Marathon, Bungie’s upcoming hero extraction shooter, is getting another invite-only test soon. The test will run from October 22 to 27, and folks can sign up right here. Things haven’t gone great for Marathon thus far, but following the disappointing reception of the first alpha test, and the embarrassing accusations of plagiarism, it’ll be interesting to see what tweaks Bungie has made and just what the game is shaping up to be.
Revealed back in 2023 with a very impressive cinematic trailer, Marathon is a reboot of Bungie’s classic Doom-like shooter from the ‘90s. It’s also Bungie’s first new shooter since it made the pivot to Destiny in the early 2010s, following its departure from Microsoft and the Halo series.
There’s still no release date for Marathon, and the game has a lot to prove to fans
Marathon was originally slated to release for current-gen consoles and PC on September 23, 2025. That date has come and gone. Unfortunately for Bungie, folks didn’t find the game terribly fun during the alpha earlier this year, and so the studio made the decision to indefinitely delay its release. The drab environments didn’t really speak to Bungie’s artistic strengths, and the hero shooter element (which I, a huge extraction shooter fan, tried to be open-minded about) still seems like an odd fit.
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While extraction shooters, especially of the PvPvE variety, have yet to really appeal to all but a dedicated niche audience, Marathon just felt rather boring. Matches mostly consisted of fights with the same repetitive robots instead of incorporating the more alluring palette of creature designs the Marathon franchise has.
We do know that the upcoming closed test will let players try out a new feature: Proximity chat, which allows you to hear other players’ voice chatter only when you’re near them. Bungie initially wanted to avoid using this, as the studio felt it was ripe for toxicity and abuse. While proximity chat can result in, well, rather silly situations in a shooter, it’s a pretty important feature in a PvPvE game; overhearing nearby players not only adds a bit of voyeuristic drama, but it can also help you avoid getting jumped sometimes.
The closed test will also feature some tweaks to TTK (time-to-kill) as well. We’ll see if this is enough to start rehabilitating Marathon’s image for folks.
It’s been a real cluster-f over at Bungie from the sounds of things
Conversations about the nuances of what does and doesn’t work in Marathon were all pushed to the side when it was revealed that Bungie had lifted designs from artist antire.al without permission or acknowledgement.
Bungie had its explanations for how the artist’s work made it into its game, essentially saying that it was material used for inspiration and research that found its way into production pipelines, and thus made it into the game. The studio blamed this oversight on a former employee and promised a full review of all its assets to be sure this wouldn’t happen again.
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Still, in an age where everyone with a functioning ethical compass is on edge about plagiarism and the unethical sharing and use of people’s work via AI, the timing couldn’t have been worse for a studio to reveal that it had aped someone else’s designs, however unintentionally.
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With the departure of CEO Pete Parsons this past August as well, and Destiny 2 seeing players leave the game in droves, it’s been a time of upheaval for the legendary studio, and there’s a lot riding on getting Marathon into shape so it attracts and resonates with players. Here’s hoping the test later this month shows that it’s moving in the right direction.
