The knife in Marathon is deadly. Especially after you unlock melee upgrades and if you equip the right mods. Some players have been complaining about being killed in just two hits with it. Those people are cowards.
“We’re looking to make some changes in the next couple of patches to adjust some of the outliers in the combat space that we’ve both seen in our observations and heard from your feedback across all of the various (and plentiful) channels we watch,” game director Joseph Ziegler recently wrote on X. “Some of these changes will be likely coming in the next patch, the next set will likely be arriving a week after.”
One of his targets is the knife. “The Knife scaling too easily to god like power levels,” he wrote in a list of problem areas. A civil war within the Marathon community immediately erupted.
“In no world should you be able to kill an entire team in 6 seconds with 6 knife melees in a game with such high risk high reward, only skill should be rewarded,” one player responded. Another fired back, “Knife is the counter to shot guns / purple and gold shields…do not need nerf this guy just will cry about anything.”
One of the learning curves in Marathon is that you spend a lot of your time inside buildings full of tight spaces and limited fields of view, and you quickly discover that most guns are useless in most of the encounters that happen in such environments. This is why WSTR combat shotguns are currently so favored, especially in Outpost’s Pinwheel and the maze-like Cryo Archive end-game map. The only way to beat a shotgun, especially for under-kitted players, is with the knife.
“As many have said, the knife is the great equalizer,” wrote user mirrorvacation on the Marathon subreddit. “If you get outplayed to let someone be close enough to you with a knife, it’s on you for losing that fight, not that the knife is ‘overpowered.’ The root of the problem is not that the knife is OP, it’s that players are not showing the knife enough respect.
The knife is free. It doesn’t require ammo. You don’t reload it. You barely have to aim it. Some Marathon players think this is unfair. No doubt many of these complaints come from filthy one-percenters who hate seeing their 10K backpacks looted by sponsored-kit sickos.
The knife reinforces an important and central truth that’s always lying just below the surface in Marathon: no matter how much you gear up, no matter how much you prepare, no matter how much you concentrate, it only takes one wrong turn for it to all come crashing down.