Six years on from the discharge of Destiny 2, Bungie, the studio that created Halo, is prepared to speak about what’s subsequent. The developer, now owned by Sony, revealed its plans within the May 2023 PlayStation Showcase.
Bungie will lastly turn into a two-game studio when it releases Marathon, which it’s going to run alongside Destiny 2. The game is a team-based extraction shooter with a far-future sci-fi setting, and a cool, minimalist artwork model with a lot of white area and splashes of neon coloration. It gained’t have a single-player marketing campaign. It’s in improvement for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, with full cross-play and cross-save.
On the official Marathon web site, Bungie affords this synopsis: “A massive ghost ship hangs in low orbit over a lost colony on Tau Ceti IV. The 30,000 souls who call this place home have disappeared without a trace. Strange signals hint at mysterious artifacts, long-dormant AI, and troves of untold riches. You are a Runner, venturing into the unknown in a fight for fame… and infamy. Who among you will write their names across the stars?”
The game is set within the yr 2850, by which period clone know-how permits folks to shift their consciousness between their born physique and artificial our bodies — which explains the android-y look of the characters within the trailer.
“Become a runner in Bungie’s new sci-fi PvP extraction shooter,” continues Bungie’s blurb. “Compete for survival, riches, and renown in a world of evolving, persistent zones, where any run can lead to greatness.”
Marathon is really a revival of considered one of Bungie’s earliest video games. Originally launched for Apple’s Macintosh PCs in 1994, the primary Marathon, through which the participant was forged as a safety officer warding off an alien invasion of a spaceship, was additionally one of many earliest first-person shooters to allow free look utilizing mouse management.
In an interview revealed on the PlayStation weblog, game director Christopher Barrett mentioned the brand new game was “not a direct sequel to the originals, but something that certainly belongs in the same universe.” He mentioned to count on the “incredible feel of the weapons” and “beautiful and evocative world building” that he sees as core to Bungie’s video games. He went on to notice that gamers will have the ability to impact modifications to the game’s persistent world with their runs.
Bungie basic supervisor Scott Taylor wouldn’t give a timeline for the discharge of Marathon within the interview, though Bungie has beforehand mentioned that it desires to launch a brand new, non-Destiny game by 2025.
First rumored in 2022, the reboot of Marathon was made doable due to a 2018 partnership with Chinese writer NetEase that introduced a cool $100 million of funding to Bungie, particularly to assist it construct a number of groups engaged on new properties. Although the studio has since been acquired by Sony, this can be music to the brand new proprietor’s ears — Sony has repeatedly mentioned that it wished Bungie for its experience in multi-platform live-service video games, to not construct PlayStation exclusives. Sony mentioned in 2022 that it desires to launch greater than 10 live-service video games by 2026, and with the announcement of Marathon, we are able to tick one off that checklist.
