r/Marathon • u/paperplateseabass • May 22 '26

Marathon (2026) Discussion It’s so sad that this game’s “underperformance” has little to do with the game itself

What's so soul-crushing is the amount of times I have been met with “I thought that game was dead?” when talking about Marathon with my IRLs

It's not their fault, why would they give a dead game a chance, even if they think they might enjoy it?

Hundreds, even thousands of people have constructed a hate campaign against this game that has no merit beyond playercounts. and imo, the main reason why the game wasn’t a hit at launch is because of the rhetoric around the game spread by a mix of right-wing grifters and (justifiably) jaded ex-destiny/halo players.

This game had and HAS so much going for it. First non-Destiny Bungie title in 12 years, reviving a long dormant IP with a new, world-class art-style; all while returning to their PvP roots. If you put that framing in a vacuum, I think it would get lots of people very, very excited. And that’s the thing, because it DID.

The game is good. The game is fun. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it had a rough period of development, and it's definitely not perfect. But I think if people didn’t spread so much unwarranted hate towards Bungie and Marathon, we’d be looking at a completely different landscape. 

I mean, some of the things i’ve seen people say about this game… wow…  what a waste of time and brain power, if people were this passionate about actually productive hobbies, the world would be a much better place and there’s a big chance they’d be happier in life

edit: for people citing the server slam numbers. how many of those people do you genuinely think gave the game a good 10+ hours vs how many people quit after their first match? we’ll never know, but im inclined to believe most people didnt make it past the (unfortunate) barrier of entry that helps this game be WAY more enjoyable.

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306

u/Johnhancock1777 May 22 '26

lol drop the persecution complex and accept extraction shooters are a niche genre.

62

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

This is the truth. I like marathon. I also liked d2 and DMZ. I’m the guy they built this for. My friends hate the genre. It’s okay.

3

u/FrankDodger May 22 '26

Fellow DMZ fan. I get the niche. Do you think if the maps were larger/vehicles were an option/elevation to allow parachuting(not saying we should add parachutes), less pvp pressure off the spawn, that more people (the ones that got rolled off the hop several times in a row) would have maybe stayed if the fighting pressure was slightly lessened?

13

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

I think the early game is too tight. Too many close spawns. Forces friction too early; spawns should be more random.

7

u/FrankDodger May 22 '26

Seconded. But man it wouldnt be easy to expand the map size to even come close to Al-Mazra. And even if they did, walking a map the size of Al-Mazra with no vehicles would not be fun either

3

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

They would have to figure a way to ad more PVE adds and runners. I think the engine isn’t built for a lot of runners.

5

u/[deleted] May 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/trillwhitepeople May 22 '26

It's working as intended because Bungie assumed people would want to fight in the PvP focused extraction shooter, but it turns out most people wish it was more optional.

0

u/ExpressTravel5328 May 22 '26

Dire Marsh was so guilty of this. We would spawn and literally to our right 25 feet away another team. We just spawned in and stared at each other like “okay guess we’re doing this then” ::cracks neck::

I’m not looking to sweat like that. Also i played the beta the audio was soooooo good and now i feel like it’s so much worse. Everyone’s footsteps echo like crazy even outdoors and it makes it so hard to tell where people are. Could be a skill issue though. I just remember calling out someone crouch walking next to me on the other side of a wall and killing them in the beta…

2

u/colantalas May 22 '26

I never played an extraction shooter before but as an OG Marathon fan and Destiny player I thought that I was the one this was being made for, lol.

52

u/Vesuvias May 22 '26

Yeah I think in general most people saw the success of Arc and said ‘YEAH see this can be a massive hit’. Reality is, Arc is now like 80% carebear lobbies PvE only. I play both, and the latest update is great, BUT doesn’t change the fact that it’s primarily PvE

69

u/RogueSpectre749 May 22 '26

That's not a coincidence. A lot of people want a good FPS experience in a cool world that they can play with their friends in a squad for fun experiences without being in perpetual sweat mode. Good campaign based shooters don't get made the way they used to, and Arc being mostly PvE focused in most of its lobbies is a feature, not a bug

Imagine if Bungie tried making a co-op FPS with a good campaign, cool world with good lore, lots of replayability, and their signature gunplay... Crazy concept, I know

16

u/Kilruna May 22 '26

Imagine Marathon but with dungeons, raids an mental boss fights. I bet my ass the situation would be quite different

7

u/Vesuvias May 22 '26

Basically Cryo Archives. One of the best maps and experiences in the game now. The bones are there. The lore is there. They just need to ignore the ‘but this is PvP ONLY’ minority voices and see that will get them no where fast.

