Is Bungie gearing up for Marathon 2.0? It’s hard to know. While the studio hasn’t announced anything that bold, fans could be forgiven for reading into the recent teases around its next content drop as hints for a more ambitious reimagining of the extraction shooter in the future. One thing that is clear is that Marathon isn’t as popular as Bungie wanted it to be.
“Marathon is an important part of shaping where Bungie goes next, but it was never intended to replace Destiny,” the studio wrote in a new blog post about how Bungie is approaching the future. “The game launched to strong critical reception, and the players who embraced Marathon connected deeply with what makes it distinct. At the same time, it did not reach as many players as we had hoped, and we also know and understand that the game needs to evolve.”
What does evolving Marathon mean? For now, it means the end of a seasonal model and investment in a new PvE mode dropping in a December update called Symbiosis. The studio says Marathon needs to grow beyond its current extraction shooter “genre constraints” to become a “deeper survival experience.” That doesn’t mean Marathon is ditching PvP though. It sounds more like an “all of the above” approach. Bungie is promising “meaningful experiences whether you prefer cooperative PvE, competitive PvP, or the unpredictable tension of Marathon PvPvE.”
If Bungie was planning on pulling the plug on Marathon sooner rather than later, I wouldn’t expect these sorts of commitments to be outlined so explicitly in a post about the studio’s future. At the same time, no live-service game’s runway is unlimited, and Bungie called Destiny “foundational” to its future. The same was not said about Marathon.
While it’s impossible for me to ascertain from a technical standpoint what would be feasible to add to Marathon down the line, it’s certainly easy to imagine its current and future maps serving more as experiences based around PvE grinding and world building that expand the game’s story rather than just the tension of multiplayer. The narrative potential in Marathon is endless. Everything about the game’s look and feel has a strong identify that makes you want to keep coming back.
Of course, actually turning that potential into a sustainable game loop that does in fact keep players coming back is much easier said than done. Bungie said it’ll have more to share on Marathon‘s future in later this week.