Going through the newly reported Bungie Marathon leaks

Since Bungie has refused to talk about Marathon in any meaningful way for ages, almost all information about the game has come to light through reports or leaks, including an earlier IGN article that said the game had switched to “hero” characters under Valorant director Joe Ziegler, and that left a lot of people confused.

Now, I've been repeatedly pointed to a long list of leaks about Marathon by leaker @oopsleaks. Normally I wouldn't bother, but after reading through them, I've heard at least some of these broad strokes, so I'm inclined to believe at least some of these points. But I'm not ready to go into detail. So, the highlights:

• Ziegler replaced Chris Barrett over a year ago. We know that's true, but given the recent story surrounding Barrett's firing, I'm not sure many people know the timeline.
• The content creators who do monthly playtests are not from hero shooters like Overwatch or Valorant, but from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown. Again, this deviates from the focus on the hero concept. We've heard of Tarkov players doing playtests before, even though the game isn't meant to be a Tarkov clone or anything like that.
• Reportedly, the “heroes” will translate into four runner presets that can be customized within those presets, each with different playstyles, which is comparable to something like The Finals. Aside from that, you can actually customize your weapons heavily, rather than locking them into set hero shooter weapons.
• It's speculated that the class idea is meant to solve the monetization problem as a F2P game (we don't know for sure if it is F2P, but after the Concord disaster it seems likely). The idea is that you can customize class characters visually without adding anything like pay-to-win microtransactions. This somewhat aligns with previous reports that monetization was a concern for the game.

• There aren't a million different types of loot to extract and it's much more streamlined than that. More Hunt than Tarkov. There are large maps that aren't procedurally generated, although there was a test where things were changed each time within an established map.
• There is a seasonal progression similar to Destiny 2's artifact system for bonuses.
• It is now described as the “main project” at Bungie, possibly even ahead of Destiny 2 itself. I'm not sure we know if there are more people working on Marathon than Destiny right now, and at least for now, I don't think that's true. The report suggests that the game won't be canceled in the wake of Sony's live service issues, and that's absolutely true. Whether it will happen in 2025 is a completely different question.
• Bungie is expected to speak officially about this soon, although the report says that otherwise a “controlled leak” could occur. In general, the report seems to be quite positive about the direction of the game, and even seems angry at its critics at times. I don't think this is anyone from the Marathon team, as this is an already established leak account that talks about a variety of games, although an insider (or playtester) might have broken down these details for them.

I think the main takeaway here is that there are no “real” heroes here in the sense of a fully set character without any gameplay customization, which I think is what worries most people, especially given the director's connection to Valorant. A class-like system that at least retains some level of customization, especially with weapons, seems like a good middle ground between fully customizable characters and heroes. Although I still don't quite understand how this would be an effective way to monetize.

It would be smart of Bungie to talk about Marathon and at least confirm a few basic facts, aside from it being an Extraction game. They haven't even bothered to dismiss the “hero shooter” report, which leaves the imagination running wild. Hopefully we'll hear more soon.

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