Marathon, the troubled new FPS from the Destiny developers, gets a potential shot in the arm as external playtests reportedly get underway
Oct. 10, 2024Is Marathon emerging from the dark?
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Early external playtests of Marathon, Destiny developerBungie’s new shooter, appear to have been underway this week.
In a tweet last night, Halo YouTuber HiddenXperia announced that “I’ve been at Bungie all week playingMarathon.” While the YouTuber wasn’t able to provide any details about his time at the studio, he said that it was a “surreal experience.”
Taylor also suggested that the next time we hear from Bungie about Marathon, the studio would be ready to reveal gameplay, but that’s not what’s happening here. While it’s a positive sign that the studio is bringing in outside perspectives on the game, bringing experts in from outside the development process is a relatively standard activity that could take place across any of a wide array of developmental milestones.
Marathon hasn’t had a particularly easy time.Plans around the game and were said to have become “overly ambitious,“leading to layoffs at Bungie and a whole new studio being spun out of the company. Back in August, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier saidthat development was going “not great,“and that it had had to slip “a whole year.” It could be that this round of playtests is evidence of a shot in the arm since that time, but I’m still not expecting to hear much from Bungie for a little while yet.
Bungie’s Marathon looks the part, but do we really need another extraction shooter?
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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