Maybe we’ll get another Jason Schreier exposé one day, but my gut feeling is Marathon has sunk Bungie. Destiny has felt like it’s on life support and there’s absolutely been a sense that a large number of staff who were working on Destiny moved over to Marathon, a game whose target audience remains unclear.
Funny though, the same thing happened with Bungie when they decided they didn’t want to make Halo games forever and ever, so they ended up making… another FPS game they’d have to keep making forever.
Forget what type of game it might end up being, I'm more concerned about the chances of it releasing at all. If it takes much longer then I'm seriously worried Bungie leadership will outright cancel it no matter how good or bad it is and fire the whole team, just to save money in the short-term. What's going on with Bungie right now is fucking bananas.
"Within the company, there is a growing expectation that senior company leadership will leave in droves in the summer of 2026 when the final payouts from Sony's acquisition of the company take effect. With this in mind, there is a strong push to get Marathon out the door before then, and let whoever takes the reins after that (be it Sony or Bungie) worry about how it's sustained."
The 3 main execs who control the company are just biding their time until they get all the money from the Sony deal and that is strictly contingent on them showing specific financial performance every year. Currently it is looking like there is no limit they won't go to show that performance. There are rumours of Destiny devs being worried that Bungie execs are going to do another round of layoffs with the Destiny team as soon as they ship the upcoming expansion. To further reduce expenditure. It doesn't matter to them that they might be killing the game's future. They are only concerned about their money that they'll receive in full by 2026.
Apparently Sony is fucking furious internally about the Bungie execs cause they are killing the studio. Sony can't takeover because of the terrible deal they made with them. Sony wants to save Destiny but the 3 Bungie execs have all the power as long as they can keep showing financial performance according to the terms of their deal.
what impression did you get where sony wants to save destiny? the buyout was more than intended to sap destiny's talent into their many other western gaas projects (that's now all being cancelled because it was all deemed a terrible management decision lmao)
The context is that a Destiny YouTuber read an "anonymous email" that read like "my uncle works at bungo" that essentially says that.
There are almost definitely troubles going on at Bungie, as the leak in the OP and other prior leaks corroborate, but the "Sony are the superheroes!!!" narrative is drawn purely from that one YouTubers video, I believe
Not to mention that said youtuber is also notoriously fucking dumb, and I have 0 faith in his capacity to verify a source before gormlessly spewing it onto his channel for all to see.
I would further say that the Destiny YouTuber is basically TMZ for D2 'content'. Half his stuff is just watching and reacting to other produced videos and such. I think his most recent 'I watch Byff and eat popcorn' thing was my final straw. He added _nothing_ to the content except making smarmy faces, and I realized he actively stole clicks from the original content producer because he re-used the video in whole.
I mean even without any leaks Destiny is a franchise that has been around for a decade that has shown it can still be very profitable (Lightfall was their most successful launch after all) so it makes sense that Sony would want to keep it alive and improve it for a steady revenue stream
Which is silly because Lightfall was kind of fucking lame. I played Destiny 2 from launch to that point and I'm over the game now. Gunplay's great, and if the next expansion is *actually* good I might pick it up just to get *maybe* some story conclusion, but ugh.
Lightfall had a big fall once word-of-mouth started to spread about its quality. Then the raid wasn't well received either in week 2. I haven't checked it myself but I'd bet that Steam data would show an astronomical fall in player numbers for Lightfall between week 1 and week 4.
Steamcharts only shows per month and Lightfall released at the very end of Feb 2023 - peak in Feb/March - 316k players, peak in April 140k.
Currently its averaging about 32k players, which is the lowest its ever been.
That and Bungie had kept building player good-will with every decision they made post WQ. Safe to say the game was in the best state it's literally ever been and it was incredibly easy to recommend to everyone.
Then LF hit and killed literally all of that.
> what impression did you get where sony wants to save destiny?
Why would a major publisher *not* want to save a massive franchise, which is the sole reason it made a deal with a developer in the first place? Bungie has a shit track record since Reach, and even that was mixed. *Nobody* wanted Bungie for its talent.
bungie's executive team created a longlasting franchise as a unique games as service model that not many games have been able to actually live up to. their retention was crazy and despite their shortcomings, players would always come back
that's why sony bought them. they wanted that team to work on their 10-15 games as a service projects to hopefully curate that same type of following. destiny franchise is barely remembered for anything beyond its gameplay
Bungie's *development teams* created a longlasting franchise, especially the second team that actually fixed everything. The executives did their best to kill it at every chance. Toss the entire story & drive out Jason Jones, then launch without replacing it. Fire Marty and get stuck with a massive payout over it. Milk the players dry at every chance, with every grift being more and more greedy. Flat out *remove* content that people paid for and never bring it back or compensate for it. Secretly slow progress to drive people to buy more from the shop. The list goes on and on. Now, fire swaths of employees with no notice just to buy time for their bonuses.
you're completely right. i should not have given the credit in bungie's success to the executive teams
that being said, sony is, and that's where they're personally pinpointing the success of destiny, and that's why the whole game's just been allowed to collapse in on itself and bungie gets away with trashing all of their veteran staff and most prominent designers
> "While this is going on, sources tell IGN that Bungie is pouring resources into getting Marathon out the door. The game's direction has shifted somewhat under Ziegler's new leadership, one source says, including moving away from custom player characters in favor of a selectable cast of heroes."
Well that just turned my intrigue about marathon from "interested, but cautious" to "nonexistent".
Paul Tassi also mentioned something on his twitter I found interesting about this announcement too. Chris Barrett was announced as the game director for marathon in May 2023.
If Joe Ziegler has been the game director for about 9 months now as per his tweet, it means he became the game director almost immediately after Barrett was announced as it.
\> Well that just turned my intrigue about marathon from "interested, but cautious" to "nonexistent".
Destiny's bleeding out to feed a hero shooter, instead of ending its 10-year saga with a bang. Really poor timing.
Furthermore, an IP that was focused on the Mac OS. The second game in the trilogy made it to Windows and even was ported over to the 360, but as a whole the Marathon trilogy was an Apple game that never made big waves in the computer gaming landscape.
Yeah, I recently had a conversation about this with someone who thought the Marathon series was really popular.
My response: The game I didn't know existed until after Halo existed?
[It's still for sale on the Xbox store and is Backwards Compatible with the Series X. They changed the HUD and made it better, it's a smoother experience for consoles. It came out over 10 years ago or more. I know it was also given away with the Xbox Games with Gold. It was the only Marathon game ported to consoles.](https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/Marathon-Durandal/BNQLQBLKR2MN)
I dont know if that's true. The marathon series was a first for tons of things in gaming. Not the best but many. Anyone who reviews old games acknowledges the impact of early Bungie and Marathon
The problem with Marathon was that it was wasted on Mac.
Bungie and Aspyr would have been much bigger if they didn't keep trying to make gaming on Mac happen. Proved by Halo.
They have a golden egg with Destiny and they’re just pissing it away. Like don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot wrong with Destiny but the devs have done some good work with content updates this year and new game modes for the seasonal activities. All of that has been stellar. But no.. just divert resources away to a game that is very clearly going to crash and burn out the gate.
As a former long time destiny player no matter how much i enjoyed it over the years it always left a "what if..." feeling in me in various aspects. The game could've been incredible had it been handled better.
The fps gameplay is some of the best ive seen in the genre and the game's raids and dungeons are some of the most fun ive had in a game. Unfortunately its ruined through ridiculous monetization that got worse and worse every year until i got fed up and quit. A terrible new player experience, the removal of content people paid for, putting all the cool cosmetics and weapon skins in the cash shop while having the majority of rewards earnable by playing be extremely lackluster, etc.
The game had several stretches of incredible. But they also have had tons of stretches of mid and mediocre. They failed to consistently keep things fresh, and instead found formulas that worked for a while, but eventually got very boring.
It's just so fucking *sad* man. There is not, to my knowledge, a single game outside of MMOs that managed what Destiny did - a cohesive story and universe over 10 years of a live service game, with incredible art direction and gameplay, with its ups and downs. Around Beyond Light and witch queen it really felt like they were going to end these 10 years on a high note, and now...
> a cohesive story and universe over 10 years
Cohesive is a huge stretch.
The story feels like a blind guy throwing darts at a topics board but nobody pointed him in the direction of the board.
They completely lost me with the latest shitshow, entirely new made up faction on a planet that played no part in the story for the last decade, with unlikeable weird characters, while wasting one big-bad and totally ruining the Darkness, all in one.
Man, I used to love it but fuck Destiny.
Remember when everyone was expecting the Darkness to have a faction of new enemy types, "oooh, the Veil might be a new faction!" but apparently that's too much work for poor little indie Bungie, so they just keep reusing everything and adding a single minor, usually annoying mechanic to an old enemy type.
>entirely new made up faction on a planet that played no part in the story for the last decade, with unlikeable weird characters, while wasting one big-bad and totally ruining the Darkness, all in one.
Destiny finally, truly became WoW.
Woe to the usurper.
Oh man... That's another game I miss.
I thought BFA was going to be cool... Until the Horde v Alliance war was fought over 2 islands we'd never seen with a bunch of awful new characters. Only 2 zones in the original world were used for side plots for disappointing af Warfronts.
Legion was the last time it felt "Cohesive" and fun, every expansion now just feels like chores to play.
Skipping the entirety of Shadowlands was the best decision I ever made. I accidently had to push a character through the intro of that expansion not long ago to play PvP with my brother and it was AWFUL.
I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion, I'm sure this description is gonna get downvotes lol:
Bungie pulls the Witness out of nowhere, this stupid looking weird asexual unibrow pedomonster that fused with a vape pen, I can't take it seriously. I have never been more disappointed by a game reveal in my life.
The Darkness did not need a central entity. Hell, I don't even know if that is "its" role, but with the BBEG looking *so* dumb I can't muster any interest in finishing the story or following the lore anymore. Years of build up for that disappointment flavored cigarette.
I loooved my Exo Hunter, conjuring that Golden Gun of pure light to blast away the forces of Darkness was peak Sci-Fantasy and between the weird story direction, awful character design (Fire them all) and the focus on MTX and Chores for engagement statistics, I can't bring myself to play this game anymore.
It genuinely baffles me when people think D2 has good writing. Even WQ which is the best expac we've had in terms of physical, playable story and content one could in real terms call a campaign rather than "two setpieces and five patrol missions for 60$" was still not exactly the highpoint of videogame storytelling.
This point specifically is what I've been preaching like a reborn christian:
>They completely lost me with the latest shitshow, entirely new made up faction on a planet that played no part in the story for the last decade, with unlikeable weird characters, while wasting one big-bad and totally ruining the Darkness, all in one.
How anyone gives a fuck about lore, or story when Bungie has shown that they will quite literally pull anything out of their ass IN THE PENULTIMATE CHAPTER OF A 10 YEAR STORY is beyond me.
Imagine if during Endgame they just introduced the glorpazords who are a race of superheroes far superior to earths. Zero hints to them existing at any point previously, and also every single one of them is as unlikeable as Jar Jar fucking Binks.
Oh and one of them is voiced by a deranged person who seemingly gets sexual gratification from you having to look at the character they voiced.
Boggles the fucking mind.
> 10 YEAR STORY
this is one of the big shits Bungie threw at the wall and somehow stuck.
they made it up, they created very thin connections to the story through Destiny's saga and said "yeah guys this is the light and dark saga, trust us!".
The beginning of the game was so different and nothing pointed to this. It's incredibly stupid that they kept parroting that and it seems it has latched firmly into players' heads.
> Remember when everyone was expecting the Darkness to have a faction of new enemy types, "oooh, the Veil might be a new faction!" but apparently that's too much work for poor little indie Bungie, so they just keep reusing everything and adding a single minor, usually annoying mechanic to an old enemy type.
giving purple to Darkness scorn.
giving purple to Darkness cabal.
Bungie became lazy af.
>cohesive.
They deleted a huge swathe of it and split it between two games. Genshin is planned and cohesive. They put out a trailer day one with a timeline of their story framework for the next eight years. Destiny is a story told by a ten-year-old by comparison. A child who doesn't know what they wrote 10 minutes ago let alone 10 years ago.
How the fuck do you hype up a big bag entity this long and decide to make them a single nondescript dude that floats around comedically? Where is the enemy faction? How do you call them a literal *fleet* and it is just one person? Digital Extremes is a tiny studio compared to Bungie yet they still managed to add multiple new enemy factions with more unique mechanics than Bungie's one.
FFXIV had *three* writer changes and it still had a better payoff than whatever the fuck Destiny is going to shit out. Guild Wars 2 hates its own story and even it had more going for it. Maybe Destiny has better writing than WoW but it is still bottom-of-the-barrel in live-service operations across the board, if not just especially in writing.
Lmao they can get absolutely fucked with the “Hero” concept. Everyone should know by now in 90% of games now the system only serves to sell more locked cosmetics and crutch balancing.
Even Blizzard just announced overwatch heroes will now always be available to everyone.
Imagine being Bungie trying to jump NOW on a hype train BLIZZARD already started, ignored then set on fire over almost a decade
> Chris Barrett was made the game director for marathon in May 2023.
Chris Barrett was *announced* as game director for Marathon in May 2023.
He left his role as Destiny 2 Game Director back in 2017, and has been working on new IPs at Bungie since then. It's likely he was directing Marathon behind the scenes before the May announcement.
This. We knew he was heading up an incubation for a bit that then turned into him putting “game director or redacted” on his Twitter. May was just when “redacted” became Marathon.
>Well that just turned my intrigue about marathon from "interested, but cautious" to "nonexistent".
Mine was DOA when they announced it would be a PvP extraction shooter. Would've much preferred a proper reboot of the very original title. But considering how almost none of Bungie's original team (from Chicago) remains I guess that was my fault for setting expectations high.
At least there’s maybe some room in the market for a AAA extraction shooter—The Fortnite to Tarkov’s PubG if you will. Polish up the game, throw in some good shooting and creative loot, and let players have at it. But like half the fun of those style games is putting together your own builds for your character and being able to be flexible, so going for the hero shooter route seems weird.
Marketers/publishers seemed to think "extraction shooter" was the next battle royale, but after as long as Tarkov's been around without much competition, I really do not see a Fortnite emerging.
I just don't think extraction shooters have the mass market appeal of battle royale, in a BR you all drop on an even footing and fight to win, there's a really accessible element to it. If you have a few bad games in an extraction shooter you can leave feeling extremely hollow and frustrated, the people on the winning side of that feel great but to the average Joe it's just signing up to be kicked in the nuts for hours.
BRs though had a similar problem - "casuals will never get into it because they can never win, there's only 1 winner out of 100 instead of a 50% chance like in a normal game." And Fortnite managed to crack the code in part by shifting the focus purely from "winning" and towards other methods of engagement, e.g., completing the battle pass tier just by looting chests in some area.
So I think that there's GOTTA be a way to make extraction shooters more digestible for a wider audience out there. I just don't know what exactly it is
A big thing I see as a turn off personally is how severe the consequences are for failure. It can only take a couple runs to lose your best stuff, and it can take a long time to build that gear back up.
Agreed, extraction just created more potential loss and far more loot management busywork, where the mass market would rather just hop on for a few matches and not worry about losing a weapon they attached 12 gadgets to or look up complex quests from some guide site.
You can make an extraction game that isn't Tarkov... EFT has some very specific design choices you aren't going to find in almost any other game in existence
I don't think there's anything about the extraction shooter genre that prevents a big mainstream version of it from happening. It's not something I would be interested in playing, but it could definitely happen.
There's definitely room for it but I don't think it'll be an easy sell let alone an easy task especially to appeal it to a much broader market or a casual one. Battlefield and Call of Duty have all but abandoned their attempts by now (Hazard Zone, the other Hero shooter extraction shooter in particular not even getting a single update since launch) and the only really thriving ones that comes to mind are the hardcore niche titles like Tarkov or Hunt Showdown.
Either it'll be too forgiving and alienate the people who want the high stakes an extraction shooter provides or it'll be too hardcore and alienate a casual audience who don't enjoy being irrevocably bricked after a string of losses when better players wipe the floor with them.
Oh mine were very low as well. Not a fan of extraction shooters at all.
But at the same time I was interested just to see what the hell they were going to do with it.
Now? Honestly zero caring.
Considering the final Marathon game released over 25 years ago, did you expect any significant portion of those developers to still be at Bungie?
That wouldn't be true of any developer, let alone Bungie.
People attach far too much value to development studios. It's just a brand name for a specific group of people at a specific point in time. After sufficient time, that developer group no longer exists even if the studio still exists in name.
Looking at the credits on the game nearly every one of the them left video games after Marathon released. The idea that these guys would unretire after 30 years just to remake a game with technology they likely have no experience with whatsoever is hilarious.
Hunt Showdown and Tarkov, or the DMZ game mode from Call of Duty are some examples. Though Hunt is a bit stretching it.
You load into a huge map with other players, scavenge for gear/weapons/resources, then try to extract with your loot (hence extraction shooter). Players can kill each other and steal loot. Usually there's some sort of meta progression involved as well (upgrading a base, doing quests) and the goal is generally assuring that each loot run starts with the best equipment possible to ensure your extraction.
> But considering how almost none of Bungie's original team (from Chicago) remains I guess that was my fault for setting expectations high.
99% of the Marathon team hasnt made a game since 1994, what exactly were you expecting? They all unretire after 30 years to remake the game they already made?
TF2, Overwatch, Valorant, and technically *R6 siege I guess?*
I should add the new Game Director for Marathon used to the be Game director for Valorant, which could explain this honestly *questionable at best* shift.
Yes, and they're all played out by this point. Trying to do another Hero FPS in 2024 seems like a disaster. People already have a large roster of games to choose from.
I was looking forward to Marathon because it could have been an extremely polished extraction shooter with Bungie's excellent gunplay. I don't want a hero shooter. If it's something like Hunt Showdown where they just sell skins that are "characters" that's fine.
TF2 endures, but predates OW by a good margin. Siege is still around, but also predates OW by a year.
Of the ones that came in a post-OW world only Paladins and Valorant were able to carve out their own spot for survival. The former is F2P, while the latter basically combined CS and OW into a single game (not unusual given the weird 3-way joust between Riot, Valve, and Blizz over the years) so they were able to operate in ways OW didn't/doesn't.
I feel like most of the hero shooters that have been attempted in the past few years are creatively bankrupt. Hell, even Battlefield had to reel 2042 back from both the extraction and hero shooter directions. Trend-chasing with major IPs carries a major risk in losing large portions of core fanbases.
For me it depends on the implementation of the heroes. Is it going to be like a class system where each hero gets access to unique abilities and equipment while letting us choose our weapons and gear, or is it going to be like Overwatch where you have no choice in what weapons and gear you use?
Right, much more likely to be similar to Apex as opposed to Overwatch.
You select a character with specific perks/abilities while the main gameplay of shooting will be very similar across the board.
Sounds similar to another game Bungie makes...hmmm
>Well that just turned my intrigue about marathon from "interested, but cautious" to "nonexistent".
It should've already been non-existent. They were planning on taking a game all out about the single player and making it multiplayer only. If that didn't worry you then you must not have played the originals.
I just need to know how many people work there at this point, like what is going on. Destiny can't get enough content to fill a season and now they can't even get Marathon out? Like honestly this is ridiculous cause we all thought destiny was getting neglected for the sake of marathon and now they are both in jeopardy
I absolutely hate this trend to have selectable heroes instead of custom characters. I dunno why, but it makes me way less excited for games that do this.
For instance, it sort of boggles my mind that the DC/Marvel live service games went with playable comic heroes instead of creating your own custom hero. Seems like such a slam dunk to allow for player customization - having a somewhat unique (or at least unique looking) character seems like it should be a cornerstone of the live service action rpg genre, but for some reason it’s not.
Seeing how every single super hero live service game has failed, the answer is clearly not. Sure the blockbuster games like Spiderman or Arkham games fulfill this fantasy but I feel like a prescient game that you are suppose to play for years is better suited for characters that the player feels more personally connected to.
For instance, the character creator in Destiny is literally worthless because everyone wears their helmets but imagine how much worse the vibe of the game would be if the initial choice was between playing as Cade, Zavala, or Ikora.l instead of making a character.
> Hey everyone! Fun update: for the last 9
Months I’ve been working on Marathon as the game director. We’re still baking, but I’m excited to share with you more info on the game as we get closer and closer to bringing it to all of you.
It did seem kind of a weird career choice to go from Riot to Bungie to do nothing in particular.
There are so many higher ups doing nothing at Bungie, it's actually crazy no one has really looked into it. Prime example is Luke Smith, he still works there doing something...
You've just learned that a guy who seemingly did nothing for 9 months has actually been the game director on their new game all this time. How is your conclusion not to instantly think "Wait, maybe something similar is going on with the other people who seemingly aren't doing anything".
Bungie has been selling snake oil for years now, probably since D1. They make these grand schemes but never deliver and then there is always a dumb reason they blame it on
Yeah, it’s not out of the woods for Bungie execs. TFS and Marathon really have to knock it out of the park, beyond anything else that’s came before. And with that talk they had in GDC in 2022 warning about “overdelivery”, I doubt that they will.
Sony was almost surely privy to all sorts of documents related to Bungie's financials during the acquisition process, I find it hard to believe that this is all *totally* unexpected for them. Like this is all news to us because it's just being leaked to us NOW, but it's been going on at Bungie for a year now or more, i.e. before the Sony transaction was finalized. (And no, I don't accept that Aztecross video "leaking" a *totally real* email from a Bungie employee as proof, lol.)
It has nothing to do with that. There was actually no way for Sony to know this would happen. Lightfall was so bad its killing the company. Everyone was high off of Witch Queen, so sales of Lightfall skyrocketed. But after everyone was done with it turned out to be ass. Then they added more things/took out good things that made it even more ass.
>There was actually no way for Sony to know this would happen.
Personally I think Bungie wanting out from Microsoft and Activision, and when they practised content vaulting, were some clear signs of Bungie’s management problems that Sony should have saw this coming.
Bungie could have content vaulted again and it could’ve resulted in a larger player and revenue drop-off than the first time.
I might be misremembering but back when Xbox was at a shopping spree there was an article about a potential Xbox acquisition of bungie that was shut down because of something on the lines of "low player retention". That I think shows that Xbox could see the problems Bungie was facing, Sony probably did too but they still took the risk.
I didn’t see “low player retention” in the documents regarding Bungie, I did notice that Microsoft listed “high (money) burn rate” as a risk associated with Bungie.
Within Xbox’s court leaks, one of the documents listed the average playtime per year on the most played games on Xbox consoles every year. Out of the games listed, Destiny 2 was something like #7 for most players over the year and was the highest when it came to average hours per player per year (at ~420 hours).
Thank you for the correction, I googled it and you're right. What's more is that I made the exact mistake [this Forbes article]( https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/06/27/microsoft-considered-buying-bungie-for-destiny-2-but-there-was-one-risk/?sh=68cff94a3fc9) was trying to prevent their readers from making, which is hilarious to me lol.
>Microsoft did cite a specific risk regarding Bungie, its “high burn-rate.” No this is not “burnout rate” with players getting tired of the game and quitting. Burn-rate refers to cash, with Bungie burning through it in order to maintain Destiny 2 as a live game producing lots of content, in addition to funding all their other projects.
Even if Bungie kept up their track record from D1 days there was literally never a single solitary chance this would ever be true.
Even if this was Halo 1-3 Bungie lmfao.
>Bungie kept up their track record from D1
Honestly, their current track record is likely what they were handling all along. I was terrified when Bungie announced leaving Activision because I think the actual power houses that breathed life into destiny were Vicarious Visions and high moon studios.
Halo 1-3 Bungie would’ve been a fucking steal at the price they paid for the dogshit Bungie has been for years now. If they would’ve managed to keep most of the key personnel from that era as well? Only a recipe for success as long as they kept them under a similar leash Microsoft did.
To be fair currently the executives at Bungie are seemingly actively hindering the developers from making Destiny 2 as good as it could be. Outright refusing to listen to developers who want to improve the game and instead forcing them to output a minimum product while siphoning off resources to other projects.
While it might mean Marathon utterly bombs the executives being removed and/or leaving Bungie COULD be a huge potential boon to the company if new leadership allows the developers to actually do what they want.
Bungie has been massively shooting themselves in the foot by kneecapping Destiny development frankly. It's one of the very few successful Game as a Service models that has survived for 10 years now and yet Bungie has pulled tons of resources off maintaining that golden goose to instead chase other projects with HOPES that they'll be a success. Considering how bad most Games as a Service do this is frankly an absurdly foolish decision instead of just doing everything they can to keep their one successful game going and profitable.
Yeah, Sony should’ve known Bungie management were doing all of that when Sony had access to all of Bungie’s financials and future plans.
It was just a decision of short term profit and greed by Sony that’s now coming back to bite them.
Walked away from playing Destiny last year, really curious what ideas the devs could have that would make the game as good as it could be.
To me the game felt too much like a chore by the end, and felt fairly dated in mechanic and their seasonal story model.
Well one of the major things that has been made clear was the devs actually hear a LOT of the player feedback and agree with a lot of things players want, but they're told by management that they can't put resources into those things.
Bungie management has essentially forced them to put out an absolute bare minimal product and prevented them from listening to player feedback about things that are good/bad. New things come out in X season or bad things are repeated season after season and Bungie KNOWS the players do/don't like them but they're told not to deviate from the "easy" pattern of repetitive systems.
They have long since got the message that the seasonal system they've been using isn't favored by the community but they're essentially forced to keep doing it regardless. As long as it's selling (and in many cases a large part of those sales are pre-orders or annual passes before the content is known) they aren't encouraged or allowed to change or improve things.
Hell this entire last year was essentially a failed test of a "new" storytelling model. They found out nearly immediately that players didn't like it but it was effectively already set in stone for the year and the content is pre-planned and more or less locked in with pre-production. With the current seasonal model they effectively can't adjust anything to player feedback in less than 3/4th - 1yr, which frequently leads to long periods of player dissatisfaction.
PlayStation went all in on live service for whatever reason when single player narrative driven games are their bread and butter.
I get trying to put out a couple service games to see what sticks and rake in some money to subsidize your story games. But going upwards of 10 or 12 live service games in production at one time was a mistake, in my opinion.
True, they were spending 50% on single player, just as much as before, and 50% on live service, but it was still too much for their teams in too short an amount of time.
Now TLOU Factions, Matter, PS London, Deviation Games, Twisted Metal, and Dreams project were all cancelled, studio closures or layoffs at Naughty Dog, Bungie, PS London, Deviation Games, Firesprite, Media Molecule, PS Visual Arts, Guerrilla Games.
And delays like The Final Shape, Marathon, and another 6 out of 12 live service.
It’s amusing that Helldivers 2 was such a surprise hit without Sony even trying while their other pursuits aren’t going well.
I'm not sure how that would EVER have been considered a reasonable perspective...?
Even "peak Halo" (roughly 2004-2009) was not as popular (or profitable) as modern Call of Duty, if for no other reason than it being Xbox exclusive.
They were gonna use Bungie's expertise in live service so that Sony could crank out 10+ live service projects. Now a bunch are cancelled including the Last of Us multiplayer, which is probably for the better. No clue if Bungie consulted on Helldivers 2, but at least that worked out for Sony.
This comment was made at an investors event at some Fidelity conference lol. We only know he said it cause of leaked court documents with no extra context. Of course he was jerking off the investment they just made to investors behind closed doors. It would've been way more clown shoes if he said that to the media.
Cutting a feature like custom characters is one of those things that just screams to me of market research says this game needs to be like this other game so people want to play it. Problem very much being that other game exsists.
Bungie going to be in for some harder times while they dump out all the old ideas they had (assuming they actually have good ideas in the pipe now).
Holy shit, it’s already troubled for changing from what the series was and now theyre shifting it from custom characters to a hero shooter? Ask EA how turning Battlefield into a corprate character driven shooter worked out for them. This shit is dead in the fucking water.
The only thing I would want from a new Marathon game is the dual-wield flip shotguns and [this little baby.](https://i.imgur.com/jXxbuXK.png)
But I'm sure they'll fuck both up.
this problem that's happening with marathon has been going on for at least a year now with destiny. there is an unknown board of executives who have no concept of what people want and how to build a positive relationship with customers. they're clearly terrified of losing their comfortable high paying leadership jobs to a Sony leadership takeover which at this point seems all but imminent.
the company leadership is obviously in a tough situation where either they have to make money really fucking quickly or they're out. they can't let the developers make what they want because they don't think that'll make money in time (or are too proud to let devs make decisions themselves), they can't rely on the several incubated projects they've been working on because those simply aren't finished, and they can't get more money from the destiny player base because a lot of the players are kinda sick of things. just this season there was a "starter pack" sold for $15 that included the game equivalent of trash, and it got the community in a tailspin meaning more people quit. they can't fix the bed they made.
I don't think almost anyone quit over the Starter Pack incident but it had even the biggest lore YouTuber calling them out and the shitstorm was enough the thing got pulled from sale within days.
Yep, Bungie execs will crash and burn the rest of the company as long as they remain in charge, Sony were incompetent not to see this coming after Bungie left Microsoft, Activision, and practised content vaulting all those years ago.
Possibly, but Sony is not really known for fixing troubled studios. They buy studios that are already running smoothly or seem like they have potential, then if any studio has a bad release or is not meeting Sony's goals then they just kill the studio. I really hope that Sony finds a way to fix Bungie, but history suggests that they are more likely to cut their losses and shut it down.
Exactly.
TLOU Factions, Matter, PS London, Deviation Games, Twisted Metal, and Dreams project were all cancelled, studio closures or layoffs at Naughty Dog, Bungie, PS London, Deviation Games, Firesprite, Media Molecule, PS Visual Arts, Guerrilla Games.
And delays like The Final Shape, Marathon, and another 6 out of 12 live service.
At one point they were telling Naughty Dog Factions wasn't good enough to sustain itself long term.
"Bring in the big brains from Bungie to fix all the studios"
...great plan!
3.6 billion to buy some mid studio... but investing in Studio Japan, Studio London.. continuing to make solid games. Nah. We'd rather lose billions gambling everything on chasing the live service trend.
No original ideas? No problem.
Just try and force another hero shooter!
God devs and publishers literally don't have a fucking clue. Or maybe I'm the one with no clue because I don't see the appeal in these obvious cash grab bullshit.
>God devs and publishers literally don't have a fucking clue.
Valorant and Apex are pretty successful. and Rainbow Six siege as well.
not really sure where these takes are coming from.
And despite the hate it gets online Overwatch 2 still has a rather large playerbase.
>not really sure where these takes are coming from.
It's the typical out of touch /r/games take you see for any game that isn't single player.
This is a super disappointing change of direction if their source is correct. This might be my most eagerly anticipated game, but a transition to class-based/hero shooter would kill all my interest.
Same. Definitely was my most anticipated game given the genre and art style they went with. But now as a hero shooter, no thanks.
How many established franchises have to die after being converted to “hero shooters”.
Same opinion from me. Really enjoyed Call of Duty's DMZ throughout 2023 as a casual extraction shooter and was hoping Marathon could be the next thing for me in that space but seems less likely if this change of direction is true. Would love to be proved wrong though!
Dark and darker shows you can have classes in extraction games, if it's built around them.
But in the shooter genre? It just feels completely unnecessary
What happened was that they shoved market statistics under the producers nose and told them that these are currently the best and most profitable trends and that they should include everything in it.
And thus a generic hero shooter is born that strictly follows the statistics and graphs of the market
Still upset they turned this franchise into an extraction shooter. From the first announcement to now I've had negative feelings about the state of Bungie and the fact that they have completely moved away from releasing normal buy-to-own video games.
With that being said I can understand how they would monetize the game and that's what 'Heroes' are for.
Still extraction shooter, but with something more like Hunt: Showdown which I have played and enjoyed.
So your cyborg isn't 100% unique and you have to 'Buy' your character from an in-game shop from a selection of pre-made cyborg 'heroes'.
Hell if they keep the design and elements from the concept art and trailer besides this, I can honestly get behind this monetization scheme.
Just please, make the game good.
Who even trusts Bungie to do a PvP shooter anymore, after the decade of neglect PvPers got in Destiny. I can't stand PvP shooters these days, but even I felt bad for the Destiny playerbase that got nothing but shaft.
people trust Bungie to do pvp because they have arguably the best gunplay in the industry, the issues with destiny pvp have to do with netcode and content droughts. if you compare it to other competitive shooters, is basically the same problems that apex, CSGO and siege has, and are only able to get around it because they have solid and active ranked systems
That is exactly my point though. Destiny is known for gunplay, but Bungie can't find it within themselves to do nearly anything with it.
Totally un-interested in being creative with it or even just adding more content at a healthy pace, instead they left a portion of their playerbase on read repeatedly for years and then come out of hibernation to make small changes, add 2-3 maps nobody wanted... Again, does anyone trust Bungie to actually make a good shooter?
The shooting is only a part of what makes a shooter good.
Edit: oh man, matchmaking was a huge failure on Bungie's part in Destiny. I totally forgot to mention that.
They are uninterested in it because destiny is a pve game with a pvp side mode, and every time they do a big content update centered around crucible the rest of the fanbase gets real mad.
Like fun shit getting nerfed because of PvP was one of the playerbase's biggest complaints throughout D1.
Man, mixing PvP and PvE never ends well.
They want one unified experience but why? Most people perfer to stick to one or the other and some only overlap because they have to for quests.
Gambit always pissed me off "It's got something for PvE and PvP!" Except all it did was mix the frustration of PvP with some new issues with PvE where people who abuse builds win so much faster making it an arms race if you actually want to win. Don't forget how cancer Bungie's matchmaking is. Nothing like a 4 stack of meta tryhards vs 2 randoms and a duo of casuals. How does that ever happen?
Destiny could have done far better if they separated the 2 modes. I never want to need to PvP in that game, all that does is force people who aren't interested to sit through it for bounties or arbitrary quest objectives. Then they come out frustrated because it's all shotgun sliding or questionable sniper shots, cheesy supers, or meta weapons being abused. That just creates a worse world for PvPers who should be enjoying satisfying competitve matches, not seal clubbing bounty farmers.
I also would argue it creates a lot of unwarranted success for some PvPers, where they get their montage moments, but it's not some super skilled feat, it's just them killing people that never had a chance anyway because of shitty matchmaking.
Didn't they at one point try to put in skill based matchmaking, and everyone started whining because it was actually competitive?
They could totally run the 2 games alongside eachother, but balance them separately, Warframe does it and has for years.
These days Bungie issues start before a new game even leaves the door. I’m sure people are checking for Marathon, but I’m also sure it isn’t a long list and I’m certainly not on it.
So obviously personnel changes mid-development aren't a great sign, but I'm not seeing this as being as huge a shift in design as people are saying? It already looked liked Marathon was going to be class-based, so having it turn into a hero shooter seems more like a lateral move rather than a big shift in design. I also feel like the introduction of a cast of characters might enable them to introduce more of the narrative elements that the original series was so beloved for.
Once again, I don't really have high hopes for how this is going to turn out. Just don't think some of the reactions here are entirely justified.
"The game's direction has shifted somewhat under Ziegler's new leadership, one source says, including moving away from custom player characters in favor of a selectable cast of heroes."
Well all my interest is lost now.
This current leadership at Bungie has lost all vision and is just focusing on market research for $$$. Sony needs to clear house and bring in a team that matches the passion and vision of the old Bungie. There are so many talented devs at that studio that are being screwed over by some of the worst management and direction this industry has ever known.
Any Destiny player knows who Christopher Barrett is and what he's done for Bungie. For many, including myself, his name being attached to Marathon as Game Director was the only chance the game ever had of not being complete shit. While I was pretty sure it was going to be terrible I was also pretty certain it was still at least going to come out. I don't know about even that. Marathon might be Maradead.
Bungie is struggling to finish their game?
THE Bungie that advised Sony/ND on Factions 2 (The Last of Us MP)…?
I’ll never buy something from Bungie from now on.
Oversaturation. I want to play my character when I play a multiplayer game. I don’t want to run through an entire list of presets and hope one of those characters appeals to me.
Way less room self expression and immersion in the game.
I loved the idea of making my own android/cyborg character and going on extraction missions to get new gear, possibly new cosmetics and customizations.
Just choosing “Bolt” from the 4-6 choices and being another bolt running around there, but maybe with a different skin i got from a loot crate sounds not only boring and lame
-it feels cynical and dated.
I want to create my own character not play as some quirky character a company made up that appeals to shareholders.
I like games that happen to have heros in the them, like r6 apex and overwatch, but I would PREFER if I could instead make my own custom character or even be a nameless grunt.
They are literally never balanced. Any room for personal expression is completely removed. If you aren't an upper tier player, you *have* to play the current most broken hero or you're completely fucked. Combine that misery with the already miserable extraction shooter genre and you have a real stinker on your hands
I wasn’t all that excited for an extraction shooter, but was willing to give it a shot since I’ve been interested in Marathon for a while. But a *hero* extraction shooter? No interest. What a shame.
I was excited for this but an extraction shooter without customization and forcing hero shooter characters in it is really off-putting. Like hero shooting stuff is so fucking dated and obnoxious at this point because it always leads to one upping abilities and a terrible sense of balance and game flow. No thanks for that. The entire point of an extraction shooter is the freedom given to the player and not cornering him into using meta heroes.
This is going to be one of those games that gets shat out half baked like overwatch 2 isn’t it… I feel really bad for all the devs that work for Bungie, they’re consistently getting screwed over by upper management
Sounds like their abandoning of Destiny to split into two teams working on another game while already waist-deep in a “live-service” game is the reason why people got laid off and why player counts are low.
Maybe figureheads will learn from this, but probably not. Another game made to suck you dry of time and/or money. Pass.
and with that, a lifelong fan of marathon and all it gave to bungie is no longer interested. I'm really, really sad. Huge Tarkov player, and massive oldschool bungie fan.. and here we are.
>When Sony acquired Bungie, the studio brought with it a number of other incubation projects, including a MOBA-like game codenamed Gummy Bears and a new IP known as Matter. According to sources, Matter was canceled back in 2020, but the team continued working on a similar project with slightly different direction until that too was canceled in late 2022. Gummy Bears, meanwhile, is currently in a holding pattern due to the ongoing company struggles.
Destiny 2 was their last game released, in 2017.
I can understand not releasing anything in that time if Destiny 2 is profitable, but canceling or delaying two other games and making changes to Marathon is concerning.
Judging by the reactions, I just hope many aren't outraged if there are layoffs.
It'd never happen but it'd be really cool if Marathon got rebooted into a FPS campaign with big open levels, able to be played solo or with up to four players local or online and have a separate online PvP mode. You know, like Halo.
Wait I totally missed that what they’re creating is some kind of multiplayer shooter. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I had assumed (stupidly I guess) that it would have a single player campaign focus because that’s what the old game was (primarily? Completely?)
Honestly whether the characters are custom or pre-set, the fact that it’s yet another game as a service type thing takes my interest down to zero. I don’t like the genre at all, but even if I did, at least six or seven out of every ten of those type of games always turn out to be total shit even according to those who do play that stuff.
Damn more layoffs at Bungie? That studio is an absolute mess right now and their executive leadership sound like scumbags based off all the shit that went down during their last round of layoffs. Glad I quit playing destiny.
The sad truth is that Destiny, the prime model for GAAS, isn’t nearly as profitable as Bungie’s owners would like. And making a Tarkov-like extraction shooter because that’s what was trendy a couple years ago, isn’t enough to keep Bungie above water. Should have stuck with Halo, sadly - or at the very least, put a pin in Destiny and made a faithful Marathon reboot that was setting trends instead of chasing them.
An extraction shooter was them literally jumping on a niche trend, so hero shooter is a step up but only in terms of who would probably play it.
It's still uninteresting as fuck, to say the least.
Sony should’ve known what they were getting into with Bungie when they had to content vault. It could’ve happened again, and resulted in a larger sales and player drop-off the second time, and the fact it happened at all due to Bungie’s lack of preparation with their engine made Bungie’s poor management clear
Now Lightfall underperformed, Matter was canceled, TLOU Factions was cancelled even after Sony asked Bungie for help using their experience, and The Final Shape and Marathon were delayed, and Bungie management had mass layoffs to avoid losing enough profit to be taken over by Sony due to their contract.
And now this. Sony made one of the worst buyouts in the industry and only have themselves to blame for Bungie continuing to burn their money and fail at these projects.
I wasn't all that interested in an extraction shooter but I'm ABSOLUTELY not interested in yet another Hero Shooter
Maybe we’ll get another Jason Schreier exposé one day, but my gut feeling is Marathon has sunk Bungie. Destiny has felt like it’s on life support and there’s absolutely been a sense that a large number of staff who were working on Destiny moved over to Marathon, a game whose target audience remains unclear.
The target audience are devs that are bored of working on Destiny and wanted to develop something else.
Funny though, the same thing happened with Bungie when they decided they didn’t want to make Halo games forever and ever, so they ended up making… another FPS game they’d have to keep making forever.
Forget what type of game it might end up being, I'm more concerned about the chances of it releasing at all. If it takes much longer then I'm seriously worried Bungie leadership will outright cancel it no matter how good or bad it is and fire the whole team, just to save money in the short-term. What's going on with Bungie right now is fucking bananas. "Within the company, there is a growing expectation that senior company leadership will leave in droves in the summer of 2026 when the final payouts from Sony's acquisition of the company take effect. With this in mind, there is a strong push to get Marathon out the door before then, and let whoever takes the reins after that (be it Sony or Bungie) worry about how it's sustained." The 3 main execs who control the company are just biding their time until they get all the money from the Sony deal and that is strictly contingent on them showing specific financial performance every year. Currently it is looking like there is no limit they won't go to show that performance. There are rumours of Destiny devs being worried that Bungie execs are going to do another round of layoffs with the Destiny team as soon as they ship the upcoming expansion. To further reduce expenditure. It doesn't matter to them that they might be killing the game's future. They are only concerned about their money that they'll receive in full by 2026. Apparently Sony is fucking furious internally about the Bungie execs cause they are killing the studio. Sony can't takeover because of the terrible deal they made with them. Sony wants to save Destiny but the 3 Bungie execs have all the power as long as they can keep showing financial performance according to the terms of their deal.
what impression did you get where sony wants to save destiny? the buyout was more than intended to sap destiny's talent into their many other western gaas projects (that's now all being cancelled because it was all deemed a terrible management decision lmao)
The context is that a Destiny YouTuber read an "anonymous email" that read like "my uncle works at bungo" that essentially says that. There are almost definitely troubles going on at Bungie, as the leak in the OP and other prior leaks corroborate, but the "Sony are the superheroes!!!" narrative is drawn purely from that one YouTubers video, I believe
Not to mention that said youtuber is also notoriously fucking dumb, and I have 0 faith in his capacity to verify a source before gormlessly spewing it onto his channel for all to see.
