Bungie’s game director on Marathon, Joe Ziegler, has fronted a camera, offering a nearly 10-minute development update on the eagerly anticipated PS5 extraction shooter. In addition, some new images are shown but no gameplay, with the promise of “a lot more” to come, including playtests, in 2025.
Gematsu has the full transcript if you read at an advanced level, but if you’d just prefer the highlights, Zeigler reveals the following factoids. Marathon is Bungie’s take on the extraction shooter subgenre, and “the goal of every session is to get out alive, and, along the way, you’re going to be completing quests, you’re going to be finding loot”, described as an “intense survival experience”. Equippable gear will change your character’s stats, which puts us in mind of Destiny, and there will be a ton of loot and weapons to track down. As “Runners”, players can use a small subset of abilities on top of those provided by equipped gear.
For the last couple of years, Bungie has been making “a lot of aggressive changes,” iterating heavily and working with players and content creators. Ziegler says that the game is coming along in some ways and taking a little longer in others. For example, the game’s environments are “starting to come together in a really, really beautiful way,” but some of its character models are “not fully there yet.”