No new release date yet. The next update from Bungie will be in the Fall. Quite frankly, I thought the game would just come out and die to cut their losses.
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Original Marathon was really great. While you’re waiting for BUNGIE to drop this turd you should play the open source remake Aleph One.
It’s available on Steam for free as Classic Marathon.
And whatever this new Marathon is it bears exactly zero relation to the original. Innovative, original, single player experience vs derivitave, cut and paste multiplayer “live service” grift.
I am not optimistic in the slightest.
But the Marathon trilogy was really a bog standard FPS of the era that was mostly tied together with a completely out there story that was told almost exclusively via text logs.
So, a bog standard whatever buzz word genre it is at this point tied together with blog posts and youtube videos would actually be keeping with tradition.
Marathon was pretty innovative at the time. The fact that there was any form of plot at all was unique in the action and shooter genres. It was the first major release with free look and being able to aim up and down at all. Plus reloading weapons, dual wielding weapons, weapon models visible on the player in multiplayer, plus network voice chat pretty much all of which have become standard in shooters today.
The fact that there was any form of plot at all was unique in the action and shooter genres.
No. It wasn’t.
There is this mindset that all that existed was DOOM (which actually did some interesting things narratively. I will always love that you actually die at the end of Episode 1 and don’t realize it until Episode 3 and you realize you were in Hell the past hour or two).
Marathon 1 came out in 1994 and built on Pathways into Darkness (1993… and I think actually did a better job of coupling narrative to gameplay than Marathon and Durandal). It came out the same year as System Shock and the year after CyClones (woefully underrated). Both of which also heavily relied on text bits but also, in my opinion, did a much better job of tying that narrative into the level/encounter design itself. Something Marathon… kind of wouldn’t really do until Infinity in 1996 where there is even more competition.
It was the first major release with free look and being able to aim up and down at all.
Again, CyClones and System Shock
Plus reloading weapons, dual wielding weapons, weapon models visible on the player in multiplayer,
“Tactical” shooters had already existed and I want to say there were a few DOOM Engine games that had reloading by this point?
Weapon models? I doubt it, but sure. Voice chat? Sure? That sounds real fun over sub 56k internet.
None of which changes Marathon classic mostly just being a “generic” FPS with a wall of crazy lore bible used to make the log entries.
To be clear: I LOVE the Marathon Trilogy. But if you actually look at what the games were, rather than what we wanted them to be… they were great writing, awkward level design, and decent shooting.
I love the callout that the story was delivered via text logs, as if voice acting was typically present in anything except FMV-based games in that time period. “Bog standard FPS” is a really funky term for an era when there were only really a few well-known FPS games out there at all.
You’ve got to remember that Marathon 1 was released in 1994, the same year Doom II was released. What else was there at that point? You really had Doom, Marathon, Pathways Into Darkness (also a Bungie title and only sort of an FPS at all), Wolfenstein 3D, System Shock, Hexen / Heretic, and some really niche ones that most people had never even heard of at the time, never mind now.
My buddy was a huge fan of it. From what I could tell, it’s biggest two gimmicks were that it ran on Mac and it was an fps with story.
I think the Mac thing was the biggest advantage. It meant that it was forbidden fruit that the vast majority of us could never play but MAYBE saw the box at a Circuit City. And then, fast forward a decade or so, and Halo comes out and suddenly EVERYONE is curious about the games that Bungie are totally referencing to a meaningful degree… and nobody played them or they MAYBE booted up Aleph One once and were scared off.
And I already ranted about how “FPS with story” is not some miraculous thing that didn’t exist… That is one of those things that really bother me because so many people just assume there was nothing but iD until Half-Life (or even Call of Duty).
But yeah. Mandalore Gaming did a few videos on Pathways->Marathon Trilogy that are REALLY good and convey the useful bits. And the reality is… they were good for their time but they weren’t mind blowing. And the narrative, while fun to read lore on, is also the kind of thing that you can completely ignore… and probably won’t even understand unless you find the hidden terminals and cross reference them with EVERYTHING else.
Which… kind of reminds me of Dark Souls come to think of it.
The fact that it ran on a Macintosh meant I could play it on the school computers during study hall.
Marathon really was best in class when it came to first person thriller shooters.
Why would they use that brand, that hardly anyone knows today, to do something completely different?
