For the record, you should know that a member of the editorial team often offers to join him in putting on jogging pants and going running with a bib on his back “for work” according to him. Over and over, the answers vary between “no” and “absolutely out of the question”, but the guy remains optimistic and continues to believe that one day, someone will give up his aquapony competition and say yes. Finally, he embraced the nature of his proposal, that of an endurance race and not a speed one.
An anecdote which apparently has absolutely no connection with the topic of the day. Marathon is not so much a video game about this “fabulous” sporting activity asa fourth opus resurrecting a universe launched in the 90s by Bungiehere taking the form of a extraction shooter spatial. Except that the title intends to appreciate over time and that this race quickly got the better of my endurance.
It is therefore not no question here of giving you a test of a Marathon mastered at the tips of the nails, but go back point by point on all these little things which will have exhausted my patiencemy only pleasure having been caused by my renunciation.
A long-running Marathon
Let’s first go back together to the genesis of the game. It is developed by Bungie, the studio responsible forHalo and of Destiny become in recent years owned by Sony and therefore from PlayStation. Which does not prevent Marathon of also released on Xbox Series and PC. The title has known a particularly long development for an extraction shooter, over several years with release date postponements. The alpha of the game had been particularly harsh with our hopes and internal reorganizations suggested that despite the promotional campaign, there were not many people left of “Destiny and Halo” at Bungie and even fewer on Marathon.
Fortunately, the marketing team has done a lot of work for months to raise expectations and we began to see a light at the end of the tunnel, despite the still recent release of a huge direct competitor, Arc Raiders. A few days before the release, I was able to get my hands on the PS5 controller during a Slam Server, a sort of free quasi-finalized beta version with dedicated serversto test the game without downtime and allow the team to correct a few more flaws.
Regarding the story, this Marathon follows in the footsteps of its predecessors. The year is 2893 and humanity has received a message from the lost colonizer ship, the Marathon (those who have played the initial trilogy will understand). As the UESC governing body sets out to investigate this mystery, powerful corporations hire Runners, synthetic mercenaries harboring human consciences, to plunder the resources of these distant colonies right under the UESC’s nose. Between the Runners and the corporate factions, the competition is on!
A bold choice that will divide
I’m not going to pretend, I never played the original games, but the title plays very well without particularly knowing the lore. The main elements of the story are very well described in the preamble and the rest can be discovered on the ground. Or the principle of gender. The extraction shooter being a sub-genre of FPS inviting the player to explore the map to complete missions and accumulate loot before escaping. In the area, we face both AI enemies and other players, thus combining PVE and PVP. A mechanism recently brought up to date by the popularity ofArc Raiders.
I’ll start by talking about the elephant in the room, the one at the heart of the identity of Marathon : its artistic direction. Bungie made a very clear choice visually, focused on a cubic aspect, a sort of homage to the first games, with a very colorful, very fluorescent environment. In an era where triple A games tend to look similar graphically, avoiding risk-taking, it cannot be denied that Marathon conspicuously stands out from the crowd. It would be in bad faith not to welcome the initiative and not credit it to the studio.
An artistic direction so different that it has the counterpart of not allowing the happy medium. That is to say that you either love it or you hate it. I don’t hide it, I hated it. I didn’t manage to immerse myself in it, beyond the flaws of the environment which I will come back to. The game visually gave me a headache, too saturatedincluding in its very epileptic cutscenes or loading times. I never felt comfortable there and from then on, I already knew that the experience was not going to be pleasant.
Marathon shoots himself several times in the foot
However, Marathon could make up for it elsewhere and still be an excellent game if I overrode its desire to blind me. Except that if you have already seen or read some feedback, you know that the room could accommodate a second elephant: son interface. Before going onto the field, this is the first connection we have with the game and this menu is literally not intuitive.
He is confused, extremely overloadedwe don’t immediately understand where we are, the usefulness of this or that object, the fonts and icons have no graphic coherence and I stopped counting the submenus that were useless or too similar to another. We alternate between a surplus of information and a total absence. Silk, for example, is a “currency” that can be used in the future battle pass. How do I know? I went looking on the internet since the game didn’t explain it to me and I didn’t understand why it was indicated to me in red.
