Marathon is a fantastic game. I love it.
I've put 600 hours in, and I've been up and down the mountain. I've got a Profiteer seal, lots of achievements checked off, and tons of awesome loot to show for my journey as a runner.
I've also put thousands and thousands of hours into Destiny 2. I'm currently guardian rank 10, level 550, a tier 5 loot enjoyer...I play Titan, Hunter and Warlock, all with equal fervor. I've been along for the ride and am sorely disappointed to see what's happened to Destiny 2. My heart is broken.
I'll be a very sad gamer if Marathon gets taken off the shelf, too.
But Marathon is not for everybody, and its not everyone else's fault for not being interested in the game's presentation, the genre, the gameplay or the development company that made it.
Haters are always going to exist. Haters were around at the peak of Destiny's success. They were loud when Bungie was genuinely cooking. Nobody actually cared, because we were too busy playing the game and having fun.
It just feels far more impactful now because for once, the haters are much, much louder than the small swathe of people who actually still fully support either game.
No special case was made by Sony to lure gamers into Marathon, Bungie did enough alone to keep people out, and the game simply did not sell itself...and then people diminished the worthiness of a dissenting opinion and wonder why more people aren't attracted to the game.
There's forced hate for the game, sure. But if the game was truly undeniable, it would've been received better and played with far greater interest than it has. That, my friends, is undeniable.
Bungie's post-release onboarding/casualizing efforts are things that could've been sussed out with longer and more frequent play testing periods. Let the people push the direction of the game before release.
We saw Bungie take pause before launch, but there clearly wasn't enough time spent to get the game into a safe enough place where more people would've been enticed to play.
Bungie also could've allocated more resources to the former to make sure Destiny didn't end with such a deafening thud. Edge of Fate was a bust, Ash and Iron was worse, and while Renegades was okay, what came after was just...dead air and boredom.
They spent a whole calendar year (perhaps more) doing the exact opposite of what everyone wanted, then scrambled to make many nagging problems right at game's end. For months, there was no comms, not enough QOL changes to help tide gamers over...just "buy our new game" and silence.
You can't even submit a proper support ticket if there's a problem with a Bungie game. You have to join a message board or a Discord and march your problems out in front of other people who slam you for having a problem to begin with.
If you're a Bungie customer, you can't even get heard properly if you have a real problem. You just have to hope that some comms director sees your viral tweet and scrambles to fix it. That's just not how things should work for consumers.
Success doesn't quite work like this, and it showed.
So...with consumer confidence lost, not just as a result of Destiny 2's myriad failures and Bungie's fecklessness, but somewhere in the flurry of controversies, layoffs, lawsuits...
At a certain point, gamers weren't ready to climb aboard and rededicate their time to a brand new asset they weren't interested in that belonged to a company that often fell short of their already tepid expectations.
Stop blaming the gamers.
Start looking inward. This entire sequence of events was perfectly preventable. One great game died, another great game is dying before it gets a chance to breathe. Bungie just couldn't get it together well enough to show consumers that both games were worth their time.
I feel terribly for the art that was created and for the people who lovingly brought these worlds to life. Its unfortunate how things shook out for those who dared to dream and for those who saw these visions and invested time and money into making them real.
I just hope folks are able to see the reality of the situation: the people who made these great games are equally responsible for how they got unmade.
@PaulTassi@Gladd@Aztecross@RickKackis@ALegendaryDrops
Marathon's Assassin voice actor Elias Toufexis says he doesn't understand why people hope the game fails
"Why are you spending hours doing this … life is so short, man. People just want to hate. I don't really understand it. It's sad more than anything"
@MidaSponsordKit@ShacosBabygirl I didn't realize I wasn't following, but now I am
I will always make fun of "darsh" and "narsh" being used unironically
@Aivur_@TheNovaPlayss@experimilk People acting like the meta actually matters
Everyone’s gonna die in some stupid way and lose a bunch of loot
It is literally the point of the game and I wish people would stop uncontrollably sobbing about it
@TheNovaPlayss@experimilk I'll be more direct since reading is hard
Show me the part where I said "sponsored night marsh is harder than regular night marsh"
I have more of a problem with Bungie giving out purple and blue kits for previous play time than I do with Bungie packing an extremely rewarding loot pile behind an activity with extremely challenging parameters
You're just upset because people didn't have to fight each other to get the loot?
The challenge is hard, and you haven't done it, and it shows, so stop whining
Have you even tried Night Marsh Sponsored?
It's not even easy to free kit with a trio, and extract with the top loot in the game against a heavily-guarded warden, racing against a fairly unforgiving time limit
If you successfully leave the experiment and extract with prestige loot, you are fucking good at this game, I won't accept any alternative explanation, and you are lying if you say otherwise
Anyone diminishing the effort on behalf of the people who run this activity just because it's not part of the dumb cryo death loop is full of shit, and they can "balance" these nuts on their chin
I'm not...anti female protagonist
I'm anti deviation from the brand - GoW has spent a little too much time running from it's identity
The original nordic spin was...difficult to absorb, ended well, still didn't really feel like GoW of old.
Ragnarok did NOT pull me in the way the first three GoW games did, where the stakes were HOT at game open
This spinoff just isn't a GoW game the way my old ass remembers it, and its that departure that makes me averse to playing it
@goldsweatpants@MarathonDevTeam You accept too much inadequacy in your life, I don't, especially when I pay for the opposite
Don't project your bent-over and simple way of life onto me
@MarathonDevTeam Guys...
You can't possibly be hard launching a v2 and having this many issues. This is what killed a lot of positive player sentiment at launch of every season of Destiny after Witch Queen.
Please, lock in. The entire games industry is watching you for missteps. LOCK IN!
@NiftyN00b If anything, it brings overconfident teams TO you so you don't have to go hunt them down and get popped by some nerd in a corner.
This isn't as bad as you think. Just work with the other classes to counter.