Marathon was originally supposed to arrive this year. Instead, Bungie’s new sci-fi extraction shooter was delayed until 2025 and still hasn’t reemerged with new gameplay since its initial PlayStation Showcase reveal. At least now, however, we do have a new development update from the project’s game director, Joe Ziegler. It details what fans can expect from the bold reboot, including “harsh” survival mechanics that might not be for everybody, but is surprisingly light on information about a game expected to arrive in just a year.
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A new YouTube video outlines the core mechanics and game loop that players will hopefully be diving into sometime in the not-too-distant future. The core gameplay revolves around customizing characters called runners that players take into matches, collecting loot and fending off rivals in order to escape alive lest they lose everything they earned during the outing. If you’ve played Escape From Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown, you probably already know the drill.
“It’s a game that’s not for everybody, but if you are interested in having sort of that tense survival experience and having a game where the stakes really matter and you’re challenged to survive in a really, really harsh and interesting world, then Marathon’s right up your alley,” Ziegler said. He added that the world of Marathon, which is based on Bungie’s classic 1990s sci-fi trilogy that recently re-released on Steam, will evolve as fans play so that there are new things for them to learn and discover.
Image: Bungie
So far, that’s all old news. What we did get from Ziegler for the first time was a glimpse of a couple of Runner archetypes codenamed “Thief” and “Stealth.” What exactly they’ll do remains a mystery, but the concept art, as with everything else in the game, looks really neat. He also gave a very light update on the state of development, including that environments are “coming together” really well while character models are not “completely there yet” and enemy models are still in an early state. “It’s a little early to show you all of it as one piece,” Ziegler said, which isn’t exactly reassuring for a game players expected to see at the recent PlayStation State of Play in September.
Marathon’s big delay came a year ago amid the first round of seismic cuts at Bungie following its acquisition by Sony. Ziegler, who previously worked on Valorant at Riot Games, was announced as the new game director earlier this year, with it only being reported later by Bloomberg that previous director and longtime Bungie veteran Chris Barrett had been fired for misconduct. Rumors of a $40 price point and new playtests have taken hold in the meantime, with questions about whether Marathon is actually really on track yet or not still up in the air.
“For the past couple of years we’ve been doing a lot of aggressive change to the game and we’ve been iterating pretty heavily,” Ziegler said today. That certainly paints a picture of a game very much still in the middle of development. Perhaps instead of a cold launch in 2025, there will be a series of closed and open betas to get player feedback and grow a fan community around the game instead. Concord’s recent failure may have put new pressure on the live-service prospects of Marathon, as well as Destiny 2’s evolving future. Ziegler signed off his video by asking players to Wishlist the game on the PlayStation store so they know how interested everyone is.
You can watch the full video below:
