I was gonna say no « decent » practice range, but no, actually just no practice range at all. I’ve got 850 hours in the game, I’m playing way less right now cause there’s nothing left to do, but since I got my PC and I used to be a console player, I figured I’d give mnk a shot. So what am I supposed to do? Run free kits on loop hoping to find weapons just to shoot walls and try to learn the recoil patterns? Load into games just to tweak my sensitivity and get shot while I’m stuck in the menu for 5 minutes? No practice range in an EXTRACTION game, I don’t know if you guys realize how rock bottom we’ve hit.

Yes, is an extraction shooter. i get it.

But that doesnt hide the fact that losing everything is quite discouraging and, not only that, but also feeds the dynamic of people that consistently stomps vs people that consistently get stomped.

Guess in which group i am in? haha yes i suck at pvp.

Rooking around to get something to start with but getting stomped and then back to Rook.

"get good" you would say. Yes, ok.

hopefully the pve thing that is coming mitigates that so Pvp losers like me can have some fun lol.

im genuinely sad that this game died out but now im questioning why my fps is so low, im averaging 50-60 while i can play games like squad at around the same fps or even higher

I have INSANELY bad gear fear, so I've been taking a break from this game. Want to hop back on since the release of Vault Breaker. From what I understand it's a PvE version of the game. So is it exactly like the regular version, but I just can't kill other players? Sorry if this is an easy question, I'm just confused based on what I've read
EDIT: thank you to all the ones that let me know it’s no longer available. That’s a shame I can’t play it lol. I’ll be on the lookout for season 3!

3v3 random spawns in pinwheel. Quick games, no third parties. This is the type of re-imagination extraction needs

This is not a doom post. I love the game, and like most of you, I want to see it survive and grow for years to come.

Bungie has nailed core things that should be built on, but everything else should be fair game for dramatic overhaul. Incremental improvements will not get us to the moment the game needs: a refreshed perspective for outsiders, a reason for new players to try it after hearing so much slander, and a reason for old players to pick it back up knowing their experience will be different. Bungie needs to swing at dramatic changes and live or die with the results, not inch forward and bleed out slowly.

Perimeter 2.0, new player on-boarding, faster kit-making, cleaner UI/UX: none of it is bad. It just doesn't reach the 0-to-1 moment of bringing players back or giving anyone a buzz-worthy reason to grab the game for the first or second time. The focus on a more robust PvE experience, while not personally exciting to me, feels well-founded and like their closest attempt at a bigger swing. I don't touch on PvE in my ideas below but feel free to add yours.

So: what are your huge, dramatic ideas, the kind that spark an "oh shit, they totally changed it, it's on sale, let's try it"?

A few of mine to start. All of them carry major risks, and the existing player base will probably dislike parts. Being okay with that is part of my point.

Funnel everyone into just one or two rotating maps.

Right now the base is split across 3 or 4 maps, solos/duos/trios, Cryo, Ranked, and experimental modes. Six thousand players spread across a dozen mode-and-map combinations. Funnel all of them into one or two active maps at a time instead. Maybe it's a single map for solos and duos plus one for trios, both rotating every 60-90 minutes. Maybe you kill Ranked entirely. Loot would need rebalancing and some maps would need reworks, but you'd finally have the population density to actually improve matchmaking and match quality.

And that density is what lets matchmaking get smarter. Not just kit value, but MMR, vault value, skill signals, blended so the game can lower the floor for newer and more casual players, the ones we most need to fall in love with the game, without walling everyone into gear-matched lobbies. Because the other half of the magic is loading in on a modest kit and walking out with a huge come-up, the goal isn't to sort everyone into their own tidy bracket. It's to have enough players in the pool that the game can protect the newer player from the worst mismatches while still leaving room for the underdog run.

Make TTK longer.

**edit** totally understand the counterpoints here that it actually benefits the sweats. Maybe this isn't the move but I also didn't mean to add like 3 seconds to the TKK. Maybe half a second. Regardless, what I was trying to get at was that the fights are too fast and punishing for new players, it's a turn off. TTK was my attempt at addressing it, but I'm sure you guys have better ones...I just think we have to acknowledge it's not a great experience for incoming new players to get wiped and have no idea what happened or why

Faster TTK has its benefits and it's part of the game's identity. But most of us would agree the best gameplay is the extended fight, where your build, your skills, and your team strategy all have time to matter. Even a drawn-out loss stings way less than a quick obliteration. Some of my favorite rounds yesterday were 10-minute fights we ended up losing.

