Marathon alpha feedback 16th May (1pm PT // 4pm ET // 9pm UK)

Part of me thinks they see those legacy ips as to masculine. It sounds dumb but internally I think some people don't see them (SOCOM, Killzone, Warhawk) as fitting the culture of the place.
All of their efforts have this 'modern' bend to it. Hoping to bring in a new audience.
I think enough loss and pressure might change things.
Sony Japan needs to go scorched earth.

I mean maybe they're right at the end of the day.

Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft.... none of that shit is for me, but it's massively popular.

I just think it would make more sense to try and fail with the legacy IP than to try and fail with stuff you've literally pulled out of a bubblegum wrapper they pulled out of a gas station trash can.

The one legacy IP that they try to make into a live service game was God of War... pushing multiplayer is one of the big reasons why God of War: Ascension didn't work out. A rare L for Santa Monica, only to be repeated by Bluepoint who could have in that time brought back Legend of Dragoon or any number of legacy IP, or hell even put Demon's Souls on PC...

I think they learned the wrong lessons from MP games that didn't succeed on PS3. It was more of a PS3 problem than an IP problem.

If they did a reboot of the Killzone trilogy and remade the first three games. I'd buy them. I still wouldn't play them online, but some people probably would. The same is true of many other games that they have and I think working from there has a greater chance of finding success than randomly stumbling onto the next big thing and getting absolutely no traction.

Even sticking with Guerrilla, it should have been EASY for them to make a Monster Hunter clone set in the world of Horizon. The gameplay is all there.

Concord, Fairgames, and Marathon all share a really similar thread of not knowing what audience they're looking for or what their hook is.
 
Yep, this stuff needs to and deserves to fail. If they thought Concord was just a one off, they need to get the message loud and clear.
Unfortunately this is Bungie's culture. It has been for a long time now if have been paying attention to the weeky TWAB (This Week and Bungie) blogs for a few years now.

For them to reset this, would take a massive purge.
I don't think they have it in them to do it themselves and it would probably take an outsider to come in to do the cutting.

Looks like Bungie was the problem all along going back to the failed marriages with MS and Activision. After their (possible) divorce with Sony, will Nintendo be next?
 
Unfortunately this is Bungie's culture. It has been for a long time now if have been paying attention to the weeky TWAB (This Week and Bungie) blogs for a few years now.

For them to reset this, would take a massive purge.
I don't think they have it in them to do it themselves and it would probably take an outsider to come in to do the cutting.

Looks like Bungie was the problem all along going back to the failed marriages with MS and Activision. After their (possible) divorce with Sony, will Nintendo be next?

Agreed except with MS. The MS stuff was clear. MS wanted them to keep focusing on Halo and they wanted to do something new. MS was in the wrong there and it killed Halo while Bungie went on to make one of the most successful GAAS games ever.
 
Agreed except with MS. The MS stuff was clear. MS wanted them to keep focusing on Halo and they wanted to do something new. MS was in the wrong there and it killed Halo while Bungie went on to make one of the most successful GAAS games ever.
MS offered to let them spin off a team to do that, but by then the relationship had soured.
My point is/was, that after going thru so many divorces, maybe the problem isn't them, but you?
 
Can I still get in on the alpha or is it invite-only?
 
This is what irks me the most. I'm a fan of the original so when they initially announced a new "marathon" game I was initially excited until they then said it was going to be an extraction shooter.

But even still, I was willing to give them a chance provided they stayed true to the source material and attempted to do something interesting with it. But no, what do we get, some generic looking souless mashup of the hero shooter and extraction shooter genres. There is nothing interesting or unique about any of this, and to make matters worse everyone looks bored playing it.

This is what marathon looked like:

bG9ID87.jpeg
wIXcXtA.png


How do you go from that to whatever the hell this is?

I remember one gaffer insulted the original game design. I love to see the look on his face now.
 
