Marathon Anecdotes
Preface
A few clarifiers. I played Destiny a lot before Taken King, but I got disappointed with how long it was taking for new content, so I never played anything after that. I’ve also played a few extraction games, mainly Hunt: Showdown and Dark and Darker. Those are still the first and second best extraction games I’ve played.
Rough Beginnings
The first time I played Marathon was during the Server Slam. I distinctly remember not liking it that much. We had some fun shooting at people, but we fell off right away. For the first time ever, I played a game released by Bungie and didn’t care for it.
In the past, I got sucked into every Bungie game religiously. Playing all night, skipping school, seeing the crosshair when I closed my eyes. Yet with Marathon, I just felt bored, so I moved on.
I didn’t buy the game day one. My friend did, and he kept talking it up and saying how much fun he was having. I figured it would still be worth playing just to spend time with him, even if the game ended up being mediocre. By pure bad luck, my friend had an emergency come up right as I was loading in. I was annoyed, but life happens.
I decided I was going to run a few rounds anyway, mostly just to get past some early grinding. What followed was some of the most fun I’ve had in a multiplayer game in a long time.
Luck Be an Autofill
I meant to queue into solo games, but I accidentally left autofill on. The two partners that loaded in were a teenager who barely said anything, and a really jovial guy with a southern accent. He was showing so much joy and wonder at everything that it was hard not to join in.
I told him, “You seem so nice and kind.”
He responded, “Thank you sir!”
Then I said, “You wouldn’t happen to play a lot of Arc Raiders, right?”
He goes, “Yes, I do play Arc Raiders.”
So I told him, “Well, I hate to tell you, but most extraction shooters aren’t as nice.”
And as those words left my lips, a sniper shot him in the head, an assassin smoked the area, and we got wiped immediately.
Not a great moment as a gamer, but it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I was cackling even while loading into the next match.
Concord 3, the Destiny Killer
In many ways, Concord’s failure was a positive thing. It showed what happens when a team isolates itself in toxic positivity and refuses to consider what players actually want. Unfortunately, something else happened after Concord’s release: gamers got a taste for blood.
A game failing that hard, that publicly, made part of the community feel genuinely excited at the thought of another game being tarnished. They got another “win” with Highguard shutting down a few weeks after release, and people started calling it Concord 2. It felt like some players were getting a cruel thrill from watching games collapse.
I can understand wanting to knock massive companies down a peg, but the vitriol didn’t sit right with me. It was toxic even toward innocent creatives.
When Marathon came around, it felt like another mass hate campaign started, and not purely on the merit of the game itself. It seemed to come from three specific sources.
First were the Concord crusaders, the people who wanted it to fail just for the fun of it. Second were the scorned Destiny players who, rightfully, have grown distrustful of Bungie. And third was a more gross possibility that may or may not exist: people betting on Marathon losing.
There are betting sites now where people wager on superfluous events. I’ve seen bets on things as silly as whether the weather will hit a certain temperature. I don’t have a problem with betting in a vacuum, as long as no one is being taken advantage of, but the kinds of things people bet on are often easy to influence.
That seemed like it could have been the case here. People wanted their money from betting on Marathon’s downfall, so they targeted it.
The reason I say they may or may not exist is because I wanted to be honest. I couldn’t find any past betting info, so I don’t know if there was actually a bet for Marathon specifically. But after seeing the kind of silly stuff people gamble on, it felt plausible. I heard it through the grapevine and it just sounded believable, but I can’t claim it as fact. You’re an adult, so you can come to whatever conclusion you want.
The Now and the When
Marathon in its current state has only a few problems that stand out to me. The user interface is really annoying at first. I got used to it, but they should improve it if they want new players to stick around.
There’s also some balancing issues with items and maps that feel unfun to play against. I don’t mind challenge, but there are definitely things that could be tuned to improve enjoyment. There are also a few bugs with interactions and AI here and there. I haven’t experienced too many of them in my 100-plus hours, but I’ve had a few moments where bad bug timing screwed me.
Marathon, if given time to cook, is shaping up to be a truly amazing experience. Cryo was one of the coolest raid experiences I’ve ever had, both inside and outside the game.
They had an ARG that launched way before release and kept going after the game dropped. It was genuinely cool, and then the map came out. It was so brilliant, and it still is. It’s only playable near the weekend right now, so I’ll be playing it today.
The map design, the puzzles, the fights, and the intensity are exhilarating.