Bungie Says Marathon Flopped Because It Was Too Hard

Bungie has admitted that extraction shooter Marathon failed at launch because it was too hard to attract a mainstream audience.

Marathon was designed as an ultra hardcore PvPvE extraction shooter where repeated death was built into the risk / reward game loop. If you die, you lose all your gear. And not just what you looted while out on the battlefield, but what you brought in. And given how easy it was to die in Marathon, particularly in PvP situations, it could feel like a brutally punishing video game.

Players certainly noticed this and made their feelings clear, even before Marathon launched. At the time, Bungie responded to concerns about its steep, unwelcoming learning curve to say that while the game was a “dangerous climb,” its difficulty could be overcome. The Sony-owned studio tried to make the point that players should play the long game, slowly improving their base stats and gaining access to better items by completing contracts and progressing faction upgrades. But unfortunately for Bungie, many players were immediately put off by the constant failure they experienced simply trying to get to grips with the game. The release of brutally difficult and complex endgame raid, Cryo Archive, in April only doubled down on the sense that Marathon was built for only the most hardcore of shooter fans.

Even former professional Counter-Strike player, Shroud, expressed concern about Marathon’s difficulty, saying that while Cryo Archive offered an incredible experience, it was too hard for casual players. "Cryo Archive is insane,” he said in April. “It's the most elaborate extraction shooter map I've ever seen in a game ever. The loop that they made is truly something special. The problem is, is it too elaborate? Is it too complex? Is it too much of a grind? Is your 9-5 grandma and grandpa going to be able to do it? I don't know."

Now, in detailing radical changes coming to Marathon as part of Bungie’s bid to save the game, developers have talked about what went wrong.

“Launch didn’t go the way we wanted it to,” Kevin Yanes, senior design lead, said in a new video. “We all built a game that we believed would resonate. But I think when you’re so close to something it’s hard to see the bigger picture objectively. And so we made a game that was overly difficult I think for a lot of folks. And that constant loop of failure I don’t think spoke to as many people as we hoped it would.

“While death is the first step for many players, death was the only step.”

Game director Del Chafe III called out Marathon’s PvP, which he called “sweaty.”

“One of the things we learned at launch is that our game is pretty niche,” he said. “It’s for sweaty people who like PvP. And, to be fair, a lot of us on the team like those experiences.”

“We all thought we were gonna bring extractions to the masses, and we didn’t, right?” Yanes added. “We built very much an extraction shooter as it was, as you’ve ever seen one.”

The question now for Bungie and for Sony is, how can the developers turn Marathon around? Certainly part of the plan is to make it more accessible, but adding dedicated PvE modes is the key. Bungie will also add a team deathmatch mode, and expand Perimeter, essentially its tutorial level, to be closer in scope to other full zones.

Bungie's goal seems to be limiting the friction that new players feel and letting them filter themselves into more familiar gameplay types. That should, in theory, let people ease themselves into the traditional extraction mode that's proven so divisive.

The changes to Marathon were revealed in the same breath as Bungie announced a surprise return to the world of Destiny 2. Having initially ditched the game, Bungie will now unvault content, although it is not returning to full live service support. Bungie has said it’s got more Destiny in its future, though. What this turns out to be remains to be seen.

Last week, Bungie denied a rumor that it planned to merge the Destiny and Marathon IPs amid continued questions about the future of both franchises. Based on this week’s news, the plan is to soldier on with Marathon, at least into 2027. The spectre in all this is of course Sony’s ongoing commitment to Marathon. It has backed the game publicly, but some fans are worried about its future. Steam concurrents do not paint the full picture of a multiplatform game, but it’s worth noting that Marathon had a 24-hour peak of 3,285 on Valve’s platform, down from an all-time peak of 88,337 set when the game launched in March.