If there's one thing most players could agree on about Marathon in its opening weeks, it is that Bungie's reimagining of the classic shooter series is mercilessly difficult. To borrow a phrase from philosopher Thomas Hobbes, every encounter with another player is nasty, brutish and short. One nano-second you're looting a bio-scanner, the next you're lying on the floor being stabbed in the chest by a space ninja. If you're skilled or lucky, the roles are reversed, but the end result is the same – absolute carnage.
In my first ten days or so with the game, I was successfully extracting perhaps 15-25 percent of the time, and it was always worse when I was playing on a team with strangers. Having come from 200 hours in Arc Raiders where servers can often be ridiculously friendly ("You loot the harvester first". "No, you, I insist". "Oh, I couldn't possibly", etc), it has been somewhat shocking – but also incredibly liberating.
Freed from the expectation of escape, I have also been able to jettison something that has almost ruined a lot of modern games for me: inventory hoarding, or gear fear if you prefer. In Arc Raiders I have a huge store of high value weapons because I always think there will be an optimal time for their use – it's the same as every survival horror game with an inventory. I hardly ever get to use the rocket launcher or nuclear grenade or whatever because I'm always saving it for a later boss battle. And then I finish the game, and the rocket launcher is still rusting in my suitcase.
Credits on the table
Marathon review: "My favorite multiplayer shooter in years"
I don't save anything in Marathon. I load up my best stuff and head out into the day-glo madness of Station. Instead of squirreling away the deluxe Retaliator LMG I tore from the cold dead hands of a player I caught hiding behind some rocks in the algae ponds, I take it straight out, hammering waves of UESC recruits with maniacal glee. What does it matter? On Tau Ceti IV, life is too short for ammo discipline.
There's a related extraction shooter problem that is also solved by the intense time-to-kill difficulty of Marathon: obsessive load-out optimization. I spend many, many minutes fine-tuning my equipment for each Arc Raiders run, a process that has become increasingly more exhausting as my objectives grow in ambition and specificity. I've heard the same from friends still grinding away in Escape from Tarkov. In Marathon, I just chuck stuff in my backpack, like hurriedly packing for a last-minute weekend break. And beneath the surface this sense of urgency is aided by the game's UI and progression design. The armory offers meagre resources to begin with, and new options unlock at a slow pace, so you learn to cope. You learn to rely on what you can loot, or the free items that factions toss at you. And of course, underlining all of this is the fact that everything resets at the end of the season, you keep nothing but the clothes on your back.
This use-it-AND-lose-it design approach is balanced out on the other side by two clever design decisions. First, almost everyone joins a match at the beginning of the instance, unlike in Arc where you can sometimes spawn in with barely 17 minutes left of the 30-minute run – so everyone gets an equal shot at the best gear. Secondly, the comparative abundance of decent items in the game world makes it quick and easy to gather a serviceable load-out. Sweep the first building you get to on a Marathon map, and you'll have health items, ammo, perhaps a basic sidearm (useful if you've gone in with a free kit), maybe even a grenade or two. In short, you build a strategy on the fly by engaging with the world on its terms, rather than through gathering, sorting and planning via a series of exterior menus. Marathon is intentionally designed to get you out of the meta and into the physical.
In terms of minute-to-minute action, the game is much more inline with the deathmatch origins of the Marathon multiplayer experience. Back then, powerful weapons were picked up for a temporary boost in each frenzied round and the emphasis was movement and instinct. The ironic thing is, as I have put in more hours, I've learned how to slow things down a little – how to scope out a building and spot trouble, how to get the most out of the cores, mods, and implants I do manage to hold onto for a few rounds. And the Rook shell is there for people who are desperate to build viable inventories by creeping in late and picking over the bones of the fallen.
Bungie has always designed multiplayer games like orchestral symphonies – a mix of parts working together in complicated but pleasing ways. It creates strange, highly expressive environments that encourage interaction and exploration, while removing barriers and facilitating seamless movement. It makes beautiful weapons and puts them in skill-based spaces that encourage and reward their use. You die easily, but then you get back in easily too. I don't know how this will play out as the game ages, I hope it sticks around. As a long-term sufferer of inventory anxiety, I am enjoying this new life of complete gear indifference. Out in the badlands of Tau Ceti IV, you can't lose what you never really owned.
