Humbled and Hooked: I Suck at Marathon and I Still Gave It an 8.5

I'll be honest with you, I suck at Marathon. Like I really suck. And I'm okay with sucking because I still think it's one of the most interesting games to come out in a long time. When we talked about it on Inside The Screen my boy Ray said the game is too hard for everybody and the numbers are going to tank because of it. You're not going to meet any of the dad gamers on Marathon. They lose too many kits and they're gone.

And he might be right about that. I still gave it an 8.5.

The world building is the whole point

The thing that hits you first is the aesthetic. The world building is so powerful that it's overstimulating. Everything is new, the sound design, the art, even the UI. And I don't think anybody is really talking about that UI. I don't think I've seen a game really lock in on making the menus feel that good. You hover over something and you can split the stack right there. Every other game you're double clicking or pressing X twice or whatever the case may be. I know that sounds small but when you're looting under pressure that stuff matters.

One of the guys on the pod said the looting can still feel inefficient and the menus are a lot and he gave it a 7. That's a fair argument. There are situations where the looting is inefficient, but I feel like that's the kind of thing they can clean up.

Let the music play

I've said this before and I'm going to say it again. A lot of these new games are pussyfooting around when it comes to music. Everybody's using the same orchestra sound. Every time I get a new game I turn the music off. Marathon is the first one in a while where I let the music play because I was like oh my gosh this is actually good. I definitely think music is an important factor in what makes a game popular and Bungie got that part right.

I never got my raid era

I didn't grow up with Destiny. I never got to have that experience of grouping up with the homies to go do a raid, the whole community event thing. I never got to be a part of that. Tarkov doesn't really do it from what I know and Arc Raiders maybe has something like it. Marathon does and I love that. Which is why I'm kind of mad I've been so busy, because the stuff I missed out on growing up is right there and I'm out here working.

Is it too hard?

Now you might be asking, if the game is that good why are the numbers dropping. Marathon launched on March 5 and hit 88,337 people at once on Steam that month according to SteamDB. By July the monthly peak was 14,809 and since August it's been peaking at a few thousand. That's a big drop and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

Part of that is the difficulty. If you came in from Arc Raiders, which Ray said plays more like a PVE game with some PVP here and there, Marathon is going to feel ruthless. And part of it is something that came up on the pod, everybody was so locked in on the art and the marketing that nobody really thought about the gameplay until they had their hands on it. It's really hard to grasp a game like that until you actually play it. People knew it was an extraction shooter, I just don't think anybody thought it would be this challenging. I went deeper on the marketing side in why video game marketing is broken.

The devs are active though. They update fast and Ray said they fix things same day sometimes. If the next seasons drop something crazy I think people come back. Bungie pushed the big Season 3 content into an update called Symbiosis that lands December 8 with permanent PvE, a new Runner shell and a social space, so we're about to find out.

The robots tell you where gaming is going

I was at a panel at Georgia State recently for gaming and esports and one of the developers said we've been having player versus environment games since 1990. And I was like damn, I wish I said this in the moment, but yeah you were also playing on a 60 hertz monitor with graphics that looked 16 bit. The times have changed.

When I think about the two most recent big player versus player versus environment games they're both going into robots and AI. Arc Raiders has its own robot aesthetic that feels more like Call of Duty realism. Marathon goes the Overwatch and Fortnite direction with it. Both of them are about robots and AI and I think there's something there about what we're all thinking about right now. Even the Runners feel like the kind of heroes we'd follow into anything.

My rating

I was stuck between an 8 and a 9 so I'm giving it an 8.5. I'm clearly not good at it, however it's a game with a real point of view on how it looks, how it sounds and how it feels to move through a menu and we don't get a lot of those anymore. If you're newer to games and Marathon sounds like too much, start with my must play games for first time gamers first.

So I want to know, did Marathon lose you because it was too hard or are you still out there losing kits with me? Come run it back with me in the CXM Discord.