Bungie has released an official update on the status of Marathon. The update came in the form of a nearly 10-minute long video on the game’s official YouTube channel.
In the video, Game Director Joe Ziegler gives an update on what’s been worked on since the last update on Marathon. He covers the direction of the game as well as plans for future updates about the game.
The update also doesn’t include any look at official gameplay, but does come with some concept art for a few of the game’s heroes. If you want to watch the video for yourself, you can below.
As far as what was covered, Ziegler discusses the game being an extraction shooter, including diving into to what an extraction shooter is for those who may be unfamiliar with the subgenre. Ziegler also talks about taking elements from the original Marathon and expanding them for a new game with a modern audience.
“We’re taking a lot of familiar elements, especially a lot of the mysterious and kind of eeriness and the — how do I put it — the psychological kind of the entire IP as it exists before,” he said.
“But we’re layering on some elements that we think really help modernize it, and also bring it to a new story and new world that we can sort of continue to update and delight all of you with over the course of time.”
Regarding how the game’s been changing during development and where things currently stand, Ziegler says that changes to the game have been “aggressive” for the past couple years along with holding multiple playtests.
“We’ve been testing with a lot of players,” he said. “A lot of players like yourself, also with creators. It’s sort of insanely awesome and I’m filled with gratitude when I think about it because there’s so many people who contributed by telling us, ‘Hey, this thing sucks’ or ‘This thing’s great’.”
He then added that there are a number of things within the game that are at different states of development. Things like the game’s environments are in a more complete state while the character models continue to be iterated through. Marathon’s enemy models, he said, are “still kind of a little bit in an early state.”
Back to the characters, Ziegler gave a sneak peak at a couple of the characters in development: a runner codenamed Thief and one codenamed Stealth..
Ziegler then wrapped up the video stating that more content reveals are coming in 2025 for Marathon. Also coming in 2025 will be an expansion of Bungie’s playtests for Marathon to include more players. There was no hint as to when that would happen, however.
As far as an official release date update, that information wasn’t provided.
What do you think of the development update for Marathon from Bungie? Let us know down below, and take the discussion further in the official Insider Gaming forums.
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