TLOU factions had a far better chance of succeeding than this ever did. Making stuff like Socom, Warhawk, killzone multiplayer, resistance multiplayer etc would have had a far better chance of success than this, and some of them would have been ripe for being made in to an extraction shooter (TLOU in particular). But this is what chasing trends instead of playing to your own strengths gets you.
Man, you know it was special when I despised the PS3 dashboard, but I endured it because I loved playing Warhawk and Resistance online so much. It was crazy that the multiplayer for TLOU was as good as it was, no one thought it would be. So why would anyone think any kind of successor to that would be a bad idea? I feel bad for developers that are just doing their job and get fired because of missteps due to higher ups. But I hate when genres are popular in video games and suddenly a ton of studios want a slice of the pie. It just pushes confidence and passion to the wayside all for an attempt at a quick buck. It's happened so many times over the decades, and so many games/studios have failed as a result. You'd think they would learn by now.

So instead of pleasing those fans... did they decide to please Marathon fans? Nah fuck them as well, lets slap the brand on a extraction shooter that plays nothing like the original games.
The thing that's wild is that I've had people online basically try to say it's wrong of me to think it's insane that they'd do something like that to the IP. Sure, Marathon wasn't Quake, DOOM, or Duke Nukem 3D levels of popular, but it wasn't some underdog either. It had various sequels and ports over the years. A lot of what was in Marathon also made its way into Halo. So to me, it's crazy that anyone would think that ISN'T bizarre. The ONLY similarity it has is the name, and the logo. Why even bother? I seriously think it's because they just had the IP in their back pocket and it was getting dusty. Nothing else makes sense to me.
 
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Unfortunately this is Bungie's culture. It has been for a long time now if have been paying attention to the weeky TWAB (This Week and Bungie) blogs for a few years now.

For them to reset this, would take a massive purge.
I don't think they have it in them to do it themselves and it would probably take an outsider to come in to do the cutting.

Looks like Bungie was the problem all along going back to the failed marriages with MS and Activision. After their (possible) divorce with Sony, will Nintendo be next?

I mean they were never really wed to Activision. They were simply business partners.

I'd say Sony should step in, but the reality is that Sony isn't doing any better with live service either. They've built their studios to be too designed around SP and SP IP.

They should have just released TLOU Online it didn't even need to be a live service game. Not sure why everything needs to be live service just because its multiplayer. You can also build out a multiplayer game as live service you know... as it goes...

They could have sold it for 20 bucks or 40 bucks and people would have played it.

Insomniac is so entrenched into Marvel, there's no space for them to take another look at Resistance and the same is true with Guerrilla and Horizon. Their next best studio is Santa Monica, who presumably was never doing anything live service and should hopefully have something to show soon.

Bend never really had multiplayer chops.

So it's obvious why Sony would buy Bungie and this is definitely a blip, but what they'll probably need to do is significantly cut down the staff of Bungie and put new leadership in place and basically start from scratch on Destiny 3.
 
If you caught the video from the beginning, the reason why it seemed so unorganized is because it turns out the two guys introduce themselves.

Turns out there's also a Bungie guy in the room off screen is a gameplay director Andrew Wits sitting across from them.

So that's why it seemed weird with a Bungie guy calling in and audio issues. The guy off screen clearly did not sync up his audio properly with the other two so thats why he was on mute sometimes or there was echo hearing him twice.

These Bungie guys didnt even prep before going live.

lol
 
If you caught the video from the beginning, the reason why it seemed so unorganized is because it turns out the two guys introduce themselves.

Turns out there's also a Bungie guy in the room off screen is a gameplay director Andrew Wits sitting across from them.

So that's why it seemed weird with a Bungie guy calling in and audio issues. The guy off screen clearly did not sync up his audio properly with the other two so thats why he was on mute sometimes or there was echo hearing him twice.

These Bungie guys didnt even prep before going live.

lol

Especially funny cause they delayed this stream like twice already.
 
but what they'll probably need to do is significantly cut down the staff of Bungie and put new leadership in place and basically start from scratch on Destiny 3.

This is 100% what needs to happen. And they need to keep a team releasing periodic content for D2 until D3 drops to at least keep the core players engaged (as much as they can, anyway). In an ideal scenario, they would've revealed their expansion like they did a few weeks ago, and also said "we are also hard at work on a D3, and this content is coming to keep you satiated until it drops."
 
