The gaming insider Jason Schreier commented on Marathon, the new game from Bungie after Destiny 2. What he has to say sounds alarming. As with Destiny 1 and 2, there has been a leadership change and a creative realignment for Marathon. The extraction shooter is ‘in no good shape.’ Schreier compares it to Suicide Squad.
This is what Schreier says about Marathon: Schreier has shown before that he has access to internal information from Bungie. He publicly revealed the delay of The Final Shape
long before it was officially announced.
Now he is speaking in the podcast ‘Friends Per Second’ about Marathon, Bungie’s PvP extraction shooter, which is set to release in 2025:
- The game is ‘in no great shape’ – there is a reason why Marathon was postponed by a whole year
- The developers are also pessimistic about meeting the current deadline for 2025
- Marathon was significantly changed in April 2024 when the game’s head, Christopher Barrett, and his producer left Bungie
Marathon: More Valorant, Less Destiny
What is supposed to have changed? In March 2024, it was announced that Joe Ziegler, the former head behind Valorant, replaced long-time Destiny veteran Christopher Barrett as the head of Marathon.
According to Schreier, this has led to Marathon now focusing on fixed characters, like in hero shooters Overwatch and Valorant, rather than customizable player characters like in Destiny.
Schreier believes: Bungie is chasing a trend that is already over
What game does Schreier compare Marathon to? Schreier says the situation with Marathon reminds him of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, one of the biggest flops of 2024:
[Suicide Squad] came out and completely flopped, and I worry that Marathon is in a similar situation because it has been in development for a while. It started development when extraction shooters were super popular; I don’t know if that’s still the case today, and now that they’ve invested so much money and it was the farthest along project, in contrast to all their other incubation bets, they’re putting a lot into it and I just don’t know if there’s a big chance that it will be successful. But you never know, you never know.
Schreier believes that Bungie is chasing a trend here, but that they are taking so long to develop their game that the trend may already be over. He seems to think that Bungie is only holding on to Marathon because they have invested so much money into it and not because they truly believe in the game’s success.
These are really not good prospects for the game.
Marathon is under no good omens
What’s behind it: As Schreier says: You never know
. Even Epic Games chased a trend with Fortnite: Battle Royale, to which they actually came too late, but helped the seemingly short-lived Battle Royale
to a resurgence and pushed into entirely new dimensions of gaming.
However, extraction shooters have not yet established themselves as a new trend – all attempts by major studios to build on the success of Escape from Tarkov
have fallen flat.
Why Bungie should succeed seems questionable at the moment. Moreover, Marathon suffers from the same issues that plagued Destiny 1 and Destiny 2:
- A leadership change in the middle of development
- A creative realignment
- A delay of one year
A delay in itself is not a problem. But it becomes a problem when development is still struggling, but you have to stick to the release date because you can’t afford to delay the game again. Then something comes out that nobody is really satisfied with. We painfully remember how that went with the release of Destiny 2 in 2017.
Anyway, it seems that hardly anyone of the Destiny fans is looking forward to Marathon. These are not good omens for the new game.
Marathon is, alongside Destiny 2, the last project Bungie is still working on. On July 31, it was announced that Bungie must take a radical austerity course after taking on too many new projects in recent years, causing them to halt all projects except for Destiny and Marathon: Destiny 2: Bungie loses 450 employees, including the most experienced – Halts all projects except for 2