Fast TTK is also why sweats can tolerate it and new players can't. For sweats and jobless heathens like myself, the game is effectively slower: our information parsing, map knowledge, and mechanics are high enough that losing more infrequently like total bs. Maybe we're caught off guard or something unexpected happened but we understand what the hell just happened and why. New players don't have that game knowledge, and might never have the spawn rotations memorized, are on white and green shields that get one-tapped, often even just by other newbies. That robs the players we most need of the deeper combat we all love, and worse, it robs them of ever learning to play. It's like sports: I can improve at basketball if the pace lets me understand it over time, but put me on a court against even the worst college player and I'd be too outclassed to even understand what was happening or learn anything. Forced PvP makes it worse, because there's no way to embrace a playstyle that avoids fighting.

I'm not saying remove the sneaky ambush pick or the punish for bad positioning. I'm saying there has to be a version that isn't this binary. How to fix it, I'm agnostic, but we shouldn't gate the best experiences in the game behind the worst ones.

Dramatically lower the bar to baseline gear.

The amazing gunplay and the buried-but-great build crafting are gated too hard, even for my level 450 ass. There should still be loot rarity, chase items, and the thrill of a lucky drop, that ceiling is fine. It's the floor that's the problem, both how high it sits and how long it takes to reach. New players should get baseline versions of all the equipment quickly, so they can explore the depth that makes the game special instead of grinding just to reach the starting line.

I'm not attached to the exact method, but a few directions:

• Simplify factions so each owns a lane (Traxus your gun merchant, Sekiguchi your implant merchant) and speed unlocks so all of them are open by level 100.
• Keep the rarest stuff as lottery chase items, but make the tier just below loosely target-farmable so there's always a concrete goal even if the jackpot stays luck-based via higher tier content.
• Simplify salvage and make it flexible. One blue neurochem should be worth 20 green and vice versa.
• Make schemas more valuable and easier to use, maybe as blank templates you can print by rarity, maybe remove the usage cap.
• Let us lock a piece of gear we love as a blueprint: I spent the time to figure out what my preferred gun is and what mods I like, so let me commit it to a schema and re-roll a copy of it for a scaling salvage or currency cost, with a capped duplicate slot so you can't run it nonstop.
• Make currency, the thing that's supposed to be the lowest common denominator, actually work like one: able to buy almost anything, including salvage.

Every one of these points the same direction: keep the chase and the luck at the top, but stop making players grind up to the baseline. If we want new and returning players to stay, let them reach the fun faster, and let the rest of us reach the depth without the friction.

The point isn't a free build or endless free items, it's a goal you're always working toward. Every bit of random salvage or currency becomes deterministic progress toward getting your favorite build back in your hands, instead of clutter you'll scrap or sit on.

Add a click-and-go roguelite mode.

The most popular mode this game has had was sponsored-kit Night Marsh. It did two key things: (1) click-and-go, and (2) equal starting points. Build a mode entirely around that.

Everyone starts with the same sponsored kit, so there's zero setup and no advantage at the door. You run a gauntlet of three maps, keeping what you find, and the loot gets richer the deeper you push. Exfil a map to bank your haul and advance; exfil the mode entirely at any point and everything you've found, you keep. Die, and you lose the whole run. No loadout screen, no risk to your own stuff. Click and go.

The hook is the push-or-cash-out decision. Map three has the best loot, but by then you're carrying everything from one and two, so the deeper you go the more you stand to lose. Bank after map one, or gamble it all for the map-three pull. Roguelite tension in a loop, the same risk/reward pull the rest of the game runs on, stripped down to something anyone can jump into cold.

This is the mode you put on the store page and hand to streamers. It's what a lapsed player clicks when the game's on sale, and where a new player learns the gunplay and loot loop without getting one-tapped on a white shield first. And because the loot feeds your real stash, it's not throwaway, it's a reason to keep loading in. The "oh shit, let's try it" moment, made into something you can actually click.

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None of these are safe, and I don't expect all of them to be right. But they share a spine: get more players into the same spaces, lower the wall between a new player and the parts of this game we already love, and give everyone a reason to load back in by increasing progress agency and balancing the player experience so that even loses can offer more enjoyment. That's the swing I want to see. Bungie built something with real depth, the problem was never the core, it's that too few people ever get far enough to feel it. What are your big ones? What would make you text your old squad get back on?

