Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter Marathon will not be a free-to-play game, but it also won’t be a ‘full-priced’ title, the company has said. How much will it cost, though? Well, you’ll have to wait until the summer to find out.
Responding to a erroneous quote pulled from a now amended Gamespot article with details on the game, the Marathon social media account states, “Marathon will be a premium title. Marathon will not be a ‘full-priced’ title.”
The implication is that the game will not be priced at the now expected $70 price point, but will come in somewhere lower, similar to other Sony game releases over the last year, where Helldivers 2 and Concord were both $40 games. Of course, those games were literal polar opposites in terms of how well that worked out, and there’s been a fairly negative view of what Bungie revealed over the weekend for Marathon.
As was showcased during the gameplay reveal over the weekend, Marathon will take the extraction shooter template – teams of players will drop into maps on the planet of Tau Ceti IV, look to scavenge resources and complete objectives against AI enemies, survive encounters with other teams of players, and extract or die trying (and lose everything you’re holding – and seek to spin it out into another broad live service shooter with battle passes, an overarching narrative and more.
For Destiny fans looking for a new fix, that is a huge change of pace to what’s on offer in Destiny 2, where everything is delineated between PvE spaces and missions and PvP. It’s also fair to expect that the story being told will likely have the feel of how narratives are threaded through seasons of Apex Legends and Fortnite – again, comparisons to Helldivers 2 with its cooperative community goals and Concord with its plan for weekly character-building cinematics will be made as more about Marathon is revealed.
There’s a lot of doubters out there, but if there’s one thing that Bungie knows how to do, it’s make great-feeling first person shooters, and Marathon has all the potential to be exactly that, adapted to another fresh setting for the studio.
Marathon is in development for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and set to launch on 23rd September. A closed alpha test is coming later this month.
Source: that specific social media hellscape, and Gamespot