Especially funny cause they delayed this stream like twice already.
I didnt catch that intro part at the beginning, so as the stream kept going it seemed so weird. You got two guys on cam, off screen guy and I think some random callers(?).

But the way the 3 Bungie guys talk asking each other questions like they dont know what each person does has a weird vibe to it despite working on the same game.

Instead of just having each guy tell their parts being expert in their aspect of the game, it's a weird discussion how they ask each other questions like they are each random callers doing Q&A.
 
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I didnt know until now.

But you know how the claim is one bad apple stole the art and nobody else knew about it? Turns out many Bungie people followed that creator Antireal's page.

And one of them was today's green shirt Art Director Joseph Cross himself. LOLOL


If, for whatever reason, that still isn't convincing, then consider this: Bungie's franchise Art Director, Joseph Cross, also happens to be following Antireal on socials. Yeah, doesn't sound like a random coincidence with all this put out there.
 
TLOU factions had a far better chance of succeeding than this ever did. Making stuff like Socom, Warhawk, killzone multiplayer, resistance multiplayer etc would have had a far better chance of success than this, and some of them would have been ripe for being made in to an extraction shooter (TLOU in particular). But this is what chasing trends instead of playing to your own strengths gets you.
Given Sony's big batch of shooter IPs, I think if they focused on 1-2, made them great and multiplat (or at least PS and PC at minimum), it could do great.

Problem with their lack of success is because back then they made so many of them at the same time, there were too many so it diluted their success. They had as many shooters franchises as MS, Activision and EA probably combined. These companies focus on maybe 2 shooters at a time. Sony shotgunned like 6 of them. You forgot MAG, those PC big battle shooters that ported over later, Haze game with UBI. And Warhawk even had a different game setting with Starhawk.

Their push with GAAS is similar. Instead of focusing on a small number of quality games, they go ape shit all at once going from existing GT7/baseball (which arent even shooters) to like +10 other GAAS games even buying up 4-5 studios including big Bungie. And one of the studios was a mobile studio. So their push into GAAS was intended to also branch into mobile at the same time. And originally all this was supposed to be released by 2025 according to those old business slides. And those old slides didnt even include the Bungie games on top of it.
 
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I hold fast the faith in Bungie because of its A tier gameplay, and used to think they will eventually pull through.
But I am inching closer to Marathon closing shop in 3 months.

The next livestream just has to blow people away or Bungie should be ready for a 3000 CCU weekends for its products lifetime.
The negativity around only does more irreparable damage to Marathon, Destiny and Bungie itself.
 
Given Sony's big batch of shooter IPs, I think if they focused on 1-2, made them great and multiplat (or at least PS and PC at minimum), it could do great.

Problem with their lack of success is because back then they made so many of them at the same time, there were too many so it diluted their success. They had as many shooters franchises as MS, Activision and EA probably combined. These companies focus on maybe 2 shooters at a time. Sony shotgunned like 6 of them. You forgot MAG, those PC big battle shooters that ported over later, Haze game with UBI. And Warhawk even had a different game setting with Starhawk.

Their push with GAAS is similar. Instead of focusing on a small number of quality games, they go ape shit all at once going from existing GT7/baseball (which afrent even shooters) to like +10 other GAAS games even buying up 4-5 studios including big Bungie. And originally all this was supposed to be released by 2025 according to those old business slides. And those old slides didnt even include the Bungie games on top of it.

Don't totally disagree with you but this is a bit revisionist.

Killzone predates Resistance. They didn't have a lot of shooters at once. Killzone wasn't at the PS3 launch, Resistance was. SOCOM had already really faded by now.

The real problem wasn't the quantity of games, but not being on multiple platforms early absolutely hurt these games. There was a larger userbase for these games on Xbox, and probably doubly so on PC. That means that PS3 represented only a quarter at best of the addressable market for these style of games at the time.

This caught up to Halo when the series transitioned to 343. It was heavily limited by the lack of sales on the Xbox One and Halo 4 and Halo 5 never came to PC (4 would eventually port over years later but was also borked with a bad port).

