Developer Bungie was able to do the impossible and get people excited for another extraction shooter. Fans were seemingly over multiplayer titles they have to pay for, but Marathon was able to garner some excitement with its recent live stream. While the gameplay looks tight and the lore looks solid, fans can’t help but feel like this shooter could use something else, even if it’s cheaper than most full-priced games.
Naturally, that something else is a single-player mode.
Before working on live-service games like Destiny, old-school fans will remember how Bungie used to make games with single-player content. The original Halo games on Xbox and Xbox 360 were prime examples of this, as they let fans experience Master Chief’s sci-fi action stories before blasting their friends with plasma guns and swords. It was a good balance that fans miss from these multiplayer-focused shooters.
Seeing games like Marathon with interesting lore launch without single-player content has been a sad experience for modern gamers. As fun as Overwatch and Marvel Rivals are, it’s sad to see most of the story happen outside of gameplay. Rivals does try to change that by making match results affect the story, but it never feels important.
While the gameplay of Marathon looks promising, seeing it fully embrace the live-service right away is annoying some fans. Many of them are impressed with the character designs and levels, but those aspects feel less impressive when they’re multiplayer maps. Having to go through these areas multiple times just to kill people over again might ruin the excitement for some.
Games like Marvel Rivals can get away with this amount of repetition because it’s a free game. Sure, fans have to pay for Battle Passes and costumes, but just playing the game and using characters is free. Fans won’t have to pay a cent to see Emma Frost’s thighs, which is not the case for Bungie’s extraction shooter.
The devs at Bungie might be able to get away with this, given their stellar reputation with Halo and those Destiny games. Granted, the latter also had a ton of live-service elements that fans were mixed on, but the second game did go free-to-play, with additional expansions being paid content. Marathon is hoping to avoid that, which is probably why the game won’t be full-price when it releases this September.
Older fans are disappointed in this because, well, the original Marathon games were single-player shooters. Fans can still play the Classic Marathon titles on Steam, so all hope isn’t lost, but the new game could have paid tribute to it with a single-player campaign. All we can do is hope they go the Splatoon 2 route and add a single-player story after launch, even if it’s paid DLC.