re: Surprisingly.... Marathon is actually a good game

Well you get a ton of rewards from faction rep increase and quest completions. Useful stuff not just a bunch of bs.

Plus you have Rook available at lvl 3 that can be used whenever, no timer. Sponsored kits which can be used at anytime. There’s not much of a reason to have gear fear in this compared to other games in the genre.


Steep punishment in solos? I’ll admit the adds were tanky but that was patched recently fwiw. Outside of that it’s the usual solo extraction stuff imo. You die, you lose your stuff. The more you play the more trivial the AI becomes. Decent chance of a rat near the extract.

Marathon + Destiny raid mechanics

I don't think I'll get to cryo archive, but Bungie went for it with the latest map.

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My wonder is if that niche is enough, considering what was spent on this game.

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Not enough to keep it from going free to play. I’d imagine it goes that route in 2 years or less. Then who knows how long it last after that point.

The game has hit its cap. They won’t really gain anymore and can’t afford to lose many.

Hard to disagree.

The only saving grace I think would be a complete HUD overhaul.

Simplify it. I spent more time in the menus asking myself wtf than I did in the actual game.

And when I did get it a game it wasn’t a solo. It was with randoms. I still don’t know if solos even exist or how to even get there.

My time is limited and I do not want to take the time to figure it all out. So I’m not going to spend the $40 unless something changes. I’m open to it.

I’ll just stick with arc raiders for the itch. It’s like the CoD of extraction shooters. Quick to get in a game. Simple.

Weird that it has had way more success than tarkov and marathon and any other extraction…think there is something to that Bungie?

Marathon is what you release to the world after Arc Raiders? Maybe in a different reality it’s successful. Not so much in this one. Timing didn’t help them that’s for sure but the slop they put on my screen absolutely did not.

IMO their only shot at saving it is going all hands on deck for the next 3-4 months designing content for the broadest audience imaginable. Pull every lever they possibly can to get people to take the plunge. Gentler onboarding, more PvE emphasis or incentive, make it easier to solo/duo, make death less punishing and rewards less a trod, etc. Can such an experience have allure to enough new players, but without diluting the experience of their existing base? Debatable since they're core characteristics of the genre, but they have to pull every lever. Also fix the UI and make the game at least somewhat marketable. Come up with a character or two people are interested in instead of the soulless neon retro-futuristic garbage

Then roll out everything and make it F2P for Season 3 (August). That's realistically their last best stand to get anything significant out of this game before it fades into complete irrelevance. Which being real it's already 90% there. The fact that this thread is only on page 2 says everything

Whether or not the servers shut down in short order is of course a different question. If on an ongoing basis money coming in > money going out, they have incentive to keep it going (the $250m investment is sunk cost at this point). It just doesn't look good. It was already a weak launch and a month later basically no one is buying it anymore. On the expense side it's live service, after the game is launched it's not a skeleton crew staffing model. They're in trouble on both sides of the ledger