The release of Bungie’s Marathon reboot was pushed back into 2025 this time last year, amid layoffs at the publisher. Thankfully for those craving updates on the game, which there’s been relative radio silence on, here’s a fresh update on it from game director Joe Ziegler.
Ziegler revealed that he’d taken over that position on the reboot of the classic 90s FPS from former director Chris Barrett back in March, with a subsequent report claiming that Barrett had been fired from Bungie following an internal investigation into misconduct. In that time, updates on what the actual game looks like have been nonexistent, so this latest one’s big news for fans.
In the developer update video, which you can watch in full below, Ziegler kicks off by explaining the game’s basic loop, and outlining what it’s taken in terms of inspiration, before really getting down to the brass tacks of where development’s currently at.
“For the past couple of years, we’ve been doing a lot of agressive change to the game, and we’ve been interating pretty heavily,” he said, “During that time we’ve been testing with a lot of players, a lot of players like yourself, also with creators.” Ziegler went on to say that right now there are “a variety of different things at different states inside of the game”, with this being the reason this update includes no full gameplay as the director said it’s “it’s a little early to show you all of it as one piece”.
As part of this section, Zigeler touched on where things like environments, character and enemy models, and items are at, with the former two being the furthest along and “coming together” in different ways, while the latter two are “still kind of in an early state” and in a few cases “still kind of coming online” respectively. He concluded by saying that “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 are looking forward to showing you what that looks like, especially in play”.
Ziegler did then offer updates on playstesting for the game, which is going to be expanded “a little bit wider and wider” in 2025 by adding a “significant amount of players” to each of its milestones as time goes on, and showed some concept art for runners codenamed “Thief” and “Stealth”. The former was shown “creepily peeking around [a] corner”, just in case those names didn’t give away how you can expect them to play.
The video closed with the director thanking folks for tuning in, and saying: “We’re excited to engage with you more in 2025 and beyond, as we bring this game to all of you to play.”