Marathon has something about it. For a while I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it was that made it appeal to me where most extraction shooters didn't. The gunplay is great, but the same could be said of Escape From Tarkov. That 'new game excitement' didn't grip me when Arc Raiders arrived, so how did Marathon immediately slip a neon-green hook under my skin and pull me into its convoluted sci-fi world?
A not-insignificant part of what pulled me in is the convoluted sci-fi world, with its abstruse design language and commitment to neon green. Here, 30 years since the original game launched, Bungie doubles down on its capitalist apocalypse with a slick design ethos and the bravery to not spoon-feed the audience lore. Marathon borrows many themes from the Soulslike genre, but its commitment to diegetic storytelling may be its masterstroke. If you want to understand what's going on, you'd better pay attention to item descriptions, random barks, and even the narrative in your own inventory.
However, fans recently complained that the icons for implants were too difficult to read at a glance and made inventory management finicky. They weren't wrong. So, Bungie changed them - and I think it was a huge mistake.
Use your eyes
I played Marathon and its 1994 predecessor to see how Bungie has evolved over the years
Instead of the slick-but-confusing designs that felt a part of this universe, we've got a bunch of icons that don't make sense within Marathon's existing design language. To make things worse, there is no discernible improvement to readability.
There are some things you should concede to players. Improving queue times, rebalancing overpowered weapons, that sort of thing. In a live-service environment, they're your biggest source of playtesters. Fans have requested other changes, such as removing the overlap between the ranked and Cryo Archive playlists. This makes sense, it ensures quicker queue times and eliminates executive dysfunction over whether to play for loot or to rise up the leaderboard. Bungie listened, changed the schedule, and everyone was happy.
But my gripe is that players aren't designers. They haven't created the mood boards, sketched out icons, and pored over every last detail. They just want to be able to loot quicker. It's disappointing that Bungie has watered down its perfectly-executed design ethos for the sake of menu navigation.
Regarding the icons, I get it. I was confused, too. As a player, you want to be able to see that this implant is Helping Hands and this one is Thick Skull while looting or setting your loadout for a mission.
I imagine that players would be happy if the Thick Skull implant was represented by a skull and Helping Hands was a hand with, say, a thumbs up. Like a Pip-Boy upgrade in Fallout 4 or something. Something readable, something they can slot into their inventory without thinking. But they forget that, in this game, they're not a player. They're a consciousness uploaded to an organic shell in order to extract maximum profit from the swamps and science facilities of Tau Ceti.
The frictional design is one of Marathon's strongest selling points
The new icons are distinct from both Marathon's existing design language and what the upgrades actually do. Now I can tell implants apart from cores at a glance, but I still can't tell what each implant does. In essence, nobody wins. Players still have to hover over the item to figure out what it does, and any immersion is lost because the new icons don't match the game's existing art direction. Marathon has sanded down its strongest asset, and for what?
That's not to catastrophize. I don't think the game is doomed because of one minor change to its design language. But, if Bungie keeps filing down the rough edges of its design in order to give players a smoother gameplay experience, Marathon becomes just another shooter. Right now, the frictional design is one of Marathon's strongest selling points. This is a Soulslike where opponents are bosses and implants are tiny fragments of storytelling.
You wouldn't tell Miyazaki to write a linear novelization of the Dark Souls' story, so why ask Bungie to water down Marathon's identity when it risks turning this bold attempt at live-service storytelling into something generic. For Marathon, I couldn't think of a worse fate.
Check out the best FPS games to play next, from Battlefield to Call of Duty.
