Marathon, as they say, has hands. This weekend, Marathon players got their first taste of the third map in the extraction shooter, Outpost. It's a small map offering tight corridor fights as you face off against other teams and beefy AI UESC bots to grab security clearances in a puzzle-like run for the best loot in the game so far. It is...extremely hard.
Marathon, in general, is very tough. At baseline, you have the extraction shooter concept of losing all your loot, of course. But it has a very fast time to kill, AI enemies that can shred you almost as easily as players, and now, it seems, maps that are more difficult than nearly anything else in the genre. And there's still the actual hardest map to go, Cryo Archive, which players are currently trying to solve and ARG to unlock. It will have the most complicated mechanics to date, bring the most dangerous AI and host the most dangerous players with the best gear. And of course, if you die, you lose your entire, hard-earned kit.
Is this fun? Is this awful? Is this good for the game? Is it bad? That depends on who you ask, but there are two main sides to this.
Marathon is a flashback to those early, extremely unforgiving days of Tarkov, an era many miss in this age of ARC Raiders skewing more and more casual in time. It's a challenge on a level that few games offer, combining two difficult genres, extraction shooters and roguelikes, plus some Apex Legends-ish combat layered on top.
This is, for many, exactly what they want to see. I'm slowly seeing some of the top streamers convert over (Shroud said ARC was like "Hello Kitty Adventures" after playing Marathon). Destiny 2 PvP lords are giddy with glee about how hard this is, long starved of challenge (and content). And there are those new to the genre who appreciate the difficulty and are enjoying themselves. For now, anyway.
I think the obvious downside here is that this is going to put a pretty fixed ceiling on Marathon's playerbase, and the game is simply too hard for many players. That's not a judgment, not a "git gud" accusation, it's just a fact, and you are going to see many bouncing as a result. That happened already with the server slam, and why the debut of Marathon wasn't exactly the blockbuster result Sony or Bungie was probably hoping for.
Now, Marathon held its live playerbase decently over the weekend, but it is only getting harder in time. Outpost is an entirely new level of difficulty, requiring a coordinated team to beat or a really, really good solo player. Cryo Archive is likely to be playable only by a few. As you get deeper into the Faction quests to even unlock them, the demands get higher and higher, sending players to flip switches and fight bosses all over the map in a single run, where any wrong step kills you, and you start over (with new gear, of course). I've seen some people say well, people like hard games, look at Dark Souls and Elden Ring. True, but you didn't lose all your armor and weapons each time you died to Malenia.
There are some concessions to casual players in Marathon. "Slamming" free sponsor kits allows players to get back in a new round within seconds, and they are not risking anything when they're going in with nothing, yet those can still be profitable runs. There's an entire scavenger class, Rook, which you can play at any time to farm up materials in a generally easier version of maps with many players already dead or extracted. Again, you risk nothing there, and this is more generous than most other games in this genre.
My ultimate take is that the difficulty and complexity work in Marathon's favor, making it...a good, unique game. I don't think much of anything needs to be actively nerfed. I do expect Bungie to add both more hardcore and casual elements in time, but I see no ARC-level PvE skew. And there is little, if any, teaming up to avoid PvP in Marathon.
But this will set pretty firm limits on the playerbase. Soon, many of the "I'll give it a try" folks are going to hit a wall in one form or another and leave rather than try to headbutt their way through it. If you do, it feels great and it rewarding. But that comes with a risk when 60-70% of players die in every run and lose everything. Feels bad. Not everyone wants to keep getting punched in the gut like that over and over.
We are too early to know the fate of Marathon. We can speak more about Sony and Bungie profit and playercount motivations later, but for now, Marathon is good; Marathon is hard; Marathon can make you want to pull your hair out; Marathon can make you want to play just one more round.