At least in my perception the initial reactions to Marathon are overwhelmingly bad and for Arc Raiders overwhelmingly good Im genuinely interested in what key differences these two extractor shooters bear to spark such a delta since I like to talk about game design specifics.
So what do you think in specific, like what is that much better in arc raiders to compete with established blockbusters like tarkov?
Marathon is “just another extraction shooter” is what I heard as a sentiment. So this is going off the assumption that both games do nothing new as in “been there done that”
My imperssions of Marathon:
- I see how “graphical realism” art style is a complete flop - personally as a trained media designer (elements on the map i.e. having that printer test stamp - very cliche)
- gun models and characters feel like they are not worthy of that universe
- the running shield animations dont help that either haha
- personally dislike hero shooter elements
- UI design aesthetic is very intern-level and execution often questionable (visual weighting off, uninteresting/overloaded pictograms) -> but: the implementation of the one in-game at least seems to have high level execution weirdly enough.
-> but: Gunplay seems fresh? Like no game has done that responsive recoil feedback before, no?
-> but: sound design seems very good too?
Arc Raiders has some really strong points I see:
- The audio design is top (not a sound designer so cant tell you specifics).
- The UI in the A to A- department, only adding responsive UI elements and other fancy tech could add as a final optional highlight.
- Presentation and staging of the world elements seems abolutely like a blockbuster movie. Huge structures and generally a feel like youre in that post apocalyptic rebel world.
-> but: The long term combat appeal of arc is questionable, progression and long term motivation unclear.
That seems a little lacking for such negative rating, sure addicted gamers tend to be very emotional about these things but idk - even more laid back people seem to agree with these evaluations - in sum these points above are smaller likes or dislikes, but in its essence and gameplay both games do nothing much different - dont they?
Is it because the dev studio’s reputations mainly? Also marathon having such a rich backbone, feels like its disrespected by the studio. Tell me my what specifics you like and dislike in these titles - did you feel different about the games?
I haven’t played Marathon, but I did get into the ARC test. This will mostly be some ramblings…
I’m still waiting to play ARC with some friends. I only did some solo stuff.
I’m coming from this as a big Hunt Showdown player (1,200+ hours) and someone that’s played a bit of Forever Winter (~20). I still like Hunt better; I think it’s the only extraction shooter that didn’t take a ton of influence from Tarkov.
I wasn’t crazy about the marathon art style, but I’m not ready to pass judgement on it until I’ve been in the world.
ARC’s art style I found beautiful but also perhaps too sparse. There were so many wide open spaces … I just don’t see that being a good thing for an extraction shooter. The world felt vast and empty … I prefer Hunt’s more cluttered and dense design.
ARC does seem to have a lot of potential in like how it’s designed its AI, Hunt’s is very primitive in a lot of ways and kind of secondary. I think the AI is going to be a bigger deal in ARC.
Third person also feels worse to me than first person. I hope they add a first person mode to ARC, but I kind of doubt they will.
I definitely agree that ARC felt like it was being set up to tell a story and felt very cinematic at times.
The UI also felt like the best extraction shooter UI I’ve ever encountered.
I’m concerned about the long term health of ARC. The progression system seems like it will certainly lead to established players dominating newer players. The lack of a primary objective that’s shared by all the teams on the map … I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it may lead to a more relaxed experience, on the other hand, it doesn’t curate players towards each other like Hunt does; it seems looting and crafting are the primary motivators instead.
The fights that I did get into, they lacked the complex environment and buildings in Hunt so I didn’t find them nearly as engaging, they were much more straight forward gunfights than leveraging the map to use it to my advantage. I think that aspect will ultimately hurt the game as it makes it feel like a bit of a generic shooter.
Overall ARC felt very middle of the road from what I’ve played of it so far. I had a similar feeling about The Finals. Embark seems like a talented studio and I wish them the best as they go up against Bungie and Crytek.
good insights on the gameplay loop.
Thanks for sharing the hunt bit too. Answers some of my questions about defining what makes fights in and generally these games good long term
Yeah for me, it’s the variety of tales that you author. Every game feels a bit like a new adventure, after a while similar to ones you’ve been on before, but still new.
ARC has those elements, but something feels off so far for me…
Also typically the progression is in terms of variety (Roguelike) instead of straight power (Roguelite). That keeps things fair because even a new player, if they trade the aim, can pose a real threat to a seasoned player of similar FPS skill. ARC seems like it’s decided to go for a sort of Roguelite experience and that seems risky.
The UI also felt like the best extraction shooter UI I’ve ever encountered.
As another big Hunt fan this made me laugh. The bar is pretty low over in Hunt land unfortunately.
They’re both going to be dead in less than like 2 years because they are both PvEvP Extraction Looter Shooters. Combining the top 10 playercounts on Steam in this genre adds up to only like 10k more than the peak player count of Helldivers 2, which is a PvE Extraction Shooter. This genre of game, without a PvE only mode, is dead. Its only good for streamers and content creators, because it is fun to watch someone crash out after losing gear they grinded to get for 50+ hours, but the viewers don’t want to play the game because feeling that themselves is not fun.
