Mastodawn

Now Marathon is open to everybody, so I'm going to talk about it.

I played 17 hours solo, and it was a miserable, sweaty experience, with a very low time-to-kill with excruciating respawn/matchmaking times when player count is low. The art direction is beautiful in theory, but the bland flat map design and inscrutable UI does it no justice.

I don't think I went a single round where something worth recording happened. It is just not at all geared for the kind of social dynamics in ARC Raiders

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Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 26

I hope Marathon finds its audience, because it's unique enough that I would be sad if it bombs like Highguard or Concord. I would love to see a singleplayer game in this setting; the trailers have made this thing out to be something completely different from what it actually is, and far more awesome. But I won't be buying this, and would rather scratch my eyes out than play any more of what's there today 😅

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Leon

@stroughtonsmith I think it’s always tough if your core proposition is “lets make winning give you more of an edge and losing take away your edge”

like, thats a barbaric difficulty curve right out of the gate, and thats the appeal for some, but i cant think it’s mass market

I think the genius of ARC Raiders is it does almost everything it can to dial the contrast between winning and losing down. Safe pocket means you don’t lose everything. A free kit is workable. Your chicken gives you stuff no matter what. You have as many reasons to cooperate as you do to betray, maybe more. It’s easy to frame a match as a story and instant to jump back into another one.