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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Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 27

Guess what game name you can't type into Marathon's chat? 🤡

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Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 27

People are saying 'information overload' a lot when talking about Marathon, and that was one of the things I struggled with: every darn texture in this game has writing on it — there's text and numbers everywhere at different angles — so actually figuring out where you're going and what you're supposed to be interacting with can be a struggle

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Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 27

Time to kill is especially frustrating; the game gives you tools to see people in infrared from across the map without them seeing you, so the moment you decide to open up they'll be downed pretty quickly. On the receiving end of this, this completely sucks. It'll happen over and over when you have lower-level gear. That's if the overzealous AI doesn't get you first — it can be pretty hard to tell the difference between player and npc

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Brandon

@stroughtonsmith all I can think of after reading your take on it here is... what even is the point of this game? Run around and shoot people? Booooring.