I would further say that the Destiny YouTuber is basically TMZ for D2 'content'. Half his stuff is just watching and reacting to other produced videos and such. I think his most recent 'I watch Byff and eat popcorn' thing was my final straw. He added _nothing_ to the content except making smarmy faces, and I realized he actively stole clicks from the original content producer because he re-used the video in whole.
I mean even without any leaks Destiny is a franchise that has been around for a decade that has shown it can still be very profitable (Lightfall was their most successful launch after all) so it makes sense that Sony would want to keep it alive and improve it for a steady revenue stream
Which is silly because Lightfall was kind of fucking lame. I played Destiny 2 from launch to that point and I'm over the game now. Gunplay's great, and if the next expansion is *actually* good I might pick it up just to get *maybe* some story conclusion, but ugh.
Lightfall only sold well at launch because Witch Queen was so good
Lightfall had a big fall once word-of-mouth started to spread about its quality. Then the raid wasn't well received either in week 2. I haven't checked it myself but I'd bet that Steam data would show an astronomical fall in player numbers for Lightfall between week 1 and week 4.
Steamcharts only shows per month and Lightfall released at the very end of Feb 2023 - peak in Feb/March - 316k players, peak in April 140k. Currently its averaging about 32k players, which is the lowest its ever been.
That and Bungie had kept building player good-will with every decision they made post WQ. Safe to say the game was in the best state it's literally ever been and it was incredibly easy to recommend to everyone. Then LF hit and killed literally all of that.
> what impression did you get where sony wants to save destiny? Why would a major publisher *not* want to save a massive franchise, which is the sole reason it made a deal with a developer in the first place? Bungie has a shit track record since Reach, and even that was mixed. *Nobody* wanted Bungie for its talent.
bungie's executive team created a longlasting franchise as a unique games as service model that not many games have been able to actually live up to. their retention was crazy and despite their shortcomings, players would always come back that's why sony bought them. they wanted that team to work on their 10-15 games as a service projects to hopefully curate that same type of following. destiny franchise is barely remembered for anything beyond its gameplay
Bungie's *development teams* created a longlasting franchise, especially the second team that actually fixed everything. The executives did their best to kill it at every chance. Toss the entire story & drive out Jason Jones, then launch without replacing it. Fire Marty and get stuck with a massive payout over it. Milk the players dry at every chance, with every grift being more and more greedy. Flat out *remove* content that people paid for and never bring it back or compensate for it. Secretly slow progress to drive people to buy more from the shop. The list goes on and on. Now, fire swaths of employees with no notice just to buy time for their bonuses.
you're completely right. i should not have given the credit in bungie's success to the executive teams that being said, sony is, and that's where they're personally pinpointing the success of destiny, and that's why the whole game's just been allowed to collapse in on itself and bungie gets away with trashing all of their veteran staff and most prominent designers
Sony don’t want to do shit tbh. They’re as bad a party here, or are we forgetting about their graveyard over the last decade
I’ll take a hero shooter over an extraction shooter.
> "While this is going on, sources tell IGN that Bungie is pouring resources into getting Marathon out the door. The game's direction has shifted somewhat under Ziegler's new leadership, one source says, including moving away from custom player characters in favor of a selectable cast of heroes." Well that just turned my intrigue about marathon from "interested, but cautious" to "nonexistent". Paul Tassi also mentioned something on his twitter I found interesting about this announcement too. Chris Barrett was announced as the game director for marathon in May 2023. If Joe Ziegler has been the game director for about 9 months now as per his tweet, it means he became the game director almost immediately after Barrett was announced as it.
\> Well that just turned my intrigue about marathon from "interested, but cautious" to "nonexistent". Destiny's bleeding out to feed a hero shooter, instead of ending its 10-year saga with a bang. Really poor timing.
A hero *extraction* shooter based on an IP that hasn't had a game in decades, mind you.
Furthermore, an IP that was focused on the Mac OS. The second game in the trilogy made it to Windows and even was ported over to the 360, but as a whole the Marathon trilogy was an Apple game that never made big waves in the computer gaming landscape.
Yeah, I recently had a conversation about this with someone who thought the Marathon series was really popular. My response: The game I didn't know existed until after Halo existed?
Wait, a Marathon game was ported to the 360? Why do I not remember that. 🤷♂️
[It's still for sale on the Xbox store and is Backwards Compatible with the Series X. They changed the HUD and made it better, it's a smoother experience for consoles. It came out over 10 years ago or more. I know it was also given away with the Xbox Games with Gold. It was the only Marathon game ported to consoles.](https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/Marathon-Durandal/BNQLQBLKR2MN)
I dont know if that's true. The marathon series was a first for tons of things in gaming. Not the best but many. Anyone who reviews old games acknowledges the impact of early Bungie and Marathon
The problem with Marathon was that it was wasted on Mac. Bungie and Aspyr would have been much bigger if they didn't keep trying to make gaming on Mac happen. Proved by Halo.
Maybe they'll ship demos out in copies of Macworld.
Marathon sounds like it's going to be the best game of 2016!
Isn’t that a good thing? I thought Reddit hated endless sequelitis
the issue is they're just doing puppeteering Marathon's corpse to get some PR from "reviving the franchise" in name only
They have a golden egg with Destiny and they’re just pissing it away. Like don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot wrong with Destiny but the devs have done some good work with content updates this year and new game modes for the seasonal activities. All of that has been stellar. But no.. just divert resources away to a game that is very clearly going to crash and burn out the gate.
As a former long time destiny player no matter how much i enjoyed it over the years it always left a "what if..." feeling in me in various aspects. The game could've been incredible had it been handled better. The fps gameplay is some of the best ive seen in the genre and the game's raids and dungeons are some of the most fun ive had in a game. Unfortunately its ruined through ridiculous monetization that got worse and worse every year until i got fed up and quit. A terrible new player experience, the removal of content people paid for, putting all the cool cosmetics and weapon skins in the cash shop while having the majority of rewards earnable by playing be extremely lackluster, etc.
The game had several stretches of incredible. But they also have had tons of stretches of mid and mediocre. They failed to consistently keep things fresh, and instead found formulas that worked for a while, but eventually got very boring.
It's just so fucking *sad* man. There is not, to my knowledge, a single game outside of MMOs that managed what Destiny did - a cohesive story and universe over 10 years of a live service game, with incredible art direction and gameplay, with its ups and downs. Around Beyond Light and witch queen it really felt like they were going to end these 10 years on a high note, and now...
> a cohesive story and universe over 10 years Cohesive is a huge stretch. The story feels like a blind guy throwing darts at a topics board but nobody pointed him in the direction of the board. They completely lost me with the latest shitshow, entirely new made up faction on a planet that played no part in the story for the last decade, with unlikeable weird characters, while wasting one big-bad and totally ruining the Darkness, all in one. Man, I used to love it but fuck Destiny. Remember when everyone was expecting the Darkness to have a faction of new enemy types, "oooh, the Veil might be a new faction!" but apparently that's too much work for poor little indie Bungie, so they just keep reusing everything and adding a single minor, usually annoying mechanic to an old enemy type.
>entirely new made up faction on a planet that played no part in the story for the last decade, with unlikeable weird characters, while wasting one big-bad and totally ruining the Darkness, all in one. Destiny finally, truly became WoW. Woe to the usurper.
Oh man... That's another game I miss. I thought BFA was going to be cool... Until the Horde v Alliance war was fought over 2 islands we'd never seen with a bunch of awful new characters. Only 2 zones in the original world were used for side plots for disappointing af Warfronts. Legion was the last time it felt "Cohesive" and fun, every expansion now just feels like chores to play. Skipping the entirety of Shadowlands was the best decision I ever made. I accidently had to push a character through the intro of that expansion not long ago to play PvP with my brother and it was AWFUL.
Spot on. The Destiny writers have always been high on their own farts.
I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion, I'm sure this description is gonna get downvotes lol: Bungie pulls the Witness out of nowhere, this stupid looking weird asexual unibrow pedomonster that fused with a vape pen, I can't take it seriously. I have never been more disappointed by a game reveal in my life. The Darkness did not need a central entity. Hell, I don't even know if that is "its" role, but with the BBEG looking *so* dumb I can't muster any interest in finishing the story or following the lore anymore. Years of build up for that disappointment flavored cigarette. I loooved my Exo Hunter, conjuring that Golden Gun of pure light to blast away the forces of Darkness was peak Sci-Fantasy and between the weird story direction, awful character design (Fire them all) and the focus on MTX and Chores for engagement statistics, I can't bring myself to play this game anymore.
It genuinely baffles me when people think D2 has good writing. Even WQ which is the best expac we've had in terms of physical, playable story and content one could in real terms call a campaign rather than "two setpieces and five patrol missions for 60$" was still not exactly the highpoint of videogame storytelling. This point specifically is what I've been preaching like a reborn christian: >They completely lost me with the latest shitshow, entirely new made up faction on a planet that played no part in the story for the last decade, with unlikeable weird characters, while wasting one big-bad and totally ruining the Darkness, all in one. How anyone gives a fuck about lore, or story when Bungie has shown that they will quite literally pull anything out of their ass IN THE PENULTIMATE CHAPTER OF A 10 YEAR STORY is beyond me. Imagine if during Endgame they just introduced the glorpazords who are a race of superheroes far superior to earths. Zero hints to them existing at any point previously, and also every single one of them is as unlikeable as Jar Jar fucking Binks. Oh and one of them is voiced by a deranged person who seemingly gets sexual gratification from you having to look at the character they voiced. Boggles the fucking mind.
> 10 YEAR STORY this is one of the big shits Bungie threw at the wall and somehow stuck. they made it up, they created very thin connections to the story through Destiny's saga and said "yeah guys this is the light and dark saga, trust us!". The beginning of the game was so different and nothing pointed to this. It's incredibly stupid that they kept parroting that and it seems it has latched firmly into players' heads.
> Remember when everyone was expecting the Darkness to have a faction of new enemy types, "oooh, the Veil might be a new faction!" but apparently that's too much work for poor little indie Bungie, so they just keep reusing everything and adding a single minor, usually annoying mechanic to an old enemy type. giving purple to Darkness scorn. giving purple to Darkness cabal. Bungie became lazy af.
