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Did you know Bungie made Marathon? Not that one, this one, the one currently running a server slam ahead of launch on March 5. The studio's a Ship of Theseus at this point but you can clearly see Bungie's DNA in Marathon's stellar gunplay, superlative soundscape, and retina-hijacking environments. My four hours with the server slam have been fantastic simply from an FPS perspective. Pardon my flowery language: it feels great to shoot guns. But this isn't a simple shooter. It's a complicated shooter – an extraction shooter. And it's in the extraction half that bad habits – revealed to me over thousands of hours of Destiny – really communicate that this is a Bungie game. With UI that's simultaneously overwhelming and uninformative, Marathon is very rapidly doing my head in.
Remember when Destiny 2 finally added a transmog system – a bog-standard cosmetic feature that other MMOs solved many moons prior – and managed to turn it into a multi-stage, fractally padded, currency-saddled, pay-to-skip mess? Bungie is a bee, but an Eldritch one. Sugar goes in, honey comes out. Guns go in and the best gunplay you've ever seen in your life comes out. But sometimes, when the hour strikes 12 and the animals wisely retreat to the safety of the forest, incredibly simple and established systems will go in and unfathomable, horrifying spaghetti not meant for human eyes will come out.
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There are, by a rough count, 11 bazillion items in Marathon. A sampling: a range of upgrade and crafting resources, gun-specific mods for four slots, grenades and gadgets, consumables to counter the grenades and gadgets, Runner-exclusive mods for other slots, neutral Runner implants that in my experience do next to nothing or only do something on Tuesday when it's overcast, cash trinkets, and at least five honest-to-god currencies for the item shop on top of actual money. That's how you know it's a Bungie game – the redundant currencies that not one single soul, not one light flickering bravely in the storm of our world, asked for.
What do you do with all of these items? I'm not sure yet. Charitably, that's part of the learning process. Less charitably, Marathon bombards you with popups and information at the start – terrible onboarding, another page torn from the Destiny handbook – and I've only played the server slam for four hours. Eventually, I once thought, I'll learn to see the lines, to determine at a glance what's worth scavenging. But here's the problem: I can't see a damn thing, and I can't carry a damn thing either.
You will find that I have far fewer than 11 bazillion inventory slots in Marathon even with a substantially upgraded bag. I can barely hold a reasonable amount of healing items and ammunition. I don't have the space for even half of the loot I'm finding – not in my pockets or in my vault – which means I can't engage with it. I can't assign value to these items, learn their strategic or economic value, or integrate them into fights. It doesn't help that most come in pitifully tiny stacks. Three bandages to a slot? Was there some sort of inventory famine and now we're rationing space?
Marathon is trying to fit 50 pounds of items into a 10-pound box, and of those plentiful and dubiously useful knick knacks, loads of them look functionally identical. In Arc Raiders, when I see a spring, I know what it is and I know what it does. It's a spring; it springs. I remember being confused by some resources at the start, but I didn't figure this out at hour 300; I knew from the start what a spring looks like. Even the fantastical elements of Arc Raiders – sparking, alien doodads dropped by Arc – became easily recognizable after a few rounds. I know what that thing is, how to get it, and what to use it for.
In Marathon, a Curious Rectangle could be one of – with zero hyperbole – 50 things with completely different use cases. I've found that implants, shields, and consumables are extremely difficult to differentiate at a glance, and some resources also look very much like weapon mods that are, themselves, hard to distinguish from one another.
Marathon's iridescent art style is incredible but its visual language is abysmal. Parsing loot is a major component of an extraction shooter, and Bungie's penchant for fumbling UX has really come back to bite it here. Four hours in, every single time I decrypt a pile of loot, I can't tell my ass from my elbow. And I don't think simply playing more is going to fix this; if anything, I imagine I'll just get better at ignoring loot, tuning out all the white noise, and finding the hay in the needle stack.
So far, sessions of Marathon feel oddly quiet for a proudly PvP-forward extraction shooter – something Bungie's acknowledged and even offered advice on – so you spend a lot of time running around looting. But it feels like the game is shoveling items at me and I'm catching them with a teaspoon. And I have to carefully inspect every single item, including ones I've handled many times before, with a magnifying glass. And if I get caught off guard by another player while doing so, I will be dead in, generously, two seconds. In other words, not good.
