Bungie's Marathon reboot is getting a closed beta later this month before it properly launches for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X on September 23 as a paid release, with full cross-play and cross-save functionality.
During Marathon's gameplay deep dive from today, the famed FPS studio behind the original Halo games and Destiny spilled the tea on how it's returning to the series that started it all. Unlike the originals from three decades ago, this Marathon is instead a multiplayer extraction shooter where teams of three Runners will jump in, loot the planet of Tau Ceti IV, and hopefully get out alive in order to keep all their fancy winnings.
If you'd like to get your hands on the competitive looting as soon as possible, a closed alpha playtest is coming on April 23 and you can sign up via the game's official Discord server, which should be going live any second now. Bungie also explained that the team will be holding Q&As and "evolving the game based on player feedback for launch and beyond."
Come September, there'll be six playable characters, who you can customize to some degree, and three maps, with a fourth one coming in the weeks after launch. That post-launch battlefield, the UESC Marathon ship that hangs above the sky, also has mysterious new "raid-like" mechanics, according to game director Joe Ziegler, who spoke at a studio Q&A attended by GamesRadar+.
Our Marathon hands-on preview showered the shooter's gunplay with praise, predicting a hit somewhere between Helldivers 2's lofty highs and Concord's underground lows. "Passed through the Bungie action machine like sugar through a bee, the extraction shooter formula looks, feels, and sounds incredible," our Austin Wood wrote. "Elegant. Refined. It is unignorably good, but it will also scare and infuriate and turn off a lot of people."
We also learned that Marathon somewhat surprisingly isn't going down the free-to-play route, though a Bungie representative said the company wasn't going to comment on how much it'll cost at launch for the moment. Sony's other recent live service games, Helldivers 2 and Concord, were also paid releases, so it's not too surprising a development, even if Destiny 2 players are used to getting their foot in the door for free.
From launch, seasons will last around three months and reset your vault and faction progress every time. Bungie says new seasons will bring big changes to the world and pacing, enticing players back after the sting of a reset.
