u/_Razorgirl

Interesting commentary here from a content creator whose channel mostly is focused on Marathon’s world and narrative (such as it is) about how it feels to play the game as someone who really seems to want to like it but isn’t a super sweaty grinder, and how all the progression nerfs have felt super bad and punishing to the exact part of the remaining population who are struggling with having a reason to play.

None of his points about how bad the game feels and why the numbers are so down this early this season are particularly new to those of us who’ve been discussing this here and elsewhere, but it’s interesting to hear them articulated by someone who is fully invested in Marathon to the degree that he has a whole channel dedicated to it and co-hosts a podcast about it. If he’s not having any fun, who really is at this point?

I also kept thinking while watching this about how it seems pretty clear that Ziegler’s focus is still on the competitive “integrity” of the game (kind of laughable in an extraction shooter where everyone says never to take a “fair” fight but that’s a whole other topic) and that there’s still very little indication that they plan to provide a PVE way to engage with the game beyond just a limited, timegated experiment.

So much wasted energy and dev time making all these nerfs and microadjustments to the loot to try and unsuccessfully keep the various (tiny) factions of your existing playerbase happy, when you could just create a separate vault for PVE, and market it as its own experience for people who might like aspects of Marathon but don’t want to PVP, which grows your playerbase (and revenue if they get invested enough to spend money in the shop or on the season pass) and lets them balance the PVP part of the game without worrying about people not “earning” their loot the right way, or whatever it is they care so much about.

This separation would also have a net positive effect on the discourse surrounding Marathon, you wouldn’t have nearly as many PVP players complaining about how “boring” the PVE mode is, or how it’s a participation trophy for carebears that’s ruining their precious loot economy, you would have way less “please bring back my PVE queue” threads and the negative responses to it, you’d have fewer people saying “only way I’ll play this is if they add PVE”, etc.

Instead, they seem to be clinging to the idea that they can entice in some new audience with a PVE mode then convert them into playing and enjoying the “real” PVP game, and that’s just a fairytale that will never happen. This is why Tarkov, Gray Zone and now Arena Breakout all have separate vaults for their PVE progression, it again feels like Bungie wants to copy aspects of other successful extraction games without truly understanding the lessons they’ve already learned the hard way.

I get that it’s part of the hive mind nature of Reddit discourse to see the same talking points repeated over and over and the same cycles of discourse rehashed on social media more generally, but it’s wild to pop on here for the first time today and see these two back to back barely an hour apart at the top of my feed lol

Edit: I’m not weighing in on the debate itself or dunking on anyone just thought the visual was funny