Been spending the last week or two taking a shot at a custom shell / OC.

Sekeguchi contracted several runner squads to recover alien technology strewn about The Marathon and wanted to put the findings to good use. The fact any alien technology was used at all is a closely guarded secret, both to avoid outrage and keep competitors at bay. The Gorgon is designed to be a prowler unit capable of climbing walls, thermal vision, and short range teleportation. Though the first two features are nothing special, the teleportation ability can be a powerful mobility tool, or for runners who think outside the box: a very messy weapon. If someone with more space/time momentum collides with another that doesn't, devastation is imminent. If you've played Quake's final mission, you would know.

Me and some homies have been grinding ranked the last month or so, and when we’re not doing that, we run outpost 24/7. So naturally we were stoked for outpost ranked last go around, and it suuuuucked. Once we hit like gold 2, every team camped one of the POIs and nobody pushed. 5+ games with 3 or more teams alive in the last 10 minutes. Was not enjoyable at all.

This week, teams have been way more aggressive and exciting, teams are looting their kills and extracting early and every game has felt a little bit different. Ive even managed to grind up to plat 2 by the end of the night. Not sure what made things change, but they’ve been some of the most enjoyable games recently.

Anybody finding the same change and been enjoying it?

I'm trying to figure out what's still missing in our roster. Healers, movers, informers, we got em. Even in season one, the grenade hell, there was someone in the pipe ready to defend against those grenades. What roles and niches are still out there?

Would they ever ship a supply runner? Could there be a prime ability which refills and improves your weapons and the weapons of your teammates? (statistical improvements, not damage)

There is a serious amount of "light" runners, where Destroyer is essentially the only "heavy" shell. I'm talking about bulk and silhouette. What does a lady heavy runner look like?

I was thinking about a mover / damage dealer with mecha legs (less sexy than Vandal mecha legs, more armor) who could do a flaming dive kick like Smoke Dive, maybe the tactical ability could be a Hulk-style Overwatch Hazard-style leap? I couldn't finish up this concept with a prime ability, though.

What kinds of new status effects could be added? What are you thinking of? What are you hoping for? What the hell are they going to ship us in three weeks! I'm so excited to find out

Max value of 10,000. Best of 5. Sectioned off parts of current maps. Maybe 12 additional slots that you can change in between rounds with your current loadout? Once a week. Would this be fun?

It feels like there are 2 runners in most map... am I the only 1 experiencing this?

There are a bunch of great quality of life improvements in Arena Breakout that Bungie should take inspiration from. Both are extraction shooters, except that Arena does a great job at making it less frustrating:

• You can exfil any gear during a match with what is basically a DCON, limited to X amount of slots. In Arena you need one player kill to activate them, in Marathon they could be available straight away but for a one time use
• You can right click any gun and see/buy every attachment/ammo compatible with that gun
• You put your keyroom keys in a "keychain" set of slots. When you go into a map, the game automatically equips the keys related to that map. If you die, you don't lose it. Looted keys during a run can be lost.
  • I also like the way it is now, because you can kill a player and find a surprise key
• There are universal keys, lootable or very expensive. Maybe universal keys should be for blues only.
• Maps are tier based (can't do that right now with the low playercount obviously), and you can't enter certain maps if your gear value is too high
  • There are multiple tiers per map (for example, a noob friendly Perimeter, and a high tier Perimeter)
• You can make Gun Presets ! Combine any attachment/mod you want and save it for a one click buy later
  • That ties really well into the "build crafting" part of the game
• You can make presets for your whole loadout (shields, implants, guns..) and just buy it anytime. Not cheap tho.

I'll add other things if I remember but this is what came up on top of my head.

Along with the firestorm keys and templates?

Aside from Ziegler leaving obviously

When player numbers fall, the obvious answer is: more content, more maps, more weapons, more events, more lore, more, more. But new content only helps if the game can retain the players who come back to experience it. Right now, I think Marathon has a retention problem before it has a content problem. The game itself is good. The gunplay is good, the extraction tension is genuinely special, and there are raids where everything just clicks. But there are also too many situations where the game doesn't give a reason to come back.

A few examples:

- Solo can have very different experiences from Trios, but the game doesn't always reward those differences and some end-game experiences are not available for Solo.

