I've never seriously played an MMORPG. I played maybe
an hour of World of Warcraft during its
heyday at a friend's urging, but found it immediately
boring. Nor am I much for shooters, especially in a
competitive context; I played a bit of
Halo and Halo 2 multiplayer when
they were the biggest thing in video games, and
enjoyed myself, but I never got good and I
certainly didn't feel the drive to hone my skills on
the grindstone of Xbox Live.
But I've been playing Marathon. I'm still
playing Marathon. I would have written this
very review months earlier, except that I was too busy
playing Marathon.
It's a surprise that I like this so much. Even my
girlfriend who loves trying to push me out of my video
game comfort zone almost as much as she loves
Marathon (both the 90s and 2020s
incarnations) didn't bother encouraging me to play it.
But I had a gap in my gaming schedule and an itch to
play something with a sense of both action and
progression, so I gave it a shot and was blown away by
what I found.
Marathon clearly isn't an MMO. There's no
persistent game world, even in the
Destiny "shared-world" sense, and the game
progression is entirely based on the items you bring
back from short-lived runs. But my more controversial
contention is that
Marathon isn't entirely a shooter, either.
Certainly, for those drawn to FPS team fights, this
game delivers in spades. I'm told by aficionados of
the genre that the guns have "the Bungie sauce". The
character-shooter-style shells all play distinctly
while remaining balanced among each other. The level
design allows for hugely diverse engagements with lots
of opportunities to play the map for advantage rather
than relying on raw aim fundamentals.
But even here I'm betraying my own biases, because my
aim fundamentals are still weak. This game has been
driving me to get better, because no part of it is
fully separable from the whole, but I've got a lot of
practice to do before I can go toe-to-toe with people
who have been playing Overwatch and
Fortnite and Apex for years. The
places I make up the difference, and which keep
drawing me into the game even 800 hours in, are those
in which you can shift the focus away from raw
shooting and towards the rest of the game.
Here is Marathon's fundamental brilliance
(and possibly that of the nascent extraction shooter
genre as a whole): by making the fundamental goal
retaining and accumulating loot, which is distinct
from but in dialog with fighting other people, it
produces complex and intense emergent experiences of a
sort I rarely see in games.
As an example, Marathon is the most effective
survival horror game I've ever played in terms of
making me actually emotionally afraid. As
much as I love the mechanical genius of
Resident Evil
or the writing of
Silent Hill 2, neither of them made me feel terror. Playing
Marathon, hiding in the tunnels with the loot
I stole from a real human team, listening to their
footsteps over my head as they search for me, knowing
that all that stood between me and my demise was my
own ability to outthink and outmaneuver them—then, I
felt terror.
As another example, Marathon is a game about
knowing the terrain. I was in a firefight through a
doorway, accompanied by two teammates who were no more
confident at raw gunplay than I. We'd fought to a
standstill, and I told them to hold the door and keep
the enemy's attention. I crept through a vent, knowing
it would lead me to a platform just above the other
team, where I rained gunfire upon them, breaking the
stalemate and yielding us a victory against superior
fighters with better gear. This is a game about
playing smart, and on my best days, I can be smart.
To play Marathon is to play a hundred
different games at once. It's an FPS, sure, but it's
also survival horror, it's stealth action, it's a
puzzle game, it's a game about navigation, it's a game
about psychogeography, and on rare occasions it's even
a game about making friends. The game is carefully
structured so that stories unfold as part of the play,
and I find that as fascinating to witness as an art
form as it is fun to engage in as a player.
I don't know how much longer this game will be around.
The industry doesn't seem to be doing well, Bungie is
certainly not thriving under its Sony overlords, and
Marathon will never be the money fountain
that Destiny was in its heyday (even
Destiny for all its success is now officially
over). I'm just glad I'm getting to experience this
while it's here, while the lobbies are still filled
with players, before this beautiful moment fades into
memory and lore.
