Marathon may be made for PvP fans, but Bungie says there’s still plenty for the rest of us
Marathon, Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter, has been officially rerevealed via a Saturday stream out of the developer’s main offices in Bellevue, Washington.
As part of a preview event for press and creators, Bungie flew me out to Washington to spend about six hours with the game, see the reveal event early, and speak to some of the creatives who are working to put everything together ahead of the game’s Sept. 23 release date.
I spent about 20 minutes speaking to Joe Ziegler, Marathon’s game director, and Andrew Witts, the gameplay director. We talked about how they define a Bungie game, who the studio is targeting with such an ambitious PvP title, and what they learned from Destiny 2’s successes and failures in the live service space.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.]
Polygon: Bungie is best known for taking popular PC-only genres and bringing them to the console masses. With Marathon, you’re trying to introduce people to this janky, weird, beloved extraction shooter genre by injecting the talent from a massive studio and a ton of money. With this being the newest genre you all have ever tried to bring to new players, what are the challenges that come with that leap to console and a whole new pool of customers? It sounds like an exciting uphill battle to develop.
Joe Ziegler: Yeah, I mean, definitely. There is somebody who I used to work with at another company who said, “Impossible is my favorite kind of possible,” and really it’s not about being impossible, but it’s about — I think doing hard things is sort of what makes the job really exciting. And when it comes to this particular challenge, I think that the way we approached it when we were really talking about it — as me and Andrew joined the project about two years ago — a big thing was really focusing on what kind of experience are we really trying to make here?
For us, it wasn’t like we’re trying to make an extraction shooter as a concept. It was like, what is the way that we can create a session-based survival experience where, if you are looking for the thrill of getting out there, trying to survive an experience that’s really, really dangerous and tough, but eking out alive and having a great story to tell about it, how do we create that kind of game? Some of the extraction conventions that we utilize were really, really useful for helping to make it happen, but typically, for us, it was just really about driving a narrow definition of what it is that we’re trying to build around more than anything else. So yeah, we’ve really focused on the sort of team-based survival experience more than anything else.
Andrew Witts: And there’s a lot of pieces to it that we heavily talked about. For a Bungie game, there’s expectation of what the action game is, right? We talked about it for a bit. It’s a big part of the DNA. And then you have a survival action game or FPS action game and what does that mean? What is the Bungie version of that? […] And for this game, when we talk about the survival part of it, there’s two parts that usually get people to lean forward and feel that. The first one is: How does the gameplay experience provide tension? Because people, when they’re tense, they often talk, and then it being a teamplay game, naturally people are communicating, and that’s a good thing.
The other part of it is: How do you make people “scared” a little bit? […] And then the awesome moment when you extract, and that feeling like a Bungie action-game moment.
So we had a lot of conversations of, What is the Bungie version and how does this scale and meet expectations? And I think we had a “very terrifying hill to climb,” or whatever? I think it’s an apt phrase I think that we’d probably agree with.
Ziegler: But I think some of it is also sort of figuring out, how do we extend the definition of what Bungie does, and go beyond that idea of, Oh, for 10 years we’ve been focused on big-grade experiences and things of that sort, right, to, Hey, we actually also want to do that and also see how we can create tense, sort of sandbox PvP experiences as well. And the marriage of that is just an extension of the idea of what we could accomplish.
I think it’s been interesting watching gaming become more segmented over the years. As it gets bigger, there are more pockets that people can fill into. Everyone played Halo. Destiny is a fierce but small pocket of the internet, but is still quite successful. Marathon is obviously pushing more in that niche-but-passionate direction, and that seems like a tough road for new players. I intentionally didn’t play an extraction shooter before seeing Marathon because I wanted to experience your onboarding into the genre. I was able to learn pretty quickly because I had Kevin Yanes [lead of the Runner team on Marathon and former Destiny developer] for the second half of the day as one of my squadmates. But for people who don’t have the benefit of Kevin—
Ziegler: [To Witts] Maybe we should ship with Kevin?
Witts: We had that conversation. [laughs]
A Kevin in every box would be very helpful! But how do you think about introducing something that is going to be quite unfamiliar for a lot of people who aren’t the Tarkov sickos? What is the process of bringing the Bungie audience into Marathon while also attracting a new group of players?
