Joe Ziegler, director of Bungie's upcoming live service extraction shooter Marathon, says there's plenty of room for growth in the genre partly fueled by the immense success of sandbox shooters and battle royale games.
GamesRadar+ recently had the chance to sit down with Ziegler to talk all things Marathon, and we asked him why the team at Bungie is confident that it'll become "the next hit PvP experience" given the relatively niche popularity of the extraction shooter genre. Turns out, Bungie is hoping to siphon some of the success from big sandbox games with deeper, more meaningful stories.
"I do think that the ceiling could rise from where it's at currently," Ziegler said. "And part of that is I think that we have a whole generation of people who are growing up in sandbox experiences. We have [battle royale] players, we have players who are playing other sandbox shooters as their main game as they were growing up. And for them, they're creating a lot of these stories, but a lot of the stories that they're creating are framed by the systems that those games embrace, right?
"And what we're trying to do is like, what if we took that to the next layer? When do you want to create emotional stories that will actually peak and valley in different ways, and create emotional texture that makes you feel something new and different based on some of the things you know?"
With a survival extraction game, players are thrust into critically dangerous situations usually in search of loot that's crucial to their survival, and it sounds like Ziegler and co. are hoping sandbox players become more emotionally invested because of the stakes at hand in Marathon.
"For us, when we're talking about extraction, we're really talking about the session-based survival experience that leads to chain storytelling. This story that we've created inside of this session has impact. We got loot out or we lost it, whatever the case is, and then that affects the next session. And so over time, you create this texture of different sessions that comes together to different stories that leads to a career inside of this space."
For what it's worth, GR+ writer Austin Wood recently went hands on with Marathon and came away with a measured and cautiously optimistic take, writing, "After playing Marathon for 8 hours, I don’t think Bungie’s extraction shooter will be the next Helldivers 2 hit, but I don’t think it will be the next Concord bust either."
Marathon is due to launch across PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on September 23, 2025, complete with full crossplay and cross save compatibility. A closed alpha test is planned to start April 23. We don't yet know the price, but Bungie has said it won't be a "full-priced title."
Marathon feels like a good extraction shooter, but it's not free-to-play, and I hope Sony and Bungie don't price it into an early grave.
