Original Marathon was really great. While you’re waiting for BUNGIE to drop this turd you should play the open source remake Aleph One.
It’s available on Steam for free as Classic Marathon.
And whatever this new Marathon is it bears exactly zero relation to the original. Innovative, original, single player experience vs derivitave, cut and paste multiplayer "live service" grift.
I am not optimistic in the slightest.
But the Marathon trilogy was really a bog standard FPS of the era that was mostly tied together with a completely out there story that was told almost exclusively via text logs.
So, a bog standard whatever buzz word genre it is at this point tied together with blog posts and youtube videos would actually be keeping with tradition.
Marathon was pretty innovative at the time. The fact that there was any form of plot at all was unique in the action and shooter genres. It was the first major release with free look and being able to aim up and down at all. Plus reloading weapons, dual wielding weapons, weapon models visible on the player in multiplayer, plus network voice chat pretty much all of which have become standard in shooters today.
I love the callout that the story was delivered via text logs, as if voice acting was typically present in anything except FMV-based games in that time period. "Bog standard FPS" is a really funky term for an era when there were only really a few well-known FPS games out there at all.
You've got to remember that Marathon 1 was released in 1994, the same year Doom II was released. What else was there at that point? You really had Doom, Marathon, Pathways Into Darkness (also a Bungie title and only sort of an FPS at all), Wolfenstein 3D, System Shock, Hexen / Heretic, and some really niche ones that most people had never even heard of at the time, never mind now.
Marathon really was best in class when it came to first person thriller shooters.
Why would they use that brand, that hardly anyone knows today, to do something completely different?
No idea. I never liked Doom or Wolfenstein because it was just mindless violence, which gets old quick.
But Marathon had a universe and a story and characters and puzzles AND mindless violence.
Maybe they just let the marketing folks determine what was popular and mimicked that.
It was a single word title that they own. It's probably how Prey 2017 used the same title as Prey 2006.
Remember when Bungie made good games?
Becoming a dim, distant memory sadly...
What is that?
An extraction shooter from Bungie, wearing the skin of a game that company made 30 years ago, that didn't test well.
What? That's surprising honestly that they aren't doing destiny 3 or something. I know the final shape just came out but like damn. Extraction shooter is a risk because every single one fails within months. Arc Raiders will also most likely bomb a few weeks after release. (I got to test it, was MEH at best, hopefully they add some stuff to do)
I could imagine that they didn't want to do something called "Destiny 3", because people would expect that to be better than Destiny 2, which is virtually impossible, if you're gonna start over from scratch, with how many years of development have gone into Destiny 2 by now...
Having to replace or pay for all the stolen art assets will do that...
The art isn't even the biggest issue, the playtest was already reviewing poorly before everybody discovered the art was stolen.
Could it be that people just don't want yet another fairly generic live service PvP extraction shooter? No, can't be.
The stolen art is a much bigger problem for Bungie in a legal sense. They (and other studios) put out mediocre shit all the time and promise to fix it. I’m sure the poor play test contributed but the stolen art is likely the cause for this delay.
They now have to scan every single asset in the game to make sure the stolen art is no longer there and that’s just the stolen art they know about. There might be more stolen art in there, who knows.
Now that the controversy is public the original artist could easily find a lawyer to go against Bungie if more stolen art is found in the final release. If Bungie gets sued they might have to pull the game from storefronts.
I'm actually almost surprised they didn't just pull it entirely after this. It's not like it's just one or two assets, the entire goddamn art style ripped off that artist.
to somewhat defend Bungie, you can't own an art style. The person whose work Bungie ripped off has a case for the specific assets that are clearly her (I think the artist was a woman?) work. However assets that are inspired by her work but aren't exactly her work is completely fair.
But that actually makes Bungies situation even worse because they don't even know how many artists they might've ripped off. Could be just this one, could be five, could be a dozen. They don't know. IMO serves them right because they clearly don't learn from their mistakes.
Oh for sure, I get that. It's not exactly something you can copyright. But when the entire art style heavily leverages stolen assets, that's not a good look - I imagine they're stuck redoing nearly everything from scratch just so they can be sure to remove anything that was stolen.
I have zero faith in anything Bungie does though until Pete Parsons bites the curb and the studio becomes developer-owned though so I'm sure something will slip through the cracks
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