After over a year of silence, Bungie has provided an update on the development progress of its extraction shooter, Marathon. The lengthy video surprisingly lacks detailed information, with only a hint of future playtests scheduled for 2025. The update, delivered by game director Joe Ziegler, functions more as a reintroduction to Bungie's latest shooter rather than a substantial update. Ziegler takes time to explain what an extraction shooter entails, highlighting the high-risk, high-reward nature of the genre, while also offering brief insights into how the game's different classes might operate. This aligns with much of what we already know about Bungie's shooter, making it a gameplay update light on new details.
In the video, Ziegler briefly discusses two of the game's Runners—the term used for Marathon's playable characters. Each description suggests that Marathon is drawing inspiration from existing hero shooters. The first, codenamed 'Thief,' implies a gameplay style that can be inferred from the name alone. The second, codenamed 'Stealth,' is described as using deception to gain an advantage on the battlefield, with Ziegler noting his enjoyment of playing as the character in recent tests.
Ziegler emphasized that Marathon is not yet in a state where the team can showcase it, pointing out the varying stages of development for different elements. 'Where the game is at right now, there's a variety of different things at different states inside of the game. Some things are a little more complete, like our environments are starting to come together in a really beautiful way. Some of the character models we've been iterating through; they're coming together but they're not fully there yet. Our enemy models are still kind of in an early state so we're still iterating through things to make those land in a strong way,' said Ziegler.
'It's a little early to show you all of it in one piece,' he continued. 'But as you've noticed, as many of you are familiar with if you're familiar with game development, all of these things are on track. They're not all together, but when they all do come together we really, really are looking forward to showing you what that looks like and play.' Ziegler concluded by inviting interested players to wishlist the game on Xbox Series X, PS5, and Steam, where store pages for Marathon are now available. This marks the first time Bungie has discussed Marathon since its announcement in May 2023, when it stated that the next update would include gameplay footage. Marathon is still slated for release in 2025, although the Steam listing simply reads 'Coming soon'.
Source link: https://www.gamespot.com
