Marathon is delayed, but don't worry, Bungie says it just has to work on the AI, loot, combat, graphics, narrative, playlists, prox chat, and oops that's the whole game isn't it?

Every time I think about Marathon nowadays, I think about two quotes. The first, I heard at Bungie when I visited earlier this year for a Marathon hands-on preview event. We were told that half of the game's systems had been thrown out or overhauled during development – not entirely unusual, as games may change dramatically from their initial pitch – with whispers among veteran testers alluding to a radically different game than what we were about to see. I asked about these overhauls in a group Q&A later during the visit, and we heard a bit of how Marathon looked before the hero shooter-coded Runners of today, back when there was limb damage and a more persistent world.

The second quote is one I heard from Strange Scaffold boss Xalavier Nelson Jr.. As part of our big developer roundtable on what people get wrong about games, he said he increasingly finds games made in two years to be more exciting than games made in eight years, because "six years of that was people wandering in a no man's land while some guy would come in and radically change the game because he played something really cool."

It's not been eight years, but Marathon has been in the works at Bungie for several years. It's going to be in the works a while longer following a newly announced delay to an unspecified future release date. The delay came as no grand surprise. Even before the game's art plagiarism fiasco – by my count, the fourth similar fiasco in Bungie's orbit – which saw an independent artist's work lifted wholesale in multiple graphics and assets, the optics were not great. It played pretty well; Bungie is nothing if not a gunplay maestro, and I had fun in the preview and alpha sessions. But I'm no extraction shooter diehard, and the folks who are have had very mixed feelings. Marathon had not won the crowd.

Let's put this into perspective. At the time of writing, Arc Raiders, a sci-fi extraction shooter from The Finals studio Embark, is ranked seventh on Steam wishlists. It's due on October 30. Marathon, a game that sits in a similar genre space but has seemingly cost considerably more to develop, was made by a storied FPS and live service veteran that PlayStation paid $3.6 billion for, and which was previously going to launch before Arc Raiders in September, is ranked 64th.

This is not the almighty metric of player interest. Steam will not be Marathon's only platform, or even necessarily its biggest. There's an argument to be made that Embark's PvP-focused background has more overlap with this kind of shooter than Destiny 2's audience, even if the latter is far bigger. And I don't want to fruitlessly pit two cool games against each other, either (even if I do remain skeptical of how many different games the niche and intimidating extraction shooter space can support, for all Bungie's ambitions of expanding that space). But this gap helps demonstrate the less-than-ravenous reception Marathon has gotten so far, and how difficult it may have been – and may yet be – for Bungie to break into a space long defined by Escape from Tarkov and its cousins.

Not a sprint

So, Bungie's working on it. With this delay, the studio says it's taking the time to "empower the team to create the intense, high-stakes experience that a title like Marathon is built around." There's more testing to be done, more elbow grease to be applied. And there are, doubtlessly, hundreds of skilled and hardworking developers working hard on this game right now (though a May report claimed morale at the studio plummeted after the plagiarism incident). "Some of our immediate focus areas," Bungie says, include:

• "More challenging and engaging AI encounters
• More rewarding runs, with new types of loot and dynamic events
• Making combat more tense and strategic
• Increased visual fidelity
• More narrative and environmental storytelling to discover and interact with
• A darker tone that delivers on the themes of the original trilogy
• Adding more social experiences
• A better player experience for solo/duos
• Prox chat, so social stories can come to life"

To recap, Bungie's "immediate focus" is on the AI, loot, events, combat strategy, visual fidelity, narrative and environmental storytelling, tone, social experience, solo and duo play, and proximity chat. I would like to know what Bungie's immediate focus is not, because this reads like tacit admission that nearly the entire game needs a non-trivial amount of work.

I'd also like to know how anyone at the leadership level thought this thing was going to be ready for September if it still needs this kind of polish. I guess they did finally decide it needs more time, but this feels like a lot of heavy lifting to be doing this late in the game, and certainly doesn't help fears that Marathon was running rudderless for too long.

This to-do list is broad, incomplete, and could manifest in a lot of ways. "Increased visual fidelity" feels like a direct response to criticism of how blocky or washed-out Marathon could feel (I find it simple and clean, but I can understand the argument). "Making combat more tense and strategic," I would imagine, will involve making it less warped by the wall hacks and invisibility provided by two Runners who quickly became dominant. That "darker tone" will hopefully emulate the style captured in Marathon's truly stunning, Alberto Mielgo-directed reveal cinematic, which nails the melancholy of hopeless mercenaries fighting for scraps in an alien world stalked by corporations.

What of the AI? Marathon's robot legions are impressively aggressive and reactive, honestly, but could certainly be more rewarding to kill; avoiding them whenever possible is usually the play, making them feel more like a nuisance. Runs and events could also be more rewarding, Bungie agrees, perhaps looking to create more hotspots that can pay off big if you brave the danger.

The social stuff feels like the biggest shift, and the loudest concession that Bungie had missed the mark. People expected proximity chat, and locking your game to teams of three can make it incredibly difficult or frustrating to play. Bungie didn't have a clean answer here, and now the game's been delayed while it comes up with one.

All of these things sound good. Of course they do. Why yes, I would like it if the whole freakin' game was better. I never want games to be bad; I'd love for Marathon to be a fun thing I can play with my friends. But there are times where the sheer scope of reactive changes, especially this close to a launch that still seems to be coming before the end of Sony's fiscal year in early 2026, gives me pause. Is there enough road left to make this turn?

Just recently, PlayStation insisted Marathon has "strong early engagement," even after a very public art scandal and divisive playtests.