Bungie seek to reassure everyone that Marathon is still alive... by saying almost nothing about it

There's a character called "Thief"

Bungie have been fairly quiet about Marathon, the upcoming extraction shooter they announced in 2023. Yesterday they released a devlog in which game director Joe Ziegler seemed to want to reassure fans of the studio that the game was still in development. He talked around a lot of the game features, without actually saying much about it. As yet, there's still no footage of the game in action, making its previous release window of 2025 appear even more tenuous.

Ziegler begins the video by saying there