No new release date yet. The next update from Bungie will be in the Fall. Quite frankly, I thought the game would just come out and die to cut their losses.
No new release date yet. The next update from Bungie will be in the Fall. Quite frankly, I thought the game would just come out and die to cut their losses.
Original Marathon was really great. While you’re waiting for BUNGIE to drop this turd you should play the open source remake Aleph One.
It’s available on Steam for free as Classic Marathon.
And whatever this new Marathon is it bears exactly zero relation to the original. Innovative, original, single player experience vs derivitave, cut and paste multiplayer “live service” grift.
I am not optimistic in the slightest.
But the Marathon trilogy was really a bog standard FPS of the era that was mostly tied together with a completely out there story that was told almost exclusively via text logs.
So, a bog standard whatever buzz word genre it is at this point tied together with blog posts and youtube videos would actually be keeping with tradition.
Marathon was pretty innovative at the time. The fact that there was any form of plot at all was unique in the action and shooter genres. It was the first major release with free look and being able to aim up and down at all. Plus reloading weapons, dual wielding weapons, weapon models visible on the player in multiplayer, plus network voice chat pretty much all of which have become standard in shooters today.
No. It wasn’t.
There is this mindset that all that existed was DOOM (which actually did some interesting things narratively. I will always love that you actually die at the end of Episode 1 and don’t realize it until Episode 3 and you realize you were in Hell the past hour or two).
Marathon 1 came out in 1994 and built on Pathways into Darkness (1993… and I think actually did a better job of coupling narrative to gameplay than Marathon and Durandal). It came out the same year as System Shock and the year after CyClones (woefully underrated). Both of which also heavily relied on text bits but also, in my opinion, did a much better job of tying that narrative into the level/encounter design itself. Something Marathon… kind of wouldn’t really do until Infinity in 1996 where there is even more competition.
Again, CyClones and System Shock
“Tactical” shooters had already existed and I want to say there were a few DOOM Engine games that had reloading by this point?
Weapon models? I doubt it, but sure. Voice chat? Sure? That sounds real fun over sub 56k internet.
None of which changes Marathon classic mostly just being a “generic” FPS with a wall of crazy lore bible used to make the log entries.
To be clear: I LOVE the Marathon Trilogy. But if you actually look at what the games were, rather than what we wanted them to be… they were great writing, awkward level design, and decent shooting.
I love the callout that the story was delivered via text logs, as if voice acting was typically present in anything except FMV-based games in that time period. “Bog standard FPS” is a really funky term for an era when there were only really a few well-known FPS games out there at all.
You’ve got to remember that Marathon 1 was released in 1994, the same year Doom II was released. What else was there at that point? You really had Doom, Marathon, Pathways Into Darkness (also a Bungie title and only sort of an FPS at all), Wolfenstein 3D, System Shock, Hexen / Heretic, and some really niche ones that most people had never even heard of at the time, never mind now.
Marathon really was best in class when it came to first person thriller shooters.
Why would they use that brand, that hardly anyone knows today, to do something completely different?
No idea. I never liked Doom or Wolfenstein because it was just mindless violence, which gets old quick.
But Marathon had a universe and a story and characters and puzzles AND mindless violence.
Maybe they just let the marketing folks determine what was popular and mimicked that.
It was a single word title that they own. It’s probably how Prey 2017 used the same title as Prey 2006.
That’s really cool. I had no idea that the original games were remade:
Classic Marathon: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2398450/Classic_Marathon/
Classic Marathon 2: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2398490/Classic_Marathon_2/
Classic Marathon Infinity: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2398520/Classic_Marathon_Infinity/
Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.
There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.
https://lochnits.com/aopid/