By Bungie’s
During Marathon’s gameplay in-depth exploration today, the renowned FPS studio behind the original Halo games and Destiny shared insights into how it is revitalizing the franchise that began it all. Unlike the originals from thirty years ago, this new Marathon is primarily a multiplayer extraction shooter where squads of three Runners will drop in, loot the planet of Tau Ceti IV, and try to survive in order to keep all their hard-earned rewards.
To get your hands on the fierce looting experience as soon as possible, a closed alpha playtest is scheduled for April 23 and you can potentially participate by joining the game’s official Discord server, which is expected to go live any moment now. Bungie also stated that the team will conduct Q&As and “adapt the game based on player feedback for launch and beyond.”
Come September, there will be six playable characters, which you can customize to a degree, and three maps, with a fourth map set to arrive in the weeks following the launch. That post-launch battlefield, the Marathon ship that hovers in the sky, will also introduce intriguing new “raid-like” mechanics, according to game director Joe Ziegler, who spoke at a studio Q&A attended by GamesRadar+.
Our hands-on preview of Marathon praised the shooter’s gunplay, anticipating success somewhere between the soaring peaks of Helldivers 2 and the underground valleys of Concord. “Passed through the Bungie action machine like sugar through a bee, the extraction shooter formula appears, feels, and sounds astonishing,” our Austin Wood remarked. “Sleek. Polished. It is undeniably excellent, yet it will also thrill and frustrate many players.”
We also discovered that Marathon surprisingly is not adopting a free-to-play model, although a Bungie representative indicated that the company would not comment on how much it will cost at launch for the time being.
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