After a short delay, the developers behind “Marathon” bring some more insight into the end of the Closed Alpha and the new upcoming plans for the extraction shooter.
With the end of the Closed Alpha 2 weeks ago, Bungie finally gives the developers a chance to get on stream and talk about all their upcoming plans for “Marathon.” The discussion was much more surface level and functioned more as a check-in as opposed to their announcement reveal stream. Instead now with feedback on the latest build and some time to work on it, game director Joe Ziegler and art director Joe Cross step on camera with the assistance of gameplay director Andrew Witts and community manager Cozmo.
One of the most important issues to discuss, which was addressed at the head of the steam, was the controversy around the assets of “4nt1r34l” (Antireal), a freelance artist who posted recently about her artwork being used without permission in the Marathon Closed Alpha. Bungie has responded on BlueSky already, but also took time to address it and apologize during the beginning of the stream as well as discussing it throughout, including that they’d be willing to hire and work with Antireal in the future but that her assets and many others were taken out and scrubbed in order to be sure that no other plagiarism occurred. The work that went into their review of this and their commitment to doing right by the artists feels sincere and will hopefully result in this never occurring in the future of Marathon, but with a history of this occurring in Destiny 2 with fan art slipping into official work there’s a lot of obvious backlash. The community deserves a response from Bungie regarding their investigation and knowing that they reached an agreement with Antireal in the future, and hopefully we’ll see some discussion about systemic crunch or structural issues that cause plagiarism from artists on the team in a way that will hopefully allow us to trust that the art and assets we praise are original.
There’s no gentle way to transition to and away from a segment on a topic as serious as plagiarism, but take this time to check out Antireal and consider donating if financially capable. Her work is incredible and shares characteristics with Marathon’s art style in a way that fans of the game will surely enjoy. This article, and the information online, is in no way a reason or excuse to harass Antireal or Bungie and their team in any way. What happened was wrong and should not happen again, but threats or untimely jokes do nothing to fix that and only serve as cruelty for the sake of hatred. This is on Bungie to reach out and make things right as well as to internally discuss and change something to ensure this won’t happen again.
(Here’s some incredible art from Antireal on her website. Check her out!)
In brighter news, a lot more positive information concerning the game’s systems and balance was shared during the stream. While there was no gameplay to show or new assets to share, we did get confirmation of a lot of highly requested features still being in discussion with the team. Proximity chat and ways to interact with rival players was brought up as something still in discussion, a feature most players are in support of but was shelved initially due to a concern of player safety during gameplay. In addition, we’ve had some more conversation about customization of runners both appearance wise and future gear. With more interesting implants on the way, there’s a lot more buildcrafting that will be available to players. One of these is the weapons and their future, especially with half of the weapons yet to be revealed. While retuning the drop chances and other balancing discussion, they’ve also noted that the perk-like effects present on the purple weapon attachments will be moving to the chip slot. This means that more common chips will be available with more frequent effects as well as the clip slot becoming generalized so that any chip can be slotted into any gun. These changes will work to help make early buildcrafting more accessible while also making the later stages of buildcrafting satisfying in different ways.
Talking more about combat during the games, the team discussed looking more at time to kill and the buffs they’ve made to health so far. They mentioned being worried about the 11% overrun damage buff during development which led them to discussing what is important to the feeling of grey guns in comparison to later attachments. This also included changing how they look at team play and looking for ways to make clutch plays and coordinated efforts more worthwhile. This included looking at how it feels to resurrect a player rather than just help them up from the “down but not out” (DBNO) knockdown state. They previously made changes to the decay rate of saved progress on fallen teammates but are also now working to potentially increase the time it takes to revive based on the amount of downs that player has had. This is based on their concepts of time, citing that the time it takes to bring a knocked player back should be longer than a player healing to full as well as noting that bringing a knocked player back to a fight should be hard but reviving a killed runner should be nearly impossible during combat. These steps extend past PvP combat and into the UESC and dangers of the world, especially as something that stops combat from being “front-loaded” and making the maps feel dangerous as time goes on. The goal sounds like as players exfil early or are picked off, more UESC with more dangerous AI and traits may take the space and begin to threaten players more directly in ways that can end a run. With more discussion about harder AI and more ways to play with them, the developers sound like they want to make PvE combat as threatening as the PvP. Pacing events and increasing difficulty as time goes on with things like new exfil requirements are likely to make players think twice when trying to push their chances.
There were many more small discussions made during the 1 hour livestream—bag space, lore concerning the original Marathon, and progression including the “Archives” achievement and collectable system were all touched on with lots of talk about the work the team was doing. We do currently lack a date as to when the next playtest is coming, but the progress being made is exciting and I hope we won’t have to wait too long to get back into Tau Ceti IV and continue our journey to discover more about their world.
