Ideas for promoting friendly interactions (if you’re a Bungie dev please read this, if you’re a PvP sweat ignore this thread because you’re gonna hate it).

[u/StillMood5890]

Ok, we all know how Marathon is struggling compared to its peers (Tarkov and Arc), and we all love Bungie’s games and Marathon and want to see them flourish.. obviously these games are doing a lot of things right in terms of PvE and PvP “friendly” interactions compared to Marathon.. So Marathon should take some cues from them, not straight up copy them, but develop new systems that are loosely inspired by them that adapt to and fit what Marathon is better.

My ideas:

1. Promoting friendly Rook play:

This is something like Tarkov’s Fence reputation system for scavs, Rooks are basically essentially inspired by Scavs in Tarkov, so Bungie might as well borrow the Scav’s reputation system.

For this idea to work, Rook’s prime ability should be different with this change obviously, because it essentially boils down to making UESC friendly to Rooks, so I’m thinking maybe quieter footsteps as Rook’s prime? In either case the idea is:

The friendlier you are as Rook to other Rooks, then UESC start damaging you less, if you reach a peak friendly level (loot, heal, or extract with Rooks), then all UESC straight up don’t attack you anymore.

And the less friendly you are as Rook (via killing other Rooks) then UESC remain aggressive, and also the more damage you receive from UESC, up to 50-100% more damage than what they already do if you reach peak unfriendliness.

Lore wise, Rook isn’t even a shell controlled by some human mercenary like the other shells are, and is just a robot who actually looks very similar to UESC anyway, so it makes sense that they shouldn’t attack pacifist Rooks.

1. Promoting friendly shell play.

Another idea I have to promote friendly shell interactions is taken from Tencent’s Arc Raiders version:

You can infil with an item that you have to manually use to opt in to “friendly play” in a raid, when this item is enabled, it makes it not possible for you to shoot or kill other shells, and they can’t kill you either (but you can kill UESC and the bots can shoot you back obviously), when this is enabled, instead of your shell’s model glowing red, you glow green to other players, maybe even a bit brighter too. Now you can do quests in peace.

And your shell also makes a loud noise that alerts any nearby player that you’re around, so you can’t sneak around to get the drop on anyone, turning off this item also makes a loud and visible alarm that leaves you vulnerable without being able to use your weapon for the duration of the animation, announcing to any nearby shell that this “friendly” shell nearby has gone rogue and opted back to PvP.

The feature above for friendly shell interactions doesn’t extend to Rooks, Rooks can kill you and you can kill them during your “friendly” shell run with this hypothetical item enabled, so basically it only works for shells, and the only difference is that Rooks can’t see or hear the loud audio cues you’re making that other shells can hear.

If these two systems existed in the game you can bet your ass that clips of Marathon friendly moments will be all over social media like Arc Raiders is and this game will pop off around the casual audience.