Bungie's Marathon reveals gameplay and a release date
Bungie hosted a live stream event this morning to showcase gameplay and a release date for their first-person shooter, Marathon.
Today, Bungie announced the release date for their first-person shooter, plenty of anxiety as well. The legendary developer behind the Halo and Destiny games has earned some trust, but PlayStation’s live service games have been hit or miss over the last few years.
Bungie’s next multiplayer shooter, Marathon, reveals a release date for later this year
The gameplay shown today revealed that Marathon is a team-based extraction shooter. Play as a runner, a cybernetically enhanced character with specialized tactics and abilities. At least for the closed alpha there will be four playable characters. Locus, a classic soldier all about pushing forward, Blackbird who specializes in reconnaissance, Glitch the disrupter, and Void, the stealth expert. As teams of players descend on the same map and objectives, there will also be security robots and aliens that need to be avoided and dispatched, adding a few PvPvE elements.
The end of the trailer revealed a release date for September 23rd, 2025, with wishlists available “on all platforms,” including Xbox and Steam, despite Bungie’s position as a PlayStation studio. The closed alpha will start on April 23rd, and players can the Marathan Discord channel to learn how to receive an invite. Notably, this Closed Alpha will be under NDA and focused on North America, so playing from elsewhere in the world on Steam may not connect as well, and PlayStation 5 codes are region locked to the Americas. We also won’t be able to learn anything more about the game from those playing it. Though, chances are some information will still leak out.
Seeing gameplay is great, but it will still be some time before the wider public is able to get a more hands-on feel for Marathon, which could be a major determining factor in the success of this game. Watching this live stream, it was hard not to think about PlayStation’s recent successes and failures when it comes to these live service, first-person shooters.
Concord is rumored to have lost Sony millions of dollars.
Research has shown that players are more and more locked into their live service ecosystems, especially on consoles. A new live service not only has some of the most intense competition in gaming, but it also demands so much consistent attention from its players to be successful. Marathon might be the kind of game that everyone tries, especially if it ends up being free-to-play, but it will need to be fun enough to hold onto those players for a long time and make them want to leave behind whichever live service game they played previously. Marathon launches in September, so we will have to keep an eye out for future playtests and ultimately see how players react.
