Gaming: Marathon Server Slam Consumed My Weekend: 21 Hours Later, I've Gone...

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It was around this time last year when Embark and Bungie both ran playtests for their new extraction shooters at the same time. Marathon's alpha was the culmination of two years of feverish speculation about the legendary FPS studio's first non-Destiny project in over 15 years.

Then the unexpected happened: Arc Raiders upstaged Marathon. Embark went on to release the first mainstream game of its genre while Marathon got delayed, cementing it as a fixation of skepticism for certain corners of the hobby.

I was among those who saw promise in Marathon's silky gunplay and standout art, but didn't click with the maps or AI enemies at the time. Even as Bungie reworked those bots and revamped its art style to better highlight Tau Ceti IV's collision of nature and artifice, I still didn't immediately connect with this past weekend's server slam: I had gripes with its punishing item economy and, after so many hours of Arc Raiders, had trouble adapting to the idea that Marathon wouldn't be the same social sandbox.

Four days and 21 hours of playtime later, I've done a 180. Marathon consumed my weekend. I've gone from "meh" on day one, to "OK this is pretty cool" on day two, to "I think I love Marathon."

My turnaround happened on day two. That was when I started to realize what sort of FPS Bungie is actually going for—an approachable, but very much lethal PvP shooter—and began to lean into that. I started running toward gunshots instead of sneaking around them. I turned on my mic, let random players fill in my crew, and finally had some great matches with the sort of intense back-and-forth fights that I recognized from Hunt: Showdown.

That's a comparison that I expect to come back to, because I really do think Marathon's PvP is the reason to play it. The looting, the upgrades, the cool gun mods—they're table setting for a three-course meal of teamfights, solo scrapes, and unlikely zero-to-hero runs. And backing it up is gunplay that's oozing the Bungie magic that I've truly missed.

I've seen some folks throw around that Marathon just feels like another hippity-hoppy Call of Duty or Apex Legends, and I wonder if we played the same game, because Marathon shells are slow, clambering creatures. Your base jogging speed has this gradual methodical thud that, unsurprisingly, has more in common with the pacing of Halo than CoD. I'm enjoying that choice for the way it gene

Source: PC Gamer