No other game looks like Marathon. That’s both one of its strongest assets and biggest challenges as players flock to the extraction shooter’s pre-launch beta weekend. Some players are complaining that there’s too much visual clutter and accusing the maximalist UI of overloading their brains. Lack of ammo and PVP encounters are also a concern. Bungie says it hears the feedback and is currently looking into each of these pain points.
Start playing Marathon and the first thing you’re likely to encounter is being utterly baffled by how to navigate the menus. This is no Call of Duty, for better and for worse. With no social hub to hang out at, main menu is essentially a juiced up cyberpunk computer terminal that both conveys information about your current contracts and inventory and also communicates the bulk of the game’s world building through lore dumps, music, tone, and the game’s graphic realism art style.
“This is hands down one of the most complex menus I’ve ever seen in my life,” Ninja said during his stream.
This carries over into the rest of the game. Tons of different fonts, colors, and shapes all vibing together. Some players love the unique and noisy visual language. Others find it oppressive. There’s like 20 different combinations of fonts, boldness levels, sizes, spacing, all caps vs regular caps, all on one menu page Just an absolute eye sore,” the stream Kelski wrote on X. They REALLY need to pull back on the whole ‘abstract’ thing for the UI.”
I’m honestly really happy with the game and the depth I’m seeing, all the consumables looking the same are the biggest problem for me tho
— GreenPig 👾🐉 (@Greenpig117) February 27, 2026
The counter-point to that is that it looks awesome. Every moment of the game feels like its begging to be quietly poured over and marveled at like a beautiful coffee table book. That’s all but impossible during matches when the timer’s going and there are threats around every corner. For the rest of the game, it takes some getting used too. Yes, Marathon runs on a loot loop. Get in, grab stuff, get out. But coming in and expecting to grind up the rarity chain and rapidly fill up XP and faction loyalty meters is the wrong approach. Once you slow down it’s easier to marvel at the design rather than feel attacked by it, though there’s probably a happier medium in-between.
Marathon and the great ammo recession
Other big pain points being debated are the lack of ammo. Players using sponsored packages load up into matches with enough for only a couple of encounters. If you don’t loot the security forces you kill or quickly find some caches in nearby facilities, you’re gonna have a bad time. That makes the early stages of Marathon while you’re still building up your inventory feel harsh and overly-tuned in favor of survival scarcity. An unfortunate feeling for new players, especially when shooting the guns feels so dang good.
But Marathon has a beginner mode that matches you with fewer players and makes it easier to just go and loot a few things and escape. You can go in as Rook and just solo scavenge to build up your inventory. Or you can just be super judicious about not wasting bullets. Again, there are pluses and minuses to Marathon’s ammo economy that make it hard to come down clearly on one side of it being right or wrong. More generous bullets would skew the experience toward something different and definitely something much more approachable at launch.
Did @Bungie forget to put ammo in Marathon during runs?
Literally explored half the map on a run and didn’t find a single stick of ammo. Had no ammo to engage others for more either.
An exercise in time wasting and an example of poor design/balancing. pic.twitter.com/36DkqjEqls
— NIB (@nib95_) February 27, 2026
PVP encounters are in a similar bucket. It’s possible to go entire matches without encountering other players. This can make the game feel quiet and boring. You get in and get out with more stuff in your bag but no fun stories to tell. This was a problem back during the original 2025 alpha test as well. I think part of the issue is that Bungie doesn’t want every session to just feel like a ruthless meat grinder where only the fittest survive and have fun. Is the answer to have more teams per map? Spawn them closer together so they are more likely to fight over points of interest earlier one? Time will tell.
Bungie followed up on day one of Marathon’s server slam with a long list of bugs, issues, and gameplay concerns it’s currently looking at. “We’ve heard your thoughts and want to hear more!” the studio wrote in response to UI concerns, directing players to weigh in on the Discord server. The same goes for PVP. “We’ve seen reports that PvP isn’t frequent enough overall,” the developers continued. “If you’re looking for more PvP, we have some recommendations: Perimeter (Beginner) intentionally infils fewer Runners – head to Perimeter and then Dire Marsh for a greater challenge.”
Funniest of all, however, was one potential reason the studio gave for why you might not be seeing as many other players in Marathon as you’d expect: UESC security robots. The NPCs can be deadly, downing unsuspecting players in just a few shots. They also quickly swarm entire areas if you try to fight them rather than breaking off the engagement. As a result, Bungie suggested that entire teams are getting wiped before they can encounter one another. Brutal. Naturally, the response has to that has been a call from players to have UESC nerfed. We’ll see how it goes. The server slam doesn’t end until March 2.