- Empty/low-population raids can feel like wasted time rather than an opportunity to play different.

- PvP can become the most reliable way of generating value, even when you just want to explore/loot POIs, do PvE events or contracts.

- Progression/Rewards don't always make a 30-minute raid feel proportionally valuable.

- Matchmaking problems can turn a good raid into an unfair one. Sometimes you really don't have the chance to play.

None of these necessarily require a new map. And that's the part I'd like Bungie to consider.

Small changes on matchmaking could make existing players have consistently more good raids.

More meaningful extraction rewards could make surviving and exfil feel worthwhile even when you don't find impressive loot or wipe the lobby.

Different dynamic PvE events (more or harder) could make an empty lobby feel like an opportunity rather than a dead raid.

Better recovery (sponsored Playlist?) options for when you lose all gear, don't let one bad session becoming a reason to quit.

More varied rewards could make different playstyles viable instead of pushing everyone towards the same PvP wiping lobby loop.

I don't think Marathon needs to become easier or more casual. Protect what makes the game special but make the existing systems better.

bungie please

I usually queue solo between 6pm-2am CET. There is a 90% chance game puts me in an asia lobby where I get 200 ms and that is after making me wait for 15 minutes.

200 ms in a shooter is unacceptable. I have to shoot ahead of moving bots to get a headshot. You can imagine how terrible pvp is. I know they a setting for matchmaking priority but it doesn't do shit because of the low player count. Just let me put a threshold on max acceptable ping or let me play in an empty lobby. This is so frustrating.

So there are these discussions that this needs nerf, that needs nerf. But how about making all shells equally overpowered instead?

Like giving Vandal 2x the stamina and higher sprint speed than other shells.

Giving Sentinel 2x the snare mines by default, larger radar range and the prime ability in addition to do signal jam/create a bubble shield.

Returning the sprint while invisible to Assassin and making him harder to see with thermal scope/thief visor.

Giving the Thief much smaller cooldown between grapple hook charges.

Like instead of nerfing Recon or whatever, maybe it will be more fun to bring other shells to the same level?

I was playing with my buddy with a random fill as our third. We were bringing blue and green kits, and almost everyone we encountered was running greens or blues. We saw a purple kit once. We played about six games like this, and the matchmaking felt pretty reasonable.

Then our third came online and joined the group. Suddenly, every lobby was completely different. I shit you not, for four rounds straight we ran into gold teams, even though we were still bringing 4k Cyberacme sponsored kits. We left Outpost and tried Dire Marsh at night, only to get killed by a gold team. Then we went to Perimeter and got killed by purples. There was nowhere safe for us to go. We eventually returned to Outpost and pushed through another ten games, getting wrecked by the sweatiest of sweats. Does matchmaking change when you queue as a full team? Because the difference between playing with a random fill and bringing a full stack was insane.

TL;DR

Everyone hated Marathon long before anyone knew a single thing about the actual game. Bungie's extremely bad reputation coming off of Destiny, as well as annoyance with how many have been announced (same thing happened with Battle Royals), led to a perfect scenario where no matter how good the game would be it was never going to succeed. It didn't lose players beyond what's normal for basically any life service game, see highguard which had a similar peak concurrent if you want an example of a game that people tried and genuinely didn't like.

This post is 100% human made. No AI ever, no matter what.

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A tremendous amount of ink is being spilled over why Marathon is feeling/has failed and even though some talking points are fairly popular, it seems like there's no good consensus as to why. The game is actually quite good, a hell of a lot better than many of the other extraction games that have magnitudes more players, yet still people make endless arguments as to what narrow specific annoyances are to blame regarding Marathon.

"The game failed because of grenade meta", "the game failed because it's woke," "the game failed because extraction games are too niche of a genre," "the game failed because no PVE," blah blah blah so many reasons and yet none of them are true.

So why did the game actually fail?

The game failed because of Bungie. No, seriously. It really has nothing to do with the actual game itself, people talk about how the player count fell off but it had a pretty normal drop off. Look at Highguard if you want to see an actual game that people played once and then never again, Marathon's numbers were/are pretty normal considering its peak.

The problem is that peak was extremely low.

It's not that everyone stopped playing marathon, is that not anywhere near close to enough people bought or even tried the game in the first place. 100,000 player peak is nothing, again Highguard had that lol. Look at every other remotely popular game's peak, even extraction games, every game has a peak and falloff, even fortnite only has something like .3% of its peak concurrents and yet no one is saying that that game failed lol.

If the game had the exact same drop off but it's peak and current numbers were 10 times higher than it would still be pretty low, but it didn't, it had low highs and low lows.

So the real reason is that everyone hated Bungie.
It's funny how Marathon being good has kind of rehabilitated Bungie's image because, I don't know if anyone remembers this, but for about a decade Bungie has been the horrible greedy company doing all of those horrible greedy things to Destiny forever. Anything you ever heard about Destiny was the player base revolting because of some horrible greedy thing that Bungie did. You want to see a drop off? Look at what happened to Destiny's player count. They were pulling Marathon numbers at the end lol.

Here's the other big reason.

People are so vocally annoyed by so many big studios making extraction games. People like playing them just fine, but the moment any company announces they're doing extraction game the immediate thought is that the game is a cynical cash grab that exists explicitly because the company is trend chasing. This combined with everyone thinking very poorly of Bungie made everyone assume that Marathon was a horrible cynical cash grab.

When Marathon actually came out and it was actually good, everyone had already formed their opinion on it long ago and everyone was shitting on it relentlessly long before anyone ever even played the game. Things like people claiming the entire game's art style was plagiarized even though it was literally a couple emblems, that claim coming from somewhat respected games journalist Paul Tassi by the way.

The narrative was 100% "greedy company cynically chasing to cash out on an old IP." No one thought for even a second that they made this game because they loved Tarkov and really wanted to make a marathon follow up and felt the natural synergy. That being true has broken everyone's brains because they want a quick easy dunk like high guard or Concord of a game that came out and sucked and died and went away.

So any criticisms of the game have nothing to do with the game's failure to attract a bigger audience.

There are plenty of criticisms with marathon, plenty of things that could have gone better, but the game's failure has little to do with the actual game because if all those things were solved, the results would have been more or less the same. The endless amount of gaming drama videos have brain poisoned the entire discourse about it and has completely alienated it from any actual discussion of the game itself. An unknown amount of people that love the game, including my entire friend group, have stopped playing because they assume the game is going to die any minute and no one wants to invest time and effort into a game that they don't think is going to exist. They all love the game but they don't want to play it because the discourse is just so toxic and I can't imagine that that's not pretty representative of a lot of people lol. It's completely different than high guard and Concord where the game sucked and nobody liked it and nobody played it and everyone shit on it deservedly, in this case the extremely disproportional hate the game receives to how popular the game is have meaningfully affected the people who play it.

Bonus prediction:

The introduction of PVE isn't going to move the needle beyond the first week or so. Regardless of many people claiming they want it, nothing has been done to rectify the actual problem that everyone still wants the game to die and no one is going to start playing it unless there is a broad consensus that the game has been redeemed in some form like what happened with rainbow six or a handful of other games.

I’m a sweat I play everyday I wipe cryo lobbies and have numerous hours with a team, I’ve VIP’d all factions but have no unlocked superior mods apart from traxus. It’s just a huge grind, it is far easier for me to loot the things I need from people than it is to find random items to unlock the upgrades I need. I did target farm a few quality of life things like blue shields, bags and basic mods but apart from that I have no interest in grinding it.

Hopefully it’s easier by season 3

I think we should have the option to avoid getting in the same match with made trios, pretty much from 6 people I used to play with only one is still playing the game, I can play just more or less 3 matches during the week, most of my play time is on weekends and it's hard to find anyone to hop in during that time for me, (I know it should be the opposite but here we are).

I don't think it's right to lock low level players away from decent or good teammates, hell we don't have the player base numbers for skill based matchmaking either, but I think that bigger que times is better than consistently fighting 3 x 2 or 3 x 1 against highly coordinated players, throwing random people together with different skill levels is better than getting stomped by kill teams in most matches.

I am not claiming to be a good player that carry my team every match, I think I am decent at the best of times, but I think it's clear when you bump into a coordinated team, there's almost nothing we can do to turn the tides when a teammate dies in the first seconds of the engagement doing whatever 100 meters away.

Let the imbalance of teams be at least random instead of a certainty.

We were caught off guard by the enemy team but the smokes saved the day

Hi,

I haven't played for the past few weeks. Were there any newly added Codex entries for Ordnance Heist? I didn't see any mention of it in the article but I wanted to make sure.