Marathon sets its sights for a March 2026 release window, rekindling the fires of Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter after a tumultuous series of issues and drama.
With the ever-shifting landscape of gaming trends and demands, Marathon has a lot to prove to attract a consistent playerbase. Just recently, Bungie finally showed more information about Marathon with their signature ViDocs. While it was interesting for its loyal players, the ViDoc also saw a divided response from the community. It’s already obvious that other toxic comments are from trolls; some other concerns are also valid. What can make Marathon compete with Embark’s ARC Raiders? What is its advantage?
This isn’t comparing apples to oranges. Both games are similar in their own way. It follows the familiar extraction-shooter loop: deploy, loot, and extract. Obviously, Bungie has to step up and do things differently. Which is why its class-based Runners are central to the grind as opposed to ARC Raiders’ inventory management, Arc enemies and weapon crafting.
Marathon’s clearest edge, apart from its Runners, is in its brilliant art direction. Yes, while Bungie had a major plagiarism issue months prior, they have since compensated the artist, and the stolen art is no longer present in the latest build of the game, except for a few stylistic choices that remained true to Marathon’s utilitarian aesthetic.
Bungie still knows how to make things look good. That’s always been their edge since the days of the first Marathon. We’ve seen this before with its plethora of skyboxes in Destiny 2’s selection of planets. From the Leviathan looming over the horizon on our moon to the Traveler hovering around the Earth’s surface, these small yet standout design choices evoke atmosphere and immersion, and that’s always been Bungie’s strongest suit.
A PvPvE extraction shooter like Marathon has this kind of advantage. With the full might of Bungie’s talented developers, every map across Tau Ceti is teeming with life. In the ViDoc, we hear leaves and grass rustling in the Dire Marsh map, alerting you to a nearby Void. Servers breathing in and out inside a facility complex in the Outpost map, clearly hinting at looming AI enemies in the area. We’ve only seen snippets of what the eponymous Marathon map is capable of, but we can already tell that this is where Bungie spent most of its resources in terms of scale and grandeur.
Even dead Runner bodies are updated to address the previous beta’s ‘arcade-y’ criticism. ARC Raiders’ version of corpses are slumped bodies waiting for someone to take them back to Speranza. Marathon takes it further with realism, as players can see the synthetic blood oozing out of a Runner corpse, which can also be used to indicate whether a hostile Runner is nearby, depending on a corpse’s freshness.
It might seem trivial to some, but attention to detail has always been my litmus test for whether a game is good or bad. Atmosphere and sound design are all part of that requirement, and Bungie’s Marathon has that.
Marathon has more opportunities to prove it can compete in the market, especially with a public playtest before launch.
The improved art direction and atmosphere sold me on that. However, I can’t say the same thing for its gameplay. Is it as addictive and rewarding as ARC Raiders? Or is it a dull slogfest like playing through a round of Destiny 2’s Gambit?
We won’t know until we get our hands on it.
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