This genre of games is basically a wet dream for toxic people. Because the PvP players know that the PvE players dont want to fight them, and take advantage of that to camp, grief, etc. What other genre of game rewards a player intentionally ruining someone else’s gaming experience?
I am grateful the toxic sponge exists so I dont have to deal with those players in other games, but these development studios keeps trying to make this genre popular, and it literally can never be popular.
Tell that to escape from tarkov devs, albion online, etc.
Just sounds like youre whining tbh
define dead, is tarkov dead by your definition? no game really dies. heck old games succeeded by dying (aka beating it)
EDIT: or hunt
I think a big part of this sentiment has to do with Bungie burning a lot of bridges with their fan base in recent years. I’d played Destiny 2 for several years (from Shadowkeep through The Final Shape), and in that time Bungie had made a lot of very unpopular moves. From things like the “Destiny Content Vault” (where old content was removed from the game to make room for new content), expansions getting delayed by several months, massive studio layoffs, apparent mismanagement of an entire expansion (Lightfall), more studio layoffs… It’s just really hard, as a player, to back a Bungie project right now. I no longer feel like their priorities line up with mine.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been a huge fan of Embark’s previous game, The Finals. It’s a totally different type of FPS compared to Destiny, yet they managed to capture my interest by doing correctly all the things Bungie did wrong. They nailed the monetization of the game and it doesn’t feel predatory, they listen to their community, and they constantly show a commitment toward making The Finals into the best game it can be (and not necessarily the most profitable game it could be).
So while Marathon looks like it’s got all the makings for an amazing game, I just don’t feel like Bungie fans have enough faith left in Bungie anymore. For a lot of people, myself included, The Final Shape was the “end” of Destiny; not because Bungie stopped making it (they’re still releasing content), but because we got the closure we wanted out of Destiny’s story and we’re just done with Bungie’s antics.
That said, I just don’t like extraction shooters. I played a bit of Arc Raiders to see how it is, and it’s just not for me. Honestly, I hope both games do well, because it’s clear that both studios put a lot of heart into these games and I’m interested in learning about both games’ stories. But right now, Bungie has to overcome their reputation if they want Marathon to succeed.
To be as specific as I’m feeling right now, feel free to tell me to dial in further, and coming from having only played Arc Raiders and only watched Marathon vods here is the main difference - Marathon’s devs are making a lot of promises vs Arc Raiders delivering on those same promised plans.
- For instance marathon is promising to launch with 3 maps, arc has 3 maps today.
- Marathon is promising tense extractor gunplay with high stakes loot, everything I heard from multiple streamers/reviewers say the tension isn’t there and the loot isn’t there. Arc has tension and definitely has loot. Their guns have clean 1-4 ranking and the weapons are rarity binned. I’ve yet to use most of the weapons available in Arc because I haven’t focused on crafting them and haven’t found them, theres already a ton of width to the pool.
- Marathon is promising strong PvE encounters with raid boss like content (or maybe the raid boss promise was actually people just speculating on where they could take this). Arc has boss like encounters with the Queen (and honestly fuck the Rocketeer and the Bastion those guys are tough little bastards that will punish you if you make a mistake).
- Marathon is promising dynamic events during the match. Arc Raiders already has dynamic events on a per map basis, night raids, and in server events like rocket landings, middle barages, etc.
I would pay $60 bucks today for Arc Raiders as it is now. My friends and I would play the fuck out of it. And if they would do DLC instead of battle passes we’d continue to financially support the game.
Based on what I heard and saw of marathons identical closed alpha, I don’t know if there’s enough content there for more than 10 hours and none of it excited me because it seemed like 20% of what they promised.
I think people are hyped by the concept of Marathon and the hope for an old Bungie game. But I think right now the reality is they’re not the same Bungie as the one that gave us Halo, I personally never got into Destiny, and they’ve only gotten more corporate not less.
If in 6 months they can spin up what seems to be 80% of a game, then I’ll be there and interested. But if Arc released next week, or spent the next 6 months adding content and I had to pick one, I’d be playing Arc without question.
the timing seems very crucial for swingcustomers (as in swingstate, not the dirty way I know you thought that) - good for us consumers if they drop it earlier short term.
On the other hand, in regard of long term quality of the game, I kinda wish they ensure to expand and refine first before releasing, since even its embark… idk updates once in post-production dont offer gamechanging features anymore. As listed in the arc-but’s (why my neologism game seem dirty) above theres lots of things that might cause a drop in success overtime similar to division.