Sony never really looks to farm their IP, they just assume the soil is barren. They don't look at why Dark Souls sold so much better than Demon's Souls or why Elden Ring sold so much better than Bloodborne. Yet they've ported neither of these games to PC. Too busy remastering Day's Gone.

The addressable market really matters, especially with shooters. Helldivers would not be the hit it is had it not released on PC. It's a popular but not earth-shatteringly so game on PS5. It not being playable on PS4 was also a big miss btw. Again, total addressable market. CoD still supports previous gen.

Look at Gran Turismo, it's popular again, and it runs on PS5 and PS4 getting the total addressable market the PlayStation has to offer. Still not on PC though...

You can play Fortnite on basically everything, which means anyone can play with pretty much anything they have (minus this apple shenanigans stuff). Similarly, you can play Minecraft on an iPad or iPhone...

Sony has ported most of their popular PS4 and PS5 games to PC, but not the games that would perform the best on PC based on PC gamer tendencies..
 
Why are they wearing hats? They are not outdoors.
because they live and work in the Pacific Northwest, in a game company that allows for casual dress. this is standard wear for non-corporate environments.

We are still mostly below 60 degrees this time of year, and it has been drizzling the last few days./
 
Don't totally disagree with you but this is a bit revisionist.

Killzone predates Resistance. They didn't have a lot of shooters at once. Killzone wasn't at the PS3 launch, Resistance was. SOCOM had already really faded by now.

The real problem wasn't the quantity of games, but not being on multiple platforms early absolutely hurt these games. There was a larger userbase for these games on Xbox, and probably doubly so on PC. That means that PS3 represented only a quarter at best of the addressable market for these style of games at the time.

This caught up to Halo when the series transitioned to 343. It was heavily limited by the lack of sales on the Xbox One and Halo 4 and Halo 5 never came to PC (4 would eventually port over years later but was also borked with a bad port).

Sony never really looks to farm their IP, they just assume the soil is barren. They don't look at why Dark Souls sold so much better than Demon's Souls or why Elden Ring sold so much better than Bloodborne. Yet they've ported neither of these games to PC. Too busy remastering Day's Gone.

The addressable market really matters, especially with shooters. Helldivers would not be the hit it is had it not released on PC. It's a popular but not earth-shatteringly so game on PS5. It not being playable on PS4 was also a big miss btw. Again, total addressable market. CoD still supports previous gen.

Look at Gran Turismo, it's popular again, and it runs on PS5 and PS4 getting the total addressable market the PlayStation has to offer. Still not on PC though...

You can play Fortnite on basically everything, which means anyone can play with pretty much anything they have (minus this apple shenanigans stuff). Similarly, you can play Minecraft on an iPad or iPhone...

Sony has ported most of their popular PS4 and PS5 games to PC, but not the games that would perform the best on PC based on PC gamer tendencies..
And as you said the userbase for PS3 need time to ramp up where it eventually outsold 360. But IMO, too many shooters across too many IPs. There's a reason why companies focus on a small number of shooter franchises.

2006 Resistance 1
2007 Warhawk
2008 Resistance 2
2008 Socom Confrontation
2009 KZ 2
2010 MAG
2011 KZ 3
2011 Resistance 3
2011 Socom 4
2012 Starhawk
2013 Dust 514
 
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And as you said the userbase for PS3 need time to ramp up where it eventually outsold 360. But IMO, too many shooters across too many IPs. There's a reason why companies focus on a small number of shooter franchises.

2006 Resistance 1
2007 Warhawk
2008 Resistance 2
2008 Socom Confrontation
2009 KZ 2
2010 MAG
2011 KZ 3
2011 Resistance 3
2011 Socom 4
2012 Starhawk
2013 Dust 514

Warhawk/Starhawk aren't aiming for the same crowd as Killzone or Resistance or even SOCOM Confrontation for that matter.

This actually proves my point. Killzone 2 didn't come out until after Resistance 2, and sales had already stumbled pretty hard from the first game.