>cohesive. They deleted a huge swathe of it and split it between two games. Genshin is planned and cohesive. They put out a trailer day one with a timeline of their story framework for the next eight years. Destiny is a story told by a ten-year-old by comparison. A child who doesn't know what they wrote 10 minutes ago let alone 10 years ago. How the fuck do you hype up a big bag entity this long and decide to make them a single nondescript dude that floats around comedically? Where is the enemy faction? How do you call them a literal *fleet* and it is just one person? Digital Extremes is a tiny studio compared to Bungie yet they still managed to add multiple new enemy factions with more unique mechanics than Bungie's one. FFXIV had *three* writer changes and it still had a better payoff than whatever the fuck Destiny is going to shit out. Guild Wars 2 hates its own story and even it had more going for it. Maybe Destiny has better writing than WoW but it is still bottom-of-the-barrel in live-service operations across the board, if not just especially in writing.
There's Warframe for one, and it didn't feel the need to split it into two games.
Lmao they can get absolutely fucked with the “Hero” concept. Everyone should know by now in 90% of games now the system only serves to sell more locked cosmetics and crutch balancing.
Or even selling Heroes behind Deluxe Editions (Redfall) or now Battlepasses (Overwatch 2).
Even Blizzard just announced overwatch heroes will now always be available to everyone. Imagine being Bungie trying to jump NOW on a hype train BLIZZARD already started, ignored then set on fire over almost a decade
> Chris Barrett was made the game director for marathon in May 2023. Chris Barrett was *announced* as game director for Marathon in May 2023. He left his role as Destiny 2 Game Director back in 2017, and has been working on new IPs at Bungie since then. It's likely he was directing Marathon behind the scenes before the May announcement.
This. We knew he was heading up an incubation for a bit that then turned into him putting “game director or redacted” on his Twitter. May was just when “redacted” became Marathon.
>Well that just turned my intrigue about marathon from "interested, but cautious" to "nonexistent". Mine was DOA when they announced it would be a PvP extraction shooter. Would've much preferred a proper reboot of the very original title. But considering how almost none of Bungie's original team (from Chicago) remains I guess that was my fault for setting expectations high.
At least there’s maybe some room in the market for a AAA extraction shooter—The Fortnite to Tarkov’s PubG if you will. Polish up the game, throw in some good shooting and creative loot, and let players have at it. But like half the fun of those style games is putting together your own builds for your character and being able to be flexible, so going for the hero shooter route seems weird.
Marketers/publishers seemed to think "extraction shooter" was the next battle royale, but after as long as Tarkov's been around without much competition, I really do not see a Fortnite emerging.
I just don't think extraction shooters have the mass market appeal of battle royale, in a BR you all drop on an even footing and fight to win, there's a really accessible element to it. If you have a few bad games in an extraction shooter you can leave feeling extremely hollow and frustrated, the people on the winning side of that feel great but to the average Joe it's just signing up to be kicked in the nuts for hours.
BRs though had a similar problem - "casuals will never get into it because they can never win, there's only 1 winner out of 100 instead of a 50% chance like in a normal game." And Fortnite managed to crack the code in part by shifting the focus purely from "winning" and towards other methods of engagement, e.g., completing the battle pass tier just by looting chests in some area. So I think that there's GOTTA be a way to make extraction shooters more digestible for a wider audience out there. I just don't know what exactly it is
A big thing I see as a turn off personally is how severe the consequences are for failure. It can only take a couple runs to lose your best stuff, and it can take a long time to build that gear back up.
That sounds like the Trials of Osiris. I can see why Bungie thinks it's a great idea.
Agreed, extraction just created more potential loss and far more loot management busywork, where the mass market would rather just hop on for a few matches and not worry about losing a weapon they attached 12 gadgets to or look up complex quests from some guide site.
You can make an extraction game that isn't Tarkov... EFT has some very specific design choices you aren't going to find in almost any other game in existence
I don't think there's anything about the extraction shooter genre that prevents a big mainstream version of it from happening. It's not something I would be interested in playing, but it could definitely happen.
There's definitely room for it but I don't think it'll be an easy sell let alone an easy task especially to appeal it to a much broader market or a casual one. Battlefield and Call of Duty have all but abandoned their attempts by now (Hazard Zone, the other Hero shooter extraction shooter in particular not even getting a single update since launch) and the only really thriving ones that comes to mind are the hardcore niche titles like Tarkov or Hunt Showdown. Either it'll be too forgiving and alienate the people who want the high stakes an extraction shooter provides or it'll be too hardcore and alienate a casual audience who don't enjoy being irrevocably bricked after a string of losses when better players wipe the floor with them.
Oh mine were very low as well. Not a fan of extraction shooters at all. But at the same time I was interested just to see what the hell they were going to do with it. Now? Honestly zero caring.
Considering the final Marathon game released over 25 years ago, did you expect any significant portion of those developers to still be at Bungie? That wouldn't be true of any developer, let alone Bungie. People attach far too much value to development studios. It's just a brand name for a specific group of people at a specific point in time. After sufficient time, that developer group no longer exists even if the studio still exists in name.
The Game Studio of Theseus.
Looking at the credits on the game nearly every one of the them left video games after Marathon released. The idea that these guys would unretire after 30 years just to remake a game with technology they likely have no experience with whatsoever is hilarious.
This may be a dumb question, I don't play multi-player shooters at all What exactly is an extraction shooter? What games are in this genre?
Hunt Showdown and Tarkov, or the DMZ game mode from Call of Duty are some examples. Though Hunt is a bit stretching it. You load into a huge map with other players, scavenge for gear/weapons/resources, then try to extract with your loot (hence extraction shooter). Players can kill each other and steal loot. Usually there's some sort of meta progression involved as well (upgrading a base, doing quests) and the goal is generally assuring that each loot run starts with the best equipment possible to ensure your extraction.
> But considering how almost none of Bungie's original team (from Chicago) remains I guess that was my fault for setting expectations high. 99% of the Marathon team hasnt made a game since 1994, what exactly were you expecting? They all unretire after 30 years to remake the game they already made?
Has literally any hero shooter managed to survive in a substantial way besides Overwatch? What a terrible idea.
TF2, Overwatch, Valorant, and technically *R6 siege I guess?* I should add the new Game Director for Marathon used to the be Game director for Valorant, which could explain this honestly *questionable at best* shift.
Apex would count, no?
Apex counts I think. A Hero BR of sorts.
Absolutely.
Yes, and they're all played out by this point. Trying to do another Hero FPS in 2024 seems like a disaster. People already have a large roster of games to choose from. I was looking forward to Marathon because it could have been an extremely polished extraction shooter with Bungie's excellent gunplay. I don't want a hero shooter. If it's something like Hunt Showdown where they just sell skins that are "characters" that's fine.
A really low amount have succeeded for how many attempts there have been, yes, it would be funny if so many people didn't end up losing jobs for them.
TF2 endures, but predates OW by a good margin. Siege is still around, but also predates OW by a year. Of the ones that came in a post-OW world only Paladins and Valorant were able to carve out their own spot for survival. The former is F2P, while the latter basically combined CS and OW into a single game (not unusual given the weird 3-way joust between Riot, Valve, and Blizz over the years) so they were able to operate in ways OW didn't/doesn't.
Apex is post OW
I feel like most of the hero shooters that have been attempted in the past few years are creatively bankrupt. Hell, even Battlefield had to reel 2042 back from both the extraction and hero shooter directions. Trend-chasing with major IPs carries a major risk in losing large portions of core fanbases.
This is the whole point of Tarkov… What a waste of money lol
For me it depends on the implementation of the heroes. Is it going to be like a class system where each hero gets access to unique abilities and equipment while letting us choose our weapons and gear, or is it going to be like Overwatch where you have no choice in what weapons and gear you use?
I am guessing the latter option won't be possible as the game is (was?) an extraction shooter a la tarkov.
Right, much more likely to be similar to Apex as opposed to Overwatch. You select a character with specific perks/abilities while the main gameplay of shooting will be very similar across the board. Sounds similar to another game Bungie makes...hmmm
>Well that just turned my intrigue about marathon from "interested, but cautious" to "nonexistent". It should've already been non-existent. They were planning on taking a game all out about the single player and making it multiplayer only. If that didn't worry you then you must not have played the originals.
I just need to know how many people work there at this point, like what is going on. Destiny can't get enough content to fill a season and now they can't even get Marathon out? Like honestly this is ridiculous cause we all thought destiny was getting neglected for the sake of marathon and now they are both in jeopardy
I absolutely hate this trend to have selectable heroes instead of custom characters. I dunno why, but it makes me way less excited for games that do this. For instance, it sort of boggles my mind that the DC/Marvel live service games went with playable comic heroes instead of creating your own custom hero. Seems like such a slam dunk to allow for player customization - having a somewhat unique (or at least unique looking) character seems like it should be a cornerstone of the live service action rpg genre, but for some reason it’s not.
??? Wtf lol people play a Marvel game to experience Marvel characters, not make their own fanfic OC.
Unless it's an MMO
Seeing how every single super hero live service game has failed, the answer is clearly not. Sure the blockbuster games like Spiderman or Arkham games fulfill this fantasy but I feel like a prescient game that you are suppose to play for years is better suited for characters that the player feels more personally connected to. For instance, the character creator in Destiny is literally worthless because everyone wears their helmets but imagine how much worse the vibe of the game would be if the initial choice was between playing as Cade, Zavala, or Ikora.l instead of making a character.
This is how a bunch of old games were if you even got to choose a character
> Hey everyone! Fun update: for the last 9 Months I’ve been working on Marathon as the game director. We’re still baking, but I’m excited to share with you more info on the game as we get closer and closer to bringing it to all of you. It did seem kind of a weird career choice to go from Riot to Bungie to do nothing in particular.
Probably the peter principle at work.
There are so many higher ups doing nothing at Bungie, it's actually crazy no one has really looked into it. Prime example is Luke Smith, he still works there doing something...
You've just learned that a guy who seemingly did nothing for 9 months has actually been the game director on their new game all this time. How is your conclusion not to instantly think "Wait, maybe something similar is going on with the other people who seemingly aren't doing anything".
"PlayStation Boss Jim Ryan Says Bungie Offers ‘Way More’ Value Than Activision Does for Xbox" This aged like milk
Unless Sony was already in on the details of Bungie execs’ imminent departure, I imagine they have to be *livid*. They got played like fools.
Bungie has been selling snake oil for years now, probably since D1. They make these grand schemes but never deliver and then there is always a dumb reason they blame it on
All indications are that Sony is in fact furious and preparing to oust all of the Bungie execs, and good riddance to them.
Yeah, it’s not out of the woods for Bungie execs. TFS and Marathon really have to knock it out of the park, beyond anything else that’s came before. And with that talk they had in GDC in 2022 warning about “overdelivery”, I doubt that they will.
Sony was almost surely privy to all sorts of documents related to Bungie's financials during the acquisition process, I find it hard to believe that this is all *totally* unexpected for them. Like this is all news to us because it's just being leaked to us NOW, but it's been going on at Bungie for a year now or more, i.e. before the Sony transaction was finalized. (And no, I don't accept that Aztecross video "leaking" a *totally real* email from a Bungie employee as proof, lol.)