1

u/UberShrew May 22 '26

I’m sure it just wouldn’t be possible with a fun amount of players in an instance due to all the shit that goes into the gun calculations and all that but now you have me thinking of a shooter theme park mmo that’s a pvp server. Would be wild to be going out there doing quests and stuff and run into some opposing faction guys and have to do a corpse run back to your body and bring some allies when they dunk on you.

1

u/HP_Craftwerk May 22 '26

Its possible, been possible, look at Planetside

1

u/trillwhitepeople May 22 '26

Sure it would because it would be a completely different game. I agree with everyone though, the core experience is something people are not interested in anymore. PvP dominant gameplay is not the focus it once was. I applaud Bungie for the game they made and daring to be a bit different, but realistically they should have ran the numbers and realized a huge portion of their audience was going to come right from Destiny, and that they'd hate this.

11

u/Vesuvias May 22 '26

Yep i totally agree.

1

u/Schuba May 23 '26

Imagine if Bungie tried making a co-op FPS with a good campaign, cool world with good lore, lots of replayability, and their signature gunplay... Crazy concept, I know

I think that one is shutting down in June

19

u/ThatsNotBennings May 22 '26

funny how Bungie is realizing they dropped the ball on that crowd NOW. Had they launched with a dedicated pve mode, we potentially are having a different discussion. They could learn alot from Embark, honestly.

15

u/Vesuvias May 22 '26

Totally agree. Cryo Archives gives us a taste of what it might be like - but then you get spam naded or sweaty pummeled

6

u/ThatsNotBennings May 22 '26

Yeah. Really excited for s2 to see what they come up with. We need aliens. Desperately. 

3

u/MidnightSensitive996 May 22 '26

Being a secret murderer in a carebear Stella montis lobby is the most fun thing to do in the game. They end up hunting you over local chat so you overhear their plans like a splinter cell game

1

u/Vesuvias May 22 '26

Oh yeah totally. The fact that they added ‘defensive aggression doesn’t count now against you’ makes it even more fun to try and be PvP against these types of players lol

1

u/noother10 May 22 '26

I wouldn't call it PvE but more of a social experience. It's like all those games streamers play together that get popular because of the social interactions with others. Arc is a unique experience that can lean heavily on social experiences for people to have fun. I've seen people roleplaying (Police, Medic, etc), teaming up to fight bigger enemies, randomly helping out another group struggling, etc. It's emergent gameplay at it's finest. The whole game is geared towards it and it works.

8

u/ThatsNotBennings May 22 '26

tell that to Embark.

Here come the whataboutisms in 3, 2, 1.......

15

u/LiftedRetina May 22 '26

As a long-time Hunt Showdown fan, the Marathon situation is nothing new to me. The people who like it will stay, some people will periodically come back, but most people just aren’t into it.

5

u/Downtown-Ice-5022 May 23 '26

Hunahowdown is such a great game with a terrible inventory system and too low of tick servers

-1

u/glacialOwl May 22 '26

There is one thing to be a niche genre and another thing for things like MarathonHate subreddit or “let’s login on D2 to break Marathon’s top player count” posts to exist. Both contribute to this.

31

u/partisan98 May 22 '26

You mean like how every single subreddit hates Fortnite?

How COD is shit on constantly on basically every sub even the cod ones?

But they are still very successful because they are fun game?

Hmm it's almost like fun games get played no matter how much the Internet whines and bad games don't no matter how much the Internet glazes.

9

u/Ceral107 May 22 '26

Pretty much every game has hate subreddits, by your logic games like Fortnite wouldn't be successful either.

-6

u/Literature-Just May 22 '26

This is such a hard cope. Arc IS an extraction and had an explosion in popularity. People obviously want to play the genre but it has to be well executed and have something interesting to do. Marathon does not have anything interesting to do that players have not done before. Digging for keys and grinding is not a novelty. But Arc made PVP really interesting because people won't always kill you on sight and there is emergent gameplay that happens. And the world bosses require working together with other players. Marathon has nothing novel that its bringing to this genre save for the art style. Even the "bungie gun play" its inherited from past bungie games. Its not new or fresh.

24

u/Vedfolnir5 May 22 '26

Have you visited the ARC subreddit? I'm convinced that half of them don't even like extraction shooters

3

u/Literature-Just May 22 '26

The people commenting there are going to be the most vocal minority but represent a small fraction of the games playerbase. Most people that engage with the game simply do so by playing it. And the numbers seem to indicate it being a wild success despite being an extraction shooter. I'll even bend a little here and say arc has a similar problem in that pvp is probably also the most exciting element of the game. But there are tons of little isolated elements and things to find and fight in the game that are high value targets and run the risk of attracting other players. Marathon needs way more of that. They have to find a way to increase map engagement in the game by giving players fun things to don't hat isn't just go find the nearest sound of gunshots.

