One of the biggest things that Bungie is banking on with the upcoming Marathon is its capacity to allow players to experience their own emergent stories. Owing to its session-based gameplay structure where players will be hopping into and out of matches, Bungie wants the stories experienced to all tie together to form a grander tale.
Speaking to GamesRadar, game director Joe Ziegler noted that this will be key in bringing in more players to the game. Describing Marathon as “the next hit PvP experience” Ziegler spoke about offering players competent shooter gameplay along with a combat sandbox that will allow players to tell their own stories.
“I do think that the ceiling could rise from where it’s at currently,” Ziegler said. “And part of that is I think that we have a whole generation of people who are growing up in sandbox experiences. We have [battle royale] players, we have players who are playing other sandbox shooters as their main game as they were growing up. And for them, they’re creating a lot of these stories, but a lot of the stories that they’re creating are framed by the systems that those games embrace, right?”
According to Ziegler, Marathon will be able to get an audience because, along with offering up a fun sandbox for combat, the game will also have more gameplay layers through which players will be able to experience their own emergent stories, complete with peaks and valleys in emotions.
“And what we’re trying to do is like, what if we took that to the next layer? When do you want to create emotional stories that will actually peak and valley in different ways, and create emotional texture that makes you feel something new and different based on some of the things you know?”
Ziegler believes that the individual stories that each player will get to experience with every single match of Marathon will be an important aspect of the game. Referring to it as “chain storytelling,” Ziegler wants players to experience their stories that flow from match to match.
“For us, when we’re talking about extraction, we’re really talking about the session-based survival experience that leads to chain storytelling,” he said. “This story that we’ve created inside of this session has impact. We got loot out or we lost it, whatever the case is, and then that affects the next session. And so over time, you create this texture of different sessions that comes together to different stories that leads to a career inside of this space.”
Marathon is currently under development for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Slated for release on September 23, the game will also be getting a closed alpha that kicks off on April 23, and will go on until May 4. The title will also not be free-to-play, with Bungie describing it as a “premium title” that will not be a “full-priced” one. In an interview, Ziegler spoke about the decision to give Marathon a price tag rather than releasing it as a free-to-play game.