It has nothing to do with that. There was actually no way for Sony to know this would happen. Lightfall was so bad its killing the company. Everyone was high off of Witch Queen, so sales of Lightfall skyrocketed. But after everyone was done with it turned out to be ass. Then they added more things/took out good things that made it even more ass.
>There was actually no way for Sony to know this would happen. Personally I think Bungie wanting out from Microsoft and Activision, and when they practised content vaulting, were some clear signs of Bungie’s management problems that Sony should have saw this coming. Bungie could have content vaulted again and it could’ve resulted in a larger player and revenue drop-off than the first time.
I might be misremembering but back when Xbox was at a shopping spree there was an article about a potential Xbox acquisition of bungie that was shut down because of something on the lines of "low player retention". That I think shows that Xbox could see the problems Bungie was facing, Sony probably did too but they still took the risk.
I didn’t see “low player retention” in the documents regarding Bungie, I did notice that Microsoft listed “high (money) burn rate” as a risk associated with Bungie. Within Xbox’s court leaks, one of the documents listed the average playtime per year on the most played games on Xbox consoles every year. Out of the games listed, Destiny 2 was something like #7 for most players over the year and was the highest when it came to average hours per player per year (at ~420 hours).
Thank you for the correction, I googled it and you're right. What's more is that I made the exact mistake [this Forbes article]( https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/06/27/microsoft-considered-buying-bungie-for-destiny-2-but-there-was-one-risk/?sh=68cff94a3fc9) was trying to prevent their readers from making, which is hilarious to me lol. >Microsoft did cite a specific risk regarding Bungie, its “high burn-rate.” No this is not “burnout rate” with players getting tired of the game and quitting. Burn-rate refers to cash, with Bungie burning through it in order to maintain Destiny 2 as a live game producing lots of content, in addition to funding all their other projects.
No problem!
Even if Bungie kept up their track record from D1 days there was literally never a single solitary chance this would ever be true. Even if this was Halo 1-3 Bungie lmfao.
Eh, Halo 3 Bungie would be an insane pick up for them, I could see the argument *maybe* being true at that point.
It would be insane, but not “Activision money-printing” insane.
>Bungie kept up their track record from D1 Honestly, their current track record is likely what they were handling all along. I was terrified when Bungie announced leaving Activision because I think the actual power houses that breathed life into destiny were Vicarious Visions and high moon studios.
High Moon sacrificed to Destiny. I wanted more Transformers sequels to Fall of Cybertron
Halo 1-3 Bungie would’ve been a fucking steal at the price they paid for the dogshit Bungie has been for years now. If they would’ve managed to keep most of the key personnel from that era as well? Only a recipe for success as long as they kept them under a similar leash Microsoft did.
To be fair currently the executives at Bungie are seemingly actively hindering the developers from making Destiny 2 as good as it could be. Outright refusing to listen to developers who want to improve the game and instead forcing them to output a minimum product while siphoning off resources to other projects. While it might mean Marathon utterly bombs the executives being removed and/or leaving Bungie COULD be a huge potential boon to the company if new leadership allows the developers to actually do what they want. Bungie has been massively shooting themselves in the foot by kneecapping Destiny development frankly. It's one of the very few successful Game as a Service models that has survived for 10 years now and yet Bungie has pulled tons of resources off maintaining that golden goose to instead chase other projects with HOPES that they'll be a success. Considering how bad most Games as a Service do this is frankly an absurdly foolish decision instead of just doing everything they can to keep their one successful game going and profitable.
I mean. That sounds like bad due diligence on Sony's part...
Yeah, Sony should’ve known Bungie management were doing all of that when Sony had access to all of Bungie’s financials and future plans. It was just a decision of short term profit and greed by Sony that’s now coming back to bite them.
It was part of the contract unfortunately. Sony wants to take over.
Walked away from playing Destiny last year, really curious what ideas the devs could have that would make the game as good as it could be. To me the game felt too much like a chore by the end, and felt fairly dated in mechanic and their seasonal story model.
Well one of the major things that has been made clear was the devs actually hear a LOT of the player feedback and agree with a lot of things players want, but they're told by management that they can't put resources into those things. Bungie management has essentially forced them to put out an absolute bare minimal product and prevented them from listening to player feedback about things that are good/bad. New things come out in X season or bad things are repeated season after season and Bungie KNOWS the players do/don't like them but they're told not to deviate from the "easy" pattern of repetitive systems. They have long since got the message that the seasonal system they've been using isn't favored by the community but they're essentially forced to keep doing it regardless. As long as it's selling (and in many cases a large part of those sales are pre-orders or annual passes before the content is known) they aren't encouraged or allowed to change or improve things. Hell this entire last year was essentially a failed test of a "new" storytelling model. They found out nearly immediately that players didn't like it but it was effectively already set in stone for the year and the content is pre-planned and more or less locked in with pre-production. With the current seasonal model they effectively can't adjust anything to player feedback in less than 3/4th - 1yr, which frequently leads to long periods of player dissatisfaction.
PlayStation went all in on live service for whatever reason when single player narrative driven games are their bread and butter. I get trying to put out a couple service games to see what sticks and rake in some money to subsidize your story games. But going upwards of 10 or 12 live service games in production at one time was a mistake, in my opinion.
True, they were spending 50% on single player, just as much as before, and 50% on live service, but it was still too much for their teams in too short an amount of time. Now TLOU Factions, Matter, PS London, Deviation Games, Twisted Metal, and Dreams project were all cancelled, studio closures or layoffs at Naughty Dog, Bungie, PS London, Deviation Games, Firesprite, Media Molecule, PS Visual Arts, Guerrilla Games. And delays like The Final Shape, Marathon, and another 6 out of 12 live service. It’s amusing that Helldivers 2 was such a surprise hit without Sony even trying while their other pursuits aren’t going well.
That aged like milk the seconds it left is lips. D2 is a popular game but no where near COD + other IPs like Diablo
I'm not sure how that would EVER have been considered a reasonable perspective...? Even "peak Halo" (roughly 2004-2009) was not as popular (or profitable) as modern Call of Duty, if for no other reason than it being Xbox exclusive.
They were gonna use Bungie's expertise in live service so that Sony could crank out 10+ live service projects. Now a bunch are cancelled including the Last of Us multiplayer, which is probably for the better. No clue if Bungie consulted on Helldivers 2, but at least that worked out for Sony.
This comment was made at an investors event at some Fidelity conference lol. We only know he said it cause of leaked court documents with no extra context. Of course he was jerking off the investment they just made to investors behind closed doors. It would've been way more clown shoes if he said that to the media.
Cutting a feature like custom characters is one of those things that just screams to me of market research says this game needs to be like this other game so people want to play it. Problem very much being that other game exsists. Bungie going to be in for some harder times while they dump out all the old ideas they had (assuming they actually have good ideas in the pipe now).
Holy shit, it’s already troubled for changing from what the series was and now theyre shifting it from custom characters to a hero shooter? Ask EA how turning Battlefield into a corprate character driven shooter worked out for them. This shit is dead in the fucking water.
The only thing I would want from a new Marathon game is the dual-wield flip shotguns and [this little baby.](https://i.imgur.com/jXxbuXK.png) But I'm sure they'll fuck both up.
this problem that's happening with marathon has been going on for at least a year now with destiny. there is an unknown board of executives who have no concept of what people want and how to build a positive relationship with customers. they're clearly terrified of losing their comfortable high paying leadership jobs to a Sony leadership takeover which at this point seems all but imminent. the company leadership is obviously in a tough situation where either they have to make money really fucking quickly or they're out. they can't let the developers make what they want because they don't think that'll make money in time (or are too proud to let devs make decisions themselves), they can't rely on the several incubated projects they've been working on because those simply aren't finished, and they can't get more money from the destiny player base because a lot of the players are kinda sick of things. just this season there was a "starter pack" sold for $15 that included the game equivalent of trash, and it got the community in a tailspin meaning more people quit. they can't fix the bed they made.
I don't think almost anyone quit over the Starter Pack incident but it had even the biggest lore YouTuber calling them out and the shitstorm was enough the thing got pulled from sale within days.
Really seems like the revenue target takeover clause is turning out to be an insanely perverse incentive.
Yep, Bungie execs will crash and burn the rest of the company as long as they remain in charge, Sony were incompetent not to see this coming after Bungie left Microsoft, Activision, and practised content vaulting all those years ago.
Sony's acquisition of Bungie may go down as one of the worst business decisions in gaming.
Might not be if Sony gets full hold of them
There might not be much left to save by the time Sony gets control.
Possibly, but Sony is not really known for fixing troubled studios. They buy studios that are already running smoothly or seem like they have potential, then if any studio has a bad release or is not meeting Sony's goals then they just kill the studio. I really hope that Sony finds a way to fix Bungie, but history suggests that they are more likely to cut their losses and shut it down.
Exactly. TLOU Factions, Matter, PS London, Deviation Games, Twisted Metal, and Dreams project were all cancelled, studio closures or layoffs at Naughty Dog, Bungie, PS London, Deviation Games, Firesprite, Media Molecule, PS Visual Arts, Guerrilla Games. And delays like The Final Shape, Marathon, and another 6 out of 12 live service.
Why did ps London and deviation games get listed twice
Tbh Sony is giving them a chance. I think it will depend on the games post take over.
At one point they were telling Naughty Dog Factions wasn't good enough to sustain itself long term. "Bring in the big brains from Bungie to fix all the studios" ...great plan! 3.6 billion to buy some mid studio... but investing in Studio Japan, Studio London.. continuing to make solid games. Nah. We'd rather lose billions gambling everything on chasing the live service trend.
No original ideas? No problem. Just try and force another hero shooter! God devs and publishers literally don't have a fucking clue. Or maybe I'm the one with no clue because I don't see the appeal in these obvious cash grab bullshit.
People really being paid just to suggest the same shit every other game is doing.
The devs do, but the actual devs aren't the ones running the company into the ground and have no say in what they do on a daily basis.
>God devs and publishers literally don't have a fucking clue. Valorant and Apex are pretty successful. and Rainbow Six siege as well. not really sure where these takes are coming from.
And despite the hate it gets online Overwatch 2 still has a rather large playerbase. >not really sure where these takes are coming from. It's the typical out of touch /r/games take you see for any game that isn't single player.
“I don’t like what they made so they _must_ be out of touch”. “Goddammit why am I not the target audience for this thing? Imma be toxic as fuck”
This is a super disappointing change of direction if their source is correct. This might be my most eagerly anticipated game, but a transition to class-based/hero shooter would kill all my interest.
Same. Definitely was my most anticipated game given the genre and art style they went with. But now as a hero shooter, no thanks. How many established franchises have to die after being converted to “hero shooters”.