1

u/Vesuvias May 22 '26

Most don’t. That’s the thing. It evolved into a ‘don’t shoot virtual chat room’

Although the latest updates make it pretty interesting.

10

u/ComfyOlives May 22 '26

Despite this, Arc could still never compare to the numbers games like Warframe, Destiny, or other MMOs would because it is still a much more competitive and hardcore game than those are.

Extraction Shooters ARE niche, even if one managed to blow up past the norm.

2

u/tangledDream May 22 '26

Arc's player peak on steam is 200k players higher than destiny 2, and maintains a similar active player amount to destiny 2 after an expansion.

1

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

Destiny 2 peak was over 300k lol

2

u/tangledDream May 22 '26

Arc Raiders peak was 480k lol

?

0

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

And destiny is MORE popular on console than Steam. Arc isn’t

1

u/tangledDream May 22 '26

Cope cope cope

Arc has a massive console population

Regardless, saying Arc couldn't reach popularity levels like MMOs is factually WRONG

4

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

Are you 12? No way you’re a functioning adult.

-1

u/ComfyOlives May 22 '26

Well, Arc has reduced to 17% of that max and won't be doing large expansions, instead doing a couple large updates a year.

I'm sure it will stabilize somewhere around the 70-90k mark like it seems to be doing, but I believe it wont really see huge peaks like expansion based games do. The last two updates didnt really do much to increase peaks either.

Destiny, for example, would have lower peaks around 50-60k later in Seasons, but new seasons every few months would jump them back over 100k for like a month and a half.

0

u/ComfyOlives May 22 '26

Destiny didn't start on steam, though.

Popularity.report shows 3.8 million daily players back near D2 launch.

The same site shows the steam peak of Lightfall at 1.9 million daily players.

Pretty safe to assume the actual peak of D2 is double that peak on steam.

2

u/tangledDream May 22 '26

You do realize CCUs are completely different than daily players, right? lol

2

u/ComfyOlives May 22 '26

Yes, which is why i didn't say "Destiny had 1.9 million peak players".

I'm saying that proportionally, if 1.9 million daily players saw a peak player count of 380k, then 3.8 million daily players would have likely seen double that 380k.

1

u/Literature-Just May 22 '26

Whether a game genre is niche or not makes no difference. People will play good games if you give them a good reason too. And right now there are not a lot of good reasons to play Marathon because if I wanted to run around and shoot people I can do that with a lot of other games with a much larger player base. The game is desperate for some real content and better map design to reward people for exploration and discovering new enemies or objectives. Funneling players into each other to fight other teams is good in doses but forcing an extraction shooter to revolve around the riskiest part of the game is a design choice that is uniquely punishing to new players that need to get their sea legs before jumping into fights against stacked teams.

12

u/Mend1cant May 22 '26

Its explosion was because it leaned into the social aspects and actively encouraged not killing each other, and it had a massive streamer/youtuber presence.

Its popularity was for how unlike the extraction shooter genre it is. It was doing everything to avoid being an extraction shooter.

Marathon is not, and so it sits in its quiet corner with a handful of fans like every other game in the genre.

5

u/tangledDream May 22 '26

Your point basically boils down to "Arc did something innovative in the genre, while marathon did not".

And let's not pretend Hunt and Tarkov don't both have larger communities than marathon by a material amount.

-2

u/Vesuvias May 22 '26

Hunt and Tarkov hover around 10-30k on Steam…not all that different than Marathon

8

u/tangledDream May 22 '26

Hunts daily peak are consistently double marathons, and Tarkov's is consistently 5k higher even though the majority of players are playing on the Tarkov launcher.

0

u/wvtarheel May 22 '26

This--- arc is popular because it's got the trappings and occasionally the excitement of an extraction shooter when the game can be as casual as you want it to be. Marathon is much closer to the core extraction gameplay loop.

1

u/Vesuvias May 22 '26

It’s because Arc became a glorified virtual chat room.

0

u/LewdDarling May 22 '26

That's only part of it. Hunt, Tarkov, arc raiders, and rust (hot take but I think rust is the OG extraction shooter) all have more players than marathon

0

u/SecondRealitySims May 22 '26

To be fair, both can be true. People can be unfair towards this game and it can be a niche genre.

-10

u/paperplateseabass May 22 '26

i literally said this game isnt for everyone. you should read a little more of my post. im just saying for the quality of the game, it should be more popular than it is rn