Marathon boss cryptically suggests the game is too hard, outright confirms "we have some iterations / big balance changes brewing right now"

In 1991, American rock band Nirvana released the song 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' as part of its second album, Nevermind. The song opens with the lines, "Load up on guns, bring your friends / It's fun to lose and to pretend." I say all this because Marathon game director Joe Ziegler says, in a cryptic "off topic" footnote on a Twitter post promising big Marathon balance changes, that he may have taken the first two lines of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' "too much to heart."

Ziegler opens with the AAA classic "update about an update," promising "we have some iterations / big balance changes brewing right now and will talk about it soon." Marathon has seen some mild balance tuning already, but this update sounds like Bungie's first massive shakeup. I would expect several weapons, items, runner shells, and more to shift around the meta considerably, to say nothing of potential structural changes to faction quests, the loot economy, or even more. Players per map, spawn locations, and base PvP time-to-kill are also evergreen talking points that could conceivably be touched on.

Yet it's the "off topic" comment from Ziegler that's really stuck to my brain. It doesn't sound very off-topic, for one, and it would be a curious thing for the game director of Marathon to say for no particular reason at all.

"But... OFF TOPIC: I feel like as a kid of the 90s and a person who's worked on PVP FPS games for over a decade, I may have taken the first two lines of Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' too much to heart.," he says in full. Ziegler comes from the likes of Valorant, where he was also game director, and his fingerprints are plain to see on Marathon's cutthroat PvP.

Discussion around Marathon has largely been dominated by how unforgiving and demanding a game it is, not just in its split-second PvP engagements but also in its lethal PvE encounters and resource-intense progression ladder. Playing Marathon alone is extra brutal, partly because much of the game literally was not built for solo play – Bungie's said repeatedly that teams of three were the vision for Marathon for a good while, and it shows – and it's had to grow into the lone wolf playstyle.

"Load up on guns, bring your friends / It's fun to lose and to pretend," Nirvana wrote. How are we to interpret this in the context of Marathon and Ziegler's post? The safest best is not to interpret it, I suppose, and simply assume it's as "off topic" as Ziegler says. Yet the game director of Marathon also said it, and he said it in a post about big balance changes.

If Ziegler had specified, say, the first two lines of Nirvana's 'Come as You Are,' which, as a refresher, are, "Come as you are, as you were / As I want you to be," I don't think the grounds for speculation would be quite so fertile. Nearest I can tell, Marathon has come exactly as Bungie wanted it; the studio made it miserable on purpose, which is why it makes so many people miserable, yet other people are miserable in a good way. 109 hours in, I'm miserable in a good way. I like the way this sucks. But 'Teen Spirit' offers quite the pair of lines to pluck out.

To pull right into speculation station, is special attention being paid to the solo experience? Is Bungie, having seen the decidedly not Arc Raiders-sized audience that Marathon's attracted, ready to make concessions on difficulty in general in the hopes of making Marathon more approachable and helping more players reach the game's nougat center of genre-leading aesthetics, worldbuilding, and gunplay? Who can say but Ziegler himself, once he is back on-topic.

We can at least turn to another line from 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' which is unquestionably relevant and which summarizes virtually every request from the players who have fallen in love with Marathon: "Here we are now, entertain us".

Our Marathon review sees Andy call it "my favorite multiplayer shooter in years."