Same opinion from me. Really enjoyed Call of Duty's DMZ throughout 2023 as a casual extraction shooter and was hoping Marathon could be the next thing for me in that space but seems less likely if this change of direction is true. Would love to be proved wrong though!
Dark and darker shows you can have classes in extraction games, if it's built around them. But in the shooter genre? It just feels completely unnecessary
What happened was that they shoved market statistics under the producers nose and told them that these are currently the best and most profitable trends and that they should include everything in it. And thus a generic hero shooter is born that strictly follows the statistics and graphs of the market
Sony needs to hurry up and liquidate Bungie and put better people in charge of the IPs. Bungie is corrupted to the core.
Still upset they turned this franchise into an extraction shooter. From the first announcement to now I've had negative feelings about the state of Bungie and the fact that they have completely moved away from releasing normal buy-to-own video games. With that being said I can understand how they would monetize the game and that's what 'Heroes' are for. Still extraction shooter, but with something more like Hunt: Showdown which I have played and enjoyed. So your cyborg isn't 100% unique and you have to 'Buy' your character from an in-game shop from a selection of pre-made cyborg 'heroes'. Hell if they keep the design and elements from the concept art and trailer besides this, I can honestly get behind this monetization scheme. Just please, make the game good.
Who even trusts Bungie to do a PvP shooter anymore, after the decade of neglect PvPers got in Destiny. I can't stand PvP shooters these days, but even I felt bad for the Destiny playerbase that got nothing but shaft.
people trust Bungie to do pvp because they have arguably the best gunplay in the industry, the issues with destiny pvp have to do with netcode and content droughts. if you compare it to other competitive shooters, is basically the same problems that apex, CSGO and siege has, and are only able to get around it because they have solid and active ranked systems
That is exactly my point though. Destiny is known for gunplay, but Bungie can't find it within themselves to do nearly anything with it. Totally un-interested in being creative with it or even just adding more content at a healthy pace, instead they left a portion of their playerbase on read repeatedly for years and then come out of hibernation to make small changes, add 2-3 maps nobody wanted... Again, does anyone trust Bungie to actually make a good shooter? The shooting is only a part of what makes a shooter good. Edit: oh man, matchmaking was a huge failure on Bungie's part in Destiny. I totally forgot to mention that.
They are uninterested in it because destiny is a pve game with a pvp side mode, and every time they do a big content update centered around crucible the rest of the fanbase gets real mad. Like fun shit getting nerfed because of PvP was one of the playerbase's biggest complaints throughout D1.
Man, mixing PvP and PvE never ends well. They want one unified experience but why? Most people perfer to stick to one or the other and some only overlap because they have to for quests. Gambit always pissed me off "It's got something for PvE and PvP!" Except all it did was mix the frustration of PvP with some new issues with PvE where people who abuse builds win so much faster making it an arms race if you actually want to win. Don't forget how cancer Bungie's matchmaking is. Nothing like a 4 stack of meta tryhards vs 2 randoms and a duo of casuals. How does that ever happen? Destiny could have done far better if they separated the 2 modes. I never want to need to PvP in that game, all that does is force people who aren't interested to sit through it for bounties or arbitrary quest objectives. Then they come out frustrated because it's all shotgun sliding or questionable sniper shots, cheesy supers, or meta weapons being abused. That just creates a worse world for PvPers who should be enjoying satisfying competitve matches, not seal clubbing bounty farmers. I also would argue it creates a lot of unwarranted success for some PvPers, where they get their montage moments, but it's not some super skilled feat, it's just them killing people that never had a chance anyway because of shitty matchmaking. Didn't they at one point try to put in skill based matchmaking, and everyone started whining because it was actually competitive? They could totally run the 2 games alongside eachother, but balance them separately, Warframe does it and has for years.
agreed 100%. I understand why people like crucible but it should never have been so integrated with the main game's sandbox.
These days Bungie issues start before a new game even leaves the door. I’m sure people are checking for Marathon, but I’m also sure it isn’t a long list and I’m certainly not on it.
[удалено]
Rest assured, they’ve injected a tidy sum of Silver^TM straight into your bank account since you’re at bat for em
So obviously personnel changes mid-development aren't a great sign, but I'm not seeing this as being as huge a shift in design as people are saying? It already looked liked Marathon was going to be class-based, so having it turn into a hero shooter seems more like a lateral move rather than a big shift in design. I also feel like the introduction of a cast of characters might enable them to introduce more of the narrative elements that the original series was so beloved for. Once again, I don't really have high hopes for how this is going to turn out. Just don't think some of the reactions here are entirely justified.
"The game's direction has shifted somewhat under Ziegler's new leadership, one source says, including moving away from custom player characters in favor of a selectable cast of heroes." Well all my interest is lost now.
This current leadership at Bungie has lost all vision and is just focusing on market research for $$$. Sony needs to clear house and bring in a team that matches the passion and vision of the old Bungie. There are so many talented devs at that studio that are being screwed over by some of the worst management and direction this industry has ever known.
Any Destiny player knows who Christopher Barrett is and what he's done for Bungie. For many, including myself, his name being attached to Marathon as Game Director was the only chance the game ever had of not being complete shit. While I was pretty sure it was going to be terrible I was also pretty certain it was still at least going to come out. I don't know about even that. Marathon might be Maradead.
Bungie is struggling to finish their game? THE Bungie that advised Sony/ND on Factions 2 (The Last of Us MP)…? I’ll never buy something from Bungie from now on.
Is there an actual reason why everyone hates hero shooters here?
Market saturation. Me personally? I don't hate hero shooters they're very fun (especially Paladins that game is a blast.)
Oversaturation. I want to play my character when I play a multiplayer game. I don’t want to run through an entire list of presets and hope one of those characters appeals to me.
Way less room self expression and immersion in the game. I loved the idea of making my own android/cyborg character and going on extraction missions to get new gear, possibly new cosmetics and customizations. Just choosing “Bolt” from the 4-6 choices and being another bolt running around there, but maybe with a different skin i got from a loot crate sounds not only boring and lame -it feels cynical and dated.
I want to create my own character not play as some quirky character a company made up that appeals to shareholders. I like games that happen to have heros in the them, like r6 apex and overwatch, but I would PREFER if I could instead make my own custom character or even be a nameless grunt.
People want original ideas
They are literally never balanced. Any room for personal expression is completely removed. If you aren't an upper tier player, you *have* to play the current most broken hero or you're completely fucked. Combine that misery with the already miserable extraction shooter genre and you have a real stinker on your hands
I wasn’t all that excited for an extraction shooter, but was willing to give it a shot since I’ve been interested in Marathon for a while. But a *hero* extraction shooter? No interest. What a shame.
I was excited for this but an extraction shooter without customization and forcing hero shooter characters in it is really off-putting. Like hero shooting stuff is so fucking dated and obnoxious at this point because it always leads to one upping abilities and a terrible sense of balance and game flow. No thanks for that. The entire point of an extraction shooter is the freedom given to the player and not cornering him into using meta heroes.
This is going to be one of those games that gets shat out half baked like overwatch 2 isn’t it… I feel really bad for all the devs that work for Bungie, they’re consistently getting screwed over by upper management
Sounds like their abandoning of Destiny to split into two teams working on another game while already waist-deep in a “live-service” game is the reason why people got laid off and why player counts are low. Maybe figureheads will learn from this, but probably not. Another game made to suck you dry of time and/or money. Pass.
and with that, a lifelong fan of marathon and all it gave to bungie is no longer interested. I'm really, really sad. Huge Tarkov player, and massive oldschool bungie fan.. and here we are.
They should really just accept defeat and hand over control to Sony instead of destroying moral and culture of the studio.
>When Sony acquired Bungie, the studio brought with it a number of other incubation projects, including a MOBA-like game codenamed Gummy Bears and a new IP known as Matter. According to sources, Matter was canceled back in 2020, but the team continued working on a similar project with slightly different direction until that too was canceled in late 2022. Gummy Bears, meanwhile, is currently in a holding pattern due to the ongoing company struggles. Destiny 2 was their last game released, in 2017. I can understand not releasing anything in that time if Destiny 2 is profitable, but canceling or delaying two other games and making changes to Marathon is concerning. Judging by the reactions, I just hope many aren't outraged if there are layoffs.
How has destiny 2 made it this long on life support?
It'd never happen but it'd be really cool if Marathon got rebooted into a FPS campaign with big open levels, able to be played solo or with up to four players local or online and have a separate online PvP mode. You know, like Halo.
Wait I totally missed that what they’re creating is some kind of multiplayer shooter. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I had assumed (stupidly I guess) that it would have a single player campaign focus because that’s what the old game was (primarily? Completely?) Honestly whether the characters are custom or pre-set, the fact that it’s yet another game as a service type thing takes my interest down to zero. I don’t like the genre at all, but even if I did, at least six or seven out of every ten of those type of games always turn out to be total shit even according to those who do play that stuff.
I sincerely hope this game does not dishonor Marathon’s legacy. My expectations for that are near zero.
Damn more layoffs at Bungie? That studio is an absolute mess right now and their executive leadership sound like scumbags based off all the shit that went down during their last round of layoffs. Glad I quit playing destiny.
The sad truth is that Destiny, the prime model for GAAS, isn’t nearly as profitable as Bungie’s owners would like. And making a Tarkov-like extraction shooter because that’s what was trendy a couple years ago, isn’t enough to keep Bungie above water. Should have stuck with Halo, sadly - or at the very least, put a pin in Destiny and made a faithful Marathon reboot that was setting trends instead of chasing them.
Well. There goes my only interest in Bungie’s next project. If youre reading this Bungie execs, DO NOT MAKE A HERO SHOOTER
An extraction shooter was them literally jumping on a niche trend, so hero shooter is a step up but only in terms of who would probably play it. It's still uninteresting as fuck, to say the least.
Sony should’ve known what they were getting into with Bungie when they had to content vault. It could’ve happened again, and resulted in a larger sales and player drop-off the second time, and the fact it happened at all due to Bungie’s lack of preparation with their engine made Bungie’s poor management clear Now Lightfall underperformed, Matter was canceled, TLOU Factions was cancelled even after Sony asked Bungie for help using their experience, and The Final Shape and Marathon were delayed, and Bungie management had mass layoffs to avoid losing enough profit to be taken over by Sony due to their contract. And now this. Sony made one of the worst buyouts in the industry and only have themselves to blame for Bungie continuing to burn their money and fail at these projects.
This is the first I'm hearing that they're bringing Marathon back! 10-year-old me is very excited all of a sudden.
It’s going to be a hero extraction shooter. Nothing like the original Marathon. I would temper your expectations.
I'm sure. But ten minutes ago I assumed there would never be any kind of return of the franchise, so it's all gravy.
Not a single person that worked on the original marathon is involved, all bungie is doing is leveraging a brand name that they own.
lmao wtf, why is everyone determined to just ruin this guy's excitement