract with the spoils and get rich or die with your gear and leave it for the scavengers. Games like “Helldivers 2” decrease the emphasis on death with multiple lives and set loadouts and gear to make missions more traditional, but the PvPvE brand of extraction shooter rides on this theory. For this reason, tension is high to keep yourself alive and make it out without pushing your luck. I had written before that Marathon was making genre defining choices by decreasing the punishments for death and prioritizing midgame and objectives, but getting my hands on the game means I can point to more interesting details about just how far Bungie goes to normalize death as a natural step. First is the tone, something that differs heavily from examples in trailers. I think a lot of us saw their Reveal Cinematic Short and considered the tone to feel somber and tense, a mistake I have now made twice considering the results of “Destiny 2: Lightfall” and the action movie tone that came from melancholic trailers. The real tone is more comical, bluntly handling the irony and behavior of their Factions to display how they clearly mistreat Runners for monetary gain or other motives. There were many times I audibly laughed out loud when Oni would equate our “invaluable” knowledge to the same as the exotic materials on Tau Ceti, or how Vulcan made sure to specify that contracted Runners were not employees and therefore not entitled to protection or representation. The game lightens itself up with this dialogue in between runs as a way of alleviating tension—the Runners are disposable and regarded as having no value, a sentiment that Marathon wishes for you to share with every run so that you’re less afraid of an inevitable death.
Additionally, there are mechanical systems in place that allow the game to improve tension without the death of a Runner feeling like the end, especially with new roguelite elements that transcend similar details of other extraction shooters. For example, the monetary value of every single item in the game is plastered all across them while looking through your vault and loadout. The constant reminder of value across every object in your inventory, from ammo to guns to upgrades to health kits, there’s a value to everything you take with a number above your character as to how much money they’re bringing in. While the tension is increased in losing the value of what you bring into the run, the focus on money and value is inherently dehumanizing in a way that I believe serves the purpose that Marathon wishes. In this way, player lives do not matter. Instead, gathering value through small objects and fighting for tiny trinkets becomes a commonplace activity in which the ebb and flow of money is more important than the ways you lose or win your runs. This combines with limited vault space, inspiring players to push forward with their loot rather than hoard the valuable weapons. With money and items as values that you can influence without extracting through contracts or quests, the death of a Runner is a dangerous blow but one that can easily be offset by having completed a lucrative business offer during the time you were alive. Tension is still high considering the monetary value in a run, but the blow of losing a Runner hurts less when you’re given money as compensation.
Finally is the aforementioned roguelite elements that have been introduced now that players have their hands on the game. Faction reputation and contracts also come with upgrade trees that players can engage with and unlock seasonal upgrades to their vault and Runners. These upgrades persist through death and act as a roguelite progression system, helping add a new objective in order to grow in power through the gathering of materials and money. As noted, these materials and money are easier to gather via extractions but a lot can still be obtained solely through contracts. This likely will perform, albeit to a lesser extent, similarly to the progression systems such as the Mirror of Night from “Hades” or Mastery in “Tiny Rogues,” applying positive buffs as a reward for playtime in order to combine with the player’s improvement in skill that will eventually result in more success as they play for longer. Even in the limited progression of the closed alpha, I can see a future of many many runs that results in me getting better and winning more, filling a vault with more cool things and learning skills that improve my gameplay. The beauty of Marathon is that even if a death sets me back a thousand credits I can get right back up and find plenty of silver linings to inspire me to queue back up. Overall, the concepts behind Marathon are phenomenal and my worries of the game having no unique draw have already been squashed. While I know there were reservations as to what the audience of Marathon would be, I think the way it strides towards a tense and thrilling experience while letting death take a backseat is an inviting step into the extraction shooter genre. The magic of Marathon is that the excitement and joy of the shooter doesn’t feel like it gets hurt by failed runs—instead, I find myself laughing over it as I quickly set myself up and hop into the queue once again. I’m beginning to fall in love with my Runner and the world, never deterred by death and exhibiting a startling lack of care for my well being as I run headlong into danger. I no longer am scared of failure—Instead, I’m willing to take as many bullets in the head as I need in order to make it out with a paycheck.
This eternal gunfight has only just begun.