Ziegler: I think it just really depends on how we sort of even cut up the Bungie audience when we think about it, right? Because, in a lot of ways, we’re looking to — when we think about the experience we’re creating, it’s a very PvE- and PvP-focused game. And the difficulty is, in some games, those things are opt-in or opt-out. In our game, you can’t opt out of the PvP experience. And so if you are a player who enjoys Bungie games but doesn’t enjoy PvP, it is probably not a game for you, to be fair. But if you are a Bungie player who also enjoys PvP games, especially sandbox survival games or even sandbox PvP games, you’ll probably really enjoy this game. You’ll find a good way in.
And some of it is also just understanding that we’re not looking to take Marathon and just say, “This is now Destiny 3” and then shift that over. We really are looking to the future of Destiny 2 and trying to figure out and work with players on how that’s going to evolve and change. And so we’re kind of carving something to live besides it for another set of players which is really focused on PvP, really focused on PvP sandbox survival experiences.
So are you mostly looking for the PvP lords here? Or where do you see them overlap with something like the Destiny audience? I’ll say, personally, that I don’t spend much time in the Crucible [Destiny PvP] these days. But, back when they were offering awesome PvE rewards via the Crucible — Mountaintop, Recluse, etc. — I put the time in to get good. I’m finding Marathon is scratching that itch, and the loot aspect is making me want to engage with PvP, and want to improve my skills. And when I look at the metagame, with the contracts and secrets, there’s a lot here for someone like me who tends to avoid a lot of the big PvP games that come out every year.
But, without having just played it for hours, I’m not sure I would’ve expected that Marathon would activate that part of my brain again. How do you all think about reaching players that may very well love Marathon, but are scared by how intense and sweaty it seems on its face?
Ziegler: Yeah, no, and to be fair, I don’t know if our game is only for the sweats. I actually totally agree with you on that front. I think when we think about PvP versus PvE, it’s more about saying that, if you are completely against ever having a PvP interaction, it’s probably not your game. If you’re OK with PvP, but you also enjoy other elements of it, we’re really driving that as well. And I think that some of it is, we do have that contract system that exists inside the game. […] I think for those players, we are focusing a little bit more on: How do we just generate the right kind of new user experience? We have the [solo tutorial] in the front that you might’ve experienced today. That actually sort of helps you learn some of the basics, but we also have the new user contracts that we’re continuing to iterate on that actually help you kind of stepladder into understanding how to accomplish goals inside of the game. […] We want to be approachable to those types of players who are sitting on the fence as well.
Witts: Bungie’s really good about delivering on fantasies and multiple aspects from the gameplay side of things. Exploration, all that stuff is still a part of this game. It’s just that it’s a very brutal environment where you have to be on your toes and you have to play tactically, and it’s a very tense experience where everything in there is hostile to you, and so you have to play it to be on your toes. But those pieces are there for those peaks that you’re talking about.
Ziegler: I think one of the things that we’ve noticed that’s been a really good trigger for learning for a lot of players is I think a lot of people who approach an extraction shooter assume that your goal is to take every fight that you see, having to try to survive. But the reality is part of the survival game is actually knowing which fights you want to take or avoiding the fights you don’t want to take or trying to get away from threats that exist in the world. Sometimes you are the college student running from the serial killer, sometimes you are the hunter.
Seasonal resets have been controversial in other extraction shooter games, although I can certainly see the argument in their favor. After years of running a live service series with Destiny and Destiny 2, what has Bungie learned in terms of managing the live content model? When you delete everyone’s cool stuff at the end of the season, what have you learned that will help you excite those players enough to come back for the next season?
Ziegler: Obviously there’s two different games when you think about Destiny and Marathon, right?
Absolutely.
Ziegler: And Destiny really is about this idea that I’m always growing more and more powerful by a number moving forward, getting better gear, getting better weaponry and things of that sort. And that’s the appeal of that experience, is just to keep driving that way. Whereas I think for us, what we’re aspiring for Marathon to really achieve is to have a sort of continuous survival engine that changes its form all the time. So, season to season, it should be not just experiencing the exact same thing a new time, but experiencing a different way to level, for example, a different way to experience new content in that journey as you go along.
For us, it is leaning into what it means to be a sort of seasonal reset game and making each season feel like its own experience so that we can drive forward in that way. Having said that, though, we want to make sure you’re commemorating those seasons. So we want to make sure that you earn things that you can keep at an account level that might be more cosmetic-oriented, or title-oriented, that let you carry those into new seasons and be like, I was there. I accomplished this thing. And so it’s more about creating those resets.
[Disclosure: This article is based on a Marathon preview event held at Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, from April 2-4. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.]
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