It was a single word title that they own. It’s probably how Prey 2017 used the same title as Prey 2006.
That one really baffles me. Prey 2017 would have been right up my alley, but I completely ignored it because I didn’t like Prey 2006. By the time I discovered that it was a game I’d have been interested in, I picked it up on sale for $10 or so. I wonder how many other people had similar experiences.
Part of the confusion is that there was a different Prey game being worked on a couple years earlier that actually was connected to Prey 2006, but that project was canceled and the studio working on it closed.
Given the quick turnaround between Prey 2 being canceled and Prey 2017 launching, I have to assume that Bethesda just took a separate project that Arkane was working on and slapped the “Prey” name on it to try to save face and show that the IP was still alive and well after the sequel was canceled.
Honestly, much like with Marathon but on a shorter time scale, I think they just bet that there aren’t enough fans of the old one to be precious about the name. The name had very little to do with why I (still) haven’t played Prey 2017.
No idea. I never liked Doom or Wolfenstein because it was just mindless violence, which gets old quick.
But Marathon had a universe and a story and characters and puzzles AND mindless violence.
Maybe they just let the marketing folks determine what was popular and mimicked that.
That’s really cool. I had no idea that the original games were remade:
Classic Marathon: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2398450/Classic_Marathon/
Classic Marathon 2: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2398490/Classic_Marathon_2/
Classic Marathon Infinity: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2398520/Classic_Marathon_Infinity/
Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.
There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.
Remember when Bungie made good games?
Becoming a dim, distant memory sadly…
Having to replace or pay for all the stolen art assets will do that…
The art isn’t even the biggest issue, the playtest was already reviewing poorly before everybody discovered the art was stolen.
Could it be that people just don’t want yet another fairly generic live service PvP extraction shooter? No, can’t be.
The stolen art is a much bigger problem for Bungie in a legal sense. They (and other studios) put out mediocre shit all the time and promise to fix it. I’m sure the poor play test contributed but the stolen art is likely the cause for this delay.
They now have to scan every single asset in the game to make sure the stolen art is no longer there and that’s just the stolen art they know about. There might be more stolen art in there, who knows.
Now that the controversy is public the original artist could easily find a lawyer to go against Bungie if more stolen art is found in the final release. If Bungie gets sued they might have to pull the game from storefronts.
I’m actually almost surprised they didn’t just pull it entirely after this. It’s not like it’s just one or two assets, the entire goddamn art style ripped off that artist.
to somewhat defend Bungie, you can’t own an art style. The person whose work Bungie ripped off has a case for the specific assets that are clearly her (I think the artist was a woman?) work. However assets that are inspired by her work but aren’t exactly her work is completely fair.
But that actually makes Bungies situation even worse because they don’t even know how many artists they might’ve ripped off. Could be just this one, could be five, could be a dozen. They don’t know. IMO serves them right because they clearly don’t learn from their mistakes.
Oh for sure, I get that. It’s not exactly something you can copyright. But when the entire art style heavily leverages stolen assets, that’s not a good look - I imagine they’re stuck redoing nearly everything from scratch just so they can be sure to remove anything that was stolen.
I have zero faith in anything Bungie does though until Pete Parsons bites the curb and the studio becomes developer-owned though so I’m sure something will slip through the cracks
What is that?
An extraction shooter from Bungie, wearing the skin of a game that company made 30 years ago, that didn’t test well.
What? That’s surprising honestly that they aren’t doing destiny 3 or something. I know the final shape just came out but like damn. Extraction shooter is a risk because every single one fails within months. Arc Raiders will also most likely bomb a few weeks after release. (I got to test it, was MEH at best, hopefully they add some stuff to do)
I could imagine that they didn’t want to do something called “Destiny 3”, because people would expect that to be better than Destiny 2, which is virtually impossible, if you’re gonna start over from scratch, with how many years of development have gone into Destiny 2 by now…
Bungie put a 10 year life span in destiny 2 when it came out. So… I’d assume destiny 3 would be after then
What the data pointed to, with tests going around the same time, is that Arc Raiders will likely hit and Marathon will likely bomb very quickly. Destiny isn’t proving to logistically be a solution to their problems either. As we’ve learned more about Bungie since the Sony acquisition, it appeared that they banked on their success continuing forever, but it was very much running out.
