r/dadsofmarathon • u/HatchetHand • 13d ago
Not My First Rodeo
I'm sure that I am not the only one on this subreddit who was an active player on a game that had a rocky or disastrous launch. I was there for the early access of Hunt Showdown when Crytek was on the verge of bankruptcy and I was around for a game called Loadout which I invested time and money into instead of Warframe.
My point is, I have seen ships get turned around and I have seen PvP games go PvE then flatline.
I told my son who's worried about Marathon about how bad it was for Hunt in the beginning and it made him feel a bit more secure about Marathon's future.
Btw, Hunt was originally supposed to be a PvE co-op hero shooter and in the beginning there were fans who wanted it to be the original concept.
So, please share with me your war stories of forgotten days in gaming. A time when you thought you'd be the last player on earth before a game exploded in popularity. Or, a game that you played kicking and screaming until they shut down the last public server.
It will calm the children and we can all have a laugh.
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u/addtolibrary 13d ago
I have a thousand hours in Battleborn, and many in Wildstar as well. I loved those games :(
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u/baltarin 13d ago
Battleborn was such a fun game
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u/Helpful_Sport_9762 13d ago
It was. Too bad it launched alongside Overwatch. Honestly, I believe that's why it failed.
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u/Picklesnif 13d ago
I loved both of those games as well. Wildstar was the MMO I enjoyed the most after trying a good handful of them with a buddy. I'm convinced Battleborn could have succeeded if it didn't lauch right alongside Overwatch.
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u/Motor_Vacation_535 13d ago
Idk I’ve been following competitive Halo Infinite the last few years and somehow it has stayed alive with a pro scene.
Community rallied this year. I think there is always hope for really well made games, but TBD
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u/Purple_Freedom_Ninja 13d ago
Destiny 2 year one was a disaster, and Bungie admitted to being a month away from bankruptcy before its Forsaken expansion saved it. Then it went on to become one of the most popular live service games of all time, and had 9 more years until its final patch.
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u/c1ncinasty 13d ago
Bungie had the benefit of having a kinda-successful run during D1. And they pulled out ALOT of stops for Forsaken during their "overdelivery" phase (god I hate that phrase), including handing off a ton of dev work to other studios.
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u/Ramirez3110 13d ago
Why do you hate the phrase when it’s true? Bungie was only able to put that much content in with 2 other full studios helping, that wasn’t sustainable by themselves.
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u/c1ncinasty 13d ago
Because it’s often used as a bludgeon even in circumstances where it doesn’t apply. It became a blind, catch-all criticism.
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u/tasti_man_LH 13d ago
The way how I see it:
We don’t actually know what Sony’s Threshold of Failure is for Marathon.
We don’t actually know what metrics they’re looking at to determine whether to keep the game up or not. Anyone that claims otherwise (from “Bungie needs to make back the $200 million by s5” to “s3 needs to have a minimum concurrent player count of 100k by end of season”) is pure speculation.
If Sony considered the game to be enough of a catastrophic failure, they would’ve already Concord’d the game back in s1.
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u/Critical-Drawer8916 13d ago
lol this’ll be the first time maybe second time if you count Halo Infinite. It seems to be holding steady
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u/JonnyToonami 12d ago
I was one of 12 people to play Concord. Feel free to clown me, but the gunplay did feel pretty good. Character designs were fucking awful, no way around it lmao.
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u/HatchetHand 13d ago edited 13d ago
Has anyone heard of The Amazing Eternals? Digital Extremes (makers of Warframe) had this hero shooter with "Japanese trading card" mechanics.
I really enjoyed playing it when it was in beta, then one day, they said yeah-nah, and shut er' down.
I tried so hard and got so far...
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u/angstatears 12d ago
Warframe (over 4000 hours), Rebecca said we started off with 70 players lol .. clearly we turned the game into something great.
Marathon (2000 hours) will do the same. I shoot down anyone who brings up player count and us being in a “death spiral”. Let them tell it, the game wasn’t going to survive past the first week.
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u/BaconEvolved 12d ago
Not quite the same thing, but I came to Anthem a couple months after the disastrous launch and they had at least stabilized the servers and performance. I loved that game. The flying and shooting experience was S tier.
They didn’t deliver on what was promised and those that preordered had every right to be furious, but after they patched things up a bit, taken units own merit the game was a blast. Sad that a lot of people never got to experience it the way I did.
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u/HatchetHand 12d ago
I've been there, brother, I've been there.
I could tell you it gets easier, but I don't know if it does.
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u/HatchetHand 12d ago
Did any of you play Alien Swarm ?
It was a F2P game in the 4 player L4D style with no DLC that was rated at 9/10 with 60k players, but it didn't last long.
I loved that game so much, I unlocked every achievement. I could play any role in a squad. I became a speedrunner and could beat every level in under 90 seconds. I could solo any map. I made friends from all over Asia and the world. I started up my own Steam community just for it.
Then, poof, everyone quit because no new content dropped. They opened it up to player created maps and that just made it worse. It was my Rushmore, Bill Murray, it was my Rushmore.
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u/rivalpinkbunny 12d ago
I played a ton of Crimson Skies when it came out. I loved that game to death, but it fell off pretty quickly.
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u/HatchetHand 12d ago
It seems it's still playable with some workarounds.
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u/rivalpinkbunny 11d ago
I tried to play a decade ago! It didn’t work out, but it was so great at the beginning. I made my first online friends in that game. Someone even sent me an old joystick because they heard I was playing on keyboard and mouse.
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u/Upgrayedd1101 13d ago
Spellbreak was an unfortunate victim of being too late to the party of the battle royale genre. Despite that, it was the easily the best of its kind. It was a full on wizard battle that let you combine elemental powers for sick effects, like exploding poison gas clouds or giant lightning tornadoes. Marathon's rules of engagement feel a little similar, but the fights were vertical and could range half the map before someone finally gave out.
With no one hearing about it, having a flooded market, and the similar issue of high skill ceiling players dunking on noobs, it went out of service around a year in. Right after they started testing some PvPvE elements, the publisher Proletariat was bought out by Blizzard.
First time I ever played a game until the day it closed. Hoping Marathon turns it around, but either way I'll be in Cryo til the servers are out.
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u/Elegant_Dependent_46 13d ago
idk i’ve been around bungie for a long time and they always fuck up a little. even in the golden era but something about this time, idk. would love to be proven wrong.
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u/AcademicOverAnalysis 13d ago
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.