As Marathon‘s first season draws to a close, Bungie has left players with a fascinating sci-fi world to chew on and some interesting questions to ponder. Where the extraction shooter’s story will go in the future is anyone’s guess, but according to creative director Julia Nardin, the development team already has plans for what the “next few years” of the game’s evolving mystery on Tau Ceti IV will look like.
“We know where we want to take the story over the next few years, but I don’t want to say it’s completely ‘locked in’ because it’s important to us that our players be able to help shape it,” she recently told Gamesradar. Nardin said player input into the narrative is “part of the magic of playing a live service game.”
Marathon revolves around corporate factions paying gig workers called runners to imprint copies of their consciousnesses inside artificial bodies called shells and scavenge for valuable loot and data among the ruins of an abandoned space colony and its derelict ship in orbit. While the story of what happened to the colonists and a rogue AI aboard the Marathon colony ship remains a static backstory players will be able to discover whenever they choose to jump into the game, the game’s broader world-building will continue “evolving in ways that are informed by its past and a future that excites our players.”
“It’s also important that players can jump into Marathon at any time,” Nardin explained. “They’ll always be able to uncover the mysteries of Tau Ceti’s past while experiencing its present. We want every season to be a new entry point, and for new players to be able to understand what’s going on regardless of how long we’ve all been running.”
Big plans but how much runway?
Season 2 is currently set to kick off in early June, and Bungie has currently teased various updates to the game to carry it through August. One of the big questions facing Sony’s latest live service game is what kind of player base it needs to sustain it and how long it will continue investing to see if that threshold can be reached. The company hasn’t released official sales or player numbers, but recent estimates point to potentially over 2 million copies sold, with the majority of fans playing on PC.
Nardin’s comments are the second signal from Bungie that it’s not giving up on Marathon anytime soon. The first was buried at the end of a PC optimization blog post that was widely shared near the end of March. “We are in it for the long haul with Marathon,” it stated. “We look forward to many years of steady improvements to every aspect of the game.”
That doesn’t mean plans can’t change or that Sony might cut things short if post-launch support remains too expensive relative to Marathon’s initial launch success. But it does suggest that existing fans have only scratched the surface of what Bungie hopes to offer over the life of the game.
