Like Destiny 2 before it, Marathon is a live-service game with a narrative set to grow and evolve over the course of (hopefully) many updates to come. But unlike Destiny 2, Bungie wants Marathon to remain an "additive experience," which means we probably shouldn't worry about content getting vaulted in the future.
"We want Marathon to be an additive experience," creative director Julia Nardin tells Space.com. "in the sense that all priority contracts and story content aims to be evergreen, meaning that it doesn't matter when you join, you'll still be able to play through the established questlines and fill out your Codex with achievements and collections that allow you to uncover additional layers of the world. We'll be adding to this foundation over time in the live service environment, depending on our players' response and at a cadence we can support, but we know what direction we want to go in and what we want to create for the community to uncover next."
That should make it a lot easier for late-coming Marathon players to pick up on the ongoing narrative, a concern that's very real for new Destiny 2 players. Missed out on the last nine years of story content? Sorry, most of that's been relegated to the Destiny Content Vault, leaving your only hope to catch up on the story as a deep dive into YouTube lore videos.
Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be a concern for Marathon. While some players – like me – who still remember Bungie best for its Halo campaigns might wonder just how much story can really be packed into an extraction shooter, Nardin is keen to emphasize the studio's narrative ambitions.
"The core loop is about scavenging an abandoned colony, so we set out to tell the best possible story about that colony and the people who lived there," she explains. "A lot of that is done through the loot itself – there are text files and audio logs that you can collect that will help you piece together what happened on Tau Ceti IV."
Meanwhile, Marathon factions issue contracts to guide you as you explore each of the locations, and the larger narrative ties back into the decades-old story first established in the '90s Marathon trilogy – which, incidentally, happens to be free on Steam. That's the kind of unvaulting I can really get behind.
If you need a little extra help, check out all our Marathon tips.