Would love your thoughts on how they specifically delivered or unsatisfied the listed promises
I’m struggling a bit with what you’re asking for but here’s what I think you’re asking for. You brought up two worries with Arc
- longterm gunplay
- meta progression
I think gunplay is at a really good point systems-wise in Arc. I think at this point the important long term factors are balance and variety. Balance is anyone’s guess in any single game or with any single company, sometimes they get close at the start and just make nothing but bad calls from then on like in Helldivers 2. So no comment on Arc’s long term balance but I’d give them no worse odds than Bungie to fuck that up - and based off the technical alpha feedback Arc is in a great place in terms of balance and Marathon is most definitely not.
Variety is an easy solve with extraction shooters in my opinion because you can control so many variables. You can have a busted gun but it’s ammo or durability decay is so large you only use it one run per find, you can make it a legendary drop, you can make it only good against players or only good against bots, etc. There’s a lot of factors in what makes a gun good when an economy and RPG elements are brought in. I imagine if they released a new gun every season or every 6 months or released a set of consumables and legendaries the variety would be maintained for a decade. Again, because there’s a bigger PvE emphasis in Arc than in Marathon from what we’ve seen, I’d bet Arc is able to keep things fresh for longer. Imagine a Javelin in Arc - it sucks against players but it crippled the Queen, that’s cool as hell and reasonably feasible. Marathon screams Apex gun design and I think Apex didn’t do a good job with their gun pool - every expansion felt like it hurt the pool instead of making it more diverse IMHO but that could have also come down to balance - I suspect marathon will be the same.
Meta progression is easy. Arc has a skill tree that I like (although it’s missing details which I think is important) and bench upgrades (and maybe vendor levels?). They also have battlepasses but this is actually a negative for me, I think current battlepass design sucks even if they’re going with the friendlier Helldivers style passes. They’re just boring. Still, more little “achievement” targets and rewards.
Those have been very compelling. Marathon has quests for a half a dozen vendors. I believe that’s it. I don’t recall a skill system, I don’t recall bench upgrades, just quests. I like the aesthetic, and I don’t really mind it all being just quests but between the lack of personalization in meta progression AND the fact it’s a hero shooter the game lacks the golden itch of individuality that I love when games have. I think marathon has significantly worse meta progression today AND I don’t think they’ve promised to make it better. That’s super important to me. Hunt Showdown is a great game but it’s lack of meta progression has made it feel shallow for me. Marathon, I imagine, will feel the same way.
Again, this comes down to Arc being good to go today with systems I can dream about them expanding. Marathon isn’t accessible outside the US right now and I imagine even if I could play it it wouldn’t feel even close to a finished project - and with a bunch of corpos making promises to the cameras my gut says if the game is good it’ll be in a year or two and even then it’ll be corporate good and not artist good.
So I’m coming at this as a MASSIVE Destiny nerd. I was in the original’s Alpha, I own the first six lore books, and over the series have a bit shy of 4,000 hours (granted I imagine a few hundred hours of that is just chilling in orbit waiting on/chatting to my fireteam. It has been a very important game to me as I still game with my clan mates from D1 to this day.
Bungie gunplay has always been my favourite in the industry, the encounters are satisfying when you have a competent fireteam, and the gameplay loop kept me going for a long while. For me personally though; my friends and the overarching story were key.
After a decade, things are going to get stale. So I would take breaks here and there and come back when I actually wanted to play. Then the studio became an absolute nightmare to be invested in. The Skeletor Destiny videos are an extremely hilarious but accurate depiction of my feelings towards it all.
I was one of the handful of players that actually enjoyed playing CoD’s extraction variant, and was willing to give Bungie a chance to the extent that I participated in the ARG when Marathon was first announced. Everything since then has been negative in my personal view; from the internal drama of job cuts and accusations of poor workplace conditions to the actual game mechanics and story.
Marathon has great lore and it jogged so Halo could run. Now they’re saying there really won’t be a story right away. I actually like the character and map designs, and the gunplay is basically just Destiny 2’s with some small modifications, that’s just how the Tiger engine looks. With all that I’m just not excited.
TL;DR: I’m not going to pay 40$ so I can be a beta tester for a game that isn’t really promising me anything. I’ve done that for the last decade and largely it’s worked. Bungie has lost the prestige it really needs to make this the ‘next big thing’ IMHO
Yeah the lore of marathon is really something else - more at the end.
So yeah the reputation plays a big role here it seems, huh…
I feel the same, just already through all stages of grief, since they I was very into Halo and even loved Reach. But then D1 didnt catch me at all, since I valued mainly the gameplay and story but also just the whole package way more.
The gunplay felt like in another league in older bungie games and is still top contender across all games. That alone though is not nearly enough to me
Off-topic:
You mentioned lore books and hours in destiny. Have you seen the lore series on the marathon trilogy or know the trilogys’ lore and universe?
Apperantly there is a rabbithole theory that all bungie games are one big shared universe with a coherent underlying lore or something. This blew my mind and made me interested in playing marathon’s trilogy one day for the lore. Also how intricate and layered the whole story was. Great series heres a youtube link to it
