In a stunning display of endurance, Bungie's unfinished, unflattering, and ultimately delayed extraction shooter Marathon finally pokes its head out of the waves after months of looking like a goner, emerging now for a closed playtest.
Before announcing the test – scheduled to take place between October 22 to October 27 – developer Bungie had been strategically silent about Marathon's fate. The developer was accused for at least the fourth time in its history of plagiarizing another artist's work, and then it admitted to mistakenly doing so in Marathon, reportedly destroying company morale about the revival of its 1994 shooter of the same name.
With this in mind, Bungie's announcement declaring signups for Marathon's technical test sounds not triumphant, but a bit begrudging. The developer says clinically that "this is an important checkpoint for us as we test our improvements since Alpha, including three maps, five runner shells, prox chat, re-tuned combat pacing, solo queue, deeper environmental storytelling, and more."
"That said, the Technical Test build is a work in progress and will only include a portion of what's planned for Marathon's full release, focused on the early player experience," Bungie continues. "We'll be sharing a public update on Marathon's development in the coming months after the Closed Technical Test!"
Participation in the closed test requires players to be located in either Europe or North America and to have, at a minimum, a PS5, Xbox Series S, or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti for their PC. I'm sure patience will also be rewarded.
