Freedom's Ramblings

The core gameplay loop of Marathon is the now tried and true extraction shooter. You take missions, equip your gear, and submit yourself to a hostile environment to try and escape with stuff more valuable than you started with. Marathon deviates slightly from the standard formula by adding in extensive skill trees. These are, as far as I can tell, all passive enhancements, like making looting faster or abilities recharge faster.

Once you’ve deployed to the world, the mechanics appear to draw heavily from tactical fps and other extraction shooters. The core ethos can generally be summarized as: punish every action. Sprinting builds heat. Healing requires consumables. Moving makes noise. Shooting consumes ammo. Every action consumes a resource or gives up information. In most cases, both.

In most shooters, this works very well. It turns even the simplest of actions into a decision that has to be calculated. Is it safe to reload? Will someone hear? Modern shooters are not just games about mechanical abilities. They’re games of incomplete information, where a big part of the game is collecting information, denying information, and establishing a tactical stance to capitalize on information to your advantage.

In Marathon, this paradigm doesn’t work as well. Actions like shooting broadcast your position far and wide, with little recourse. The rewards are often fairly minimal. When someone does come running, the time-to-kill is short and brutal. Being the responding party to information, you have all the advantages of setting up a kill. This makes the risk-reward unfavorable to taking about any action, especially in solos. The result of doing anything is, often, getting shot in the back and dying in the time it takes you to turn around. So far, I haven’t found a way to counter this. Options in solo boil down to refusing to engage in combat, and ambushing other players.

The game works better in squads. Your teammate can respond, get you back up, and improve overall awareness. Players are often more cautious, as getting caught away from your team almost always results in near instant death. You can still setup ambushes, but they’re harder to pull off effectively. The risk formula changes, and players seem to pick up on that. Overall, makes for better engagements.

I suspect the game shifts a bit as more skills are unlocked and better items can be equipped. As is, I think the game sticks around for a bit. I’m not sure if it will find the same kind of traction as Tarkov or Arc Raiders, but it’s reasonably fun in its own way.