No comparison option in the inventory (or I didn’t find it), a hidden skill tree, an armory (faction shop) where health items are ridiculously overpriced, free boxes (free basic equipment) that you have to remember to unequip, mission rewards that you have to manually and individually collect… The list of “constraints” continues to grow and forces the player to thoroughly explore the nooks and crannies of these menus, the nature of each item, the subtle difference between two weapons. In short, patience is a virtue, as is perseverance.
Here again, I touch on a point which can be debated. Since when did the requirement fundamentally become a default? For my part, I have nothing against a little challenge, on the contrary. Except that here, I haven’t even really started playing yet Marathon overheats the pan. I feel less a conscious desire to force myself to a certain discipline than a sort of big mess that cannot be said.
A too vague finish line
And the game in all this? Here again, I had the impression ofa lack of overall coherence, on each aspect of the gameplay. And if certain details can still be corrected, or will be once the title is released, the work seems too major for several of Bungie’s choices to remain.
On the two cards that I was able to testI was struck by the disparity of the environments. I was able to find worked interiorsin particular with specific color codes at times, such as empty exteriorswithout soul, with a lack of finish in the textures. Although the maps are not very large, they are difficult to navigateto know what might be useful to do or to loot. Many times I found myself wandering aimlessly or mindlessly following my two teammates.
Although there is different character classes (fairly classic), their specificities are not marked enough to weigh in combat, including in active or passive skills. Movements are rigidwith a ridiculously short stamina bar where our character finds himself exhausted after a double jump, becoming dead weight for several seconds afterwards. A movement ability that does not stick to the incredibly fast TTK (time to kill). It only takes a few balls to put a real player on the ground. When we come across them.
Difficult to say if it was because it was Server Slam (although there seemed to be a lot of people there), but I encountered very few enemy players during my game phases. And when you come across them, you then have to know how to differentiate between allied players and adversaries or between real or AI enemies. Everything is easily confused. There is, however, one major detail to differentiate the latter two: the AI is much less easy to bring down. In other words, I found the PVE dimension and the PVP dimension extremely poorly calibratedmaking both equally uninteresting. By the way, on console, help to aim it well supported will pretty much revive the console vs PC debate.
The sound, too, has no coherence since we can hear the heavy noise of enemy robots from quite a distance away, where the shots are rather distant and it is difficult to differentiate the number of enemies and their directions by their steps. We may think we are facing one adversary, when there are much more. The sound of the weapons is strangely homogeneous and I rarely had the opportunity to understand what I was thinking.
A new Concord?
I sincerely think that Marathon is the kind of game that can be appreciated over time and that its originality, its high standards, allow it to stand out from the crowd or from more accessible games. Besides, that’s why I avoided comparing it too much to titles like Apex Legends or to Arc Raiders while there are many points in common, often to the disadvantage of Marathon. Simply because I think that Bungie’s game is not intended for the same type of players.
However, it is impossible to deny that, for my part, I didn’t take any pleasure in starting games and there wasn’t a time when I had fun in the gameincluding when events became more rhythmic. I was bored and constantly found the time long, experiencing the experience as a constraint.
I didn’t appreciate the artistic direction, I didn’t understand why take on the latter to give birth to such simplistic gameplay behind it. Ultimately, I just asked myself one question: is it that Marathon has something that really differentiates it from its competitors, to its advantage, in its design, apart from its AD? Not from what I could see.
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As it stands, I believe, on my modest scale, that the success of Marathon would have been easier to perceive in a free-to-play model. There, at 40 euros per gameit is difficult to assume that it will succeed in attracting a large community of players when the competition is already well established.
The other question is about the future of triple A, constantly overtaken lately by titles with much smaller budgets. Marathon unfortunately has everything to become a new Concord and be buried prematurely, thus placing a very dark veil over the future of Bungie.
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