After more than a year of silence, Bungie has given an update on the development progress of its extraction shooter Marathon. The lengthy video is surprisingly light on details, however, with only a hint of future playtests coming in 2025.
The update, delivered by game director Joe Ziegler, acts more like a reintroduction to Bungie’s latest shooter as opposed to a meaningful update. Ziegler spends time explaining what an extraction shooter is, breaking down the high risk, high reward nature of the genre, while also giving brief hints as to how the games different classes might work. It aligns with a lot of what we already know about Bungie’s shooter, making it a gameplay update light on new details
In the video, Ziegler briefly speaks about two of the game’s Runners–the name given to Marathon’s playable characters–with each of their descriptions suggesting that Marathon is taking hints from existing hero shooters. The first is simply codenamed “Thief”, with Ziegler assuming you’ll have an idea of their gameplay style from the name alone. The other, codenamed “Stealth”, is described as using deception to their advantage on the battlefield, with Ziegler remarking that he’s enjoyed playing as the character in tests recently.
Ziegler stressed that Marathon is still not in a state where the team can show it off just yet, pointing at the various states at which distinct elements are at currently.
“Where the game is at right now, there’s a variety of different things at different states inside of the game. Some things are a little more complete, like our environments are starting to come together in a really beautiful way. Some of the character models we’ve been iterating through; they’re coming together but they’re not fully there yet. Our enemy models are still kind of in an early state so we’re still iterating through things to make those land in a strong way,” said Ziegler.
“It’s a little early to show you all of it in one piece,” he continued. “But as you’ve noticed, as many of you are familiar with if you’re familiar with game development, all of these things are on track. They’re not all together, but when they all do come together we really, really are looking forward to showing you what that looks like and play.
Zielger ended off by inviting players interested in being invited to further tests to wishlist the game on Xbox Series X, PS5, and Steam, with store pages up for Marathon right now. This is the first time Bungie has spoken about Marathon since it’s announcement in May 2023, where it said that the next time, writing at the time, “now we’re going dark to focus on the game… and when we come back – we’ll have gameplay to show!”. Marathon is still slated for release in 2025, although the Steam listing omits this and simply reads “Coming soon”.