The problem for most of these games was that they just weren't made that well. People purchasing a PS3 for Uncharted 2 or God of War 3 simply weren't the same audience buying FPS. PS3 eventually caught up with 360 worldwide, but was outsold significantly in the US. There's a reason why they called the 360 the dudebro console. It wasn't until the PS4 that many of these players returned to play CoD on PS4.

The bigger problem for quality titles like Killzone and Resistance is that they lacked playerbase and name recognition that they could have gotten had they released on PC in tandem with PS3, but Sony wasn't about that life at the time. They didn't sell terribly compared to black ops and modern warfare 1 (they actually both outsold the first MW on PS3).

Sony just doesn't know how to differentiate Killzone and Resistance from CoD today and the studios responsible for the games are on to bigger selling properties.
 
In general, I think the main points I've seen about the game from people are:

Good
- Gun play
- Net code
- Seems pretty polished

Bad
- Graphics. Doesnt look anything like those fancy promo pics. And the backgrounds have a low res hazy look to it
- Boring
- UI or inventory screens looks cheap
- AI bots too hard
- No prox chat
- No solo queue lobbies
- Already done before in other extraction games. Looks different with sci-fi, but samey gameplay

All the bad points can be fixed with some tweaks except the "boring" part which would require overhauling the objectives and/or AI and human enemy encounters
Considering it was an alpha build, I could see them turning it all around.

I just hope they focus on the coop/PvE aspect, more than the PvP elements.

I kind of want them to succeed at this point. Since hating on big projects like these has become so darn popular, or easy to do. And I have fond gaming memories thanks to Bungie.
 
Considering it was an alpha build, I could see them turning it all around.

I just hope they focus on the coop/PvE aspect, more than the PvP elements.

I kind of want them to succeed at this point. Since hating on big projects like these has become so darn popular, or easy to do. And I have fond gaming memories thanks to Bungie.

I'm not one of these haters that hates on projects or wishes people failure, so hear this when I say it. Marathon is going to flop and flop hard.

What I saw in that live stream is a team that is deflated and defeated and at the same time tone deaf. Will the final product be better than the alpha? Sure. Will that save it? No. The reason why Joseph Cross looked dead inside is because he's a big reason why a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. So why was he on the stream? Because he had to be to address the issues around the stolen art, but his body language and facial expressions did the company no favors. I would have had him address things off camera.

Maybe it's time to get employees media training if they're going to do public speaking events...

Companies need to get better about adjusting or pulling the plug early before dropping tens of millions into things and hundreds of millions into things.

There will 100% be layoffs at Bungie before the year is out, but I'm not rooting for that.
 
I'm not one of these haters that hates on projects or wishes people failure, so hear this when I say it. Marathon is going to flop and flop hard.
You also said this:
I think Doom will easily clear 2 million on PS5
With only 30K ccu on Steam, there is no way Doom will 'easily' sell 2M copies on PS5.

Point is, the market can react completely differently from what the 'general consensus' on Gaf or even the gaming community is.

Pretty much all the main complaints StreetsofBeige StreetsofBeige mentioned can be adressed/solved before launch, or maybe within a few months post-release.

I still stand by everything I said, in that people are wayy too quick to jump the gun.
 
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You also said this:

With only 30K ccu on Steam, there is no way Doom will 'easily' sell 2M copies on PS5.

Point is, the market can react completely differently from what the 'general consensus' on Gaf or even the gaming community is.

Pretty much all the main complaints StreetsofBeige StreetsofBeige mentioned can be adressed/solved before launch, or maybe within a few months post-release.

I still stand by everything I said, in that people are wayy too quick to jump the gun.

I said this in March before I saw that they put out a lackluster port on PS5 and PS5 Pro.

There's not much excuse for this game not to hit 2 million on PS5.

I'm willing to make an avatar bet with you if you want. This game is going to fail.
 
I said this in March before I saw that they put out a lackluster port on PS5 and PS5 Pro.

There's not much excuse for this game not to hit 2 million on PS5.

I'm willing to make an avatar bet with you if you want. This game is going to fail.
If we're gonna do a bet, we go full permanent account-ban.

Like I said in another thread, we'll put Marathon up against ARC.

I stand by what I said:
12 months post-release (both games respectively), Marathon will be in a healthier state than ARC.

Seems like a fair way to judge Marathon's performance as a live service game.
 
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I dont work in artsy media stuff, so things like plagiarism isnt the kind of thing anyone thinks about. At least not in my role and files I do.

But with this Bungie debacle, now I understand more why some people who do PPT slides put their name on the title page. I never do for any files I make (incl PPT), but they probably do that just to make sure nobody rips off their slick PPT taking credit.

Hell, you never know. Maybe I've gotten ripped off myself when someone takes one of my files and passes it off as their own work.
 
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What is the genius feedback anyway. All I see is how this game is cooked.

Genuinely want to know what people think who played the alpha. Is it at least fun? I personally haven't found extraction games to click for me.
 
Whole game was looking like it's made out of placeholder assets anyways (you know the ones developers usually start with to test things out before they eventually replace them with what they truly want for the final game) how do you mess up this bad, I honestly think original Marathon art would look great with Modern graphics it's got enough uniqueness to it and doesn't just look like Generic Corpo ass Roblox Minecraft Lego toy, I mean they are already using plenty of Lore from the Original Marathon so might aswell

the-original-marathon-art-by-craig-mullins-v0-q5a9haxek22b1.jpg
DEAD-SPHT.jpg

Marathon_Image.jpg
battle.lg.jpg
deathofahulk.lg.jpg
 
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Does marathon die before launch?

I feel this is worse than concord to be honest. The only thing that might save them is their studio name and weight in the industry.

After this....and coming from an artistic family I have 0 respect for bungie.

I hadn't even heard about the other cases and the ripping off of the halo story from that book....I feel completely hoodwinked.
 
Never seen anyone wearing a baseball cap indoors?

Caps are equally something useful against sun and a fashion choice.
Very few times and it always some young lad, not grown ass dudes. But I guess fashion things are different across the sea.

In any case, it strikes me as unprofessional. Like what's next, being in front of an audience with your sunglasses on? Fashion choice is fine but people should know better and have some class.
 
Part of me thinks they see those legacy ips as to masculine. It sounds dumb but internally I think some people don't see them (SOCOM, Killzone, Warhawk) as fitting the culture of the place.
All of their efforts have this 'modern' bend to it. Hoping to bring in a new audience.
I think enough loss and pressure might change things.
Sony Japan needs to go scorched earth.
Funny thing is people think Sony can't make GAAS but the truth is…. Sony probably can't make good original IPs anymore this generation has no cool male protagonist and I feel like these Devs at big studios cater to feminine ideologies so every game has to have a map with markers to make easy and simple games to play with all female leads.

Socom is an obvious choice for a game but it has to much toxic masculinity…. Confrontation actually had proximity chat it was awesome. These devs want to make high ttk fast paced shooters and they don't understand theirs a market for a 6v6 8v8 no respawn mission based games PvP game that's simple but all these studios feel like you have to have the DBNO baby crawl and you have to give people a second chance to live….
 
Sorry for the hat debacle, didn't mean to sidetrack the thread lol.

The ONLY similarity it has is the name, and the logo.
I find curious how they are still able to use the Marathon logo after smearing that thing all over Halo over the years.

aEpPQWo.png


Right there in the middle! :goog_relieved:


And yes, I agree that the only possible explanation for they doing this is they owning the IP, not knowing what to do with it and went "yeah lets slap the Marathon name on this just for marketing purposes". Kinda what happened with Quake 2 back then.
 
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If we're gonna do a bet, we go full permanent account-ban.

Like I said in another thread, we'll put Marathon up against ARC.

I stand by what I said:
12 months post-release (both games respectively), Marathon will be in a healthier state than ARC.

Seems like a fair way to judge Marathon's performance as a live service game.


I don't care about Arc Raiders.

How about we keep it a permanent account-ban and if the game never hits 100k peak you lose and if it does I lose. 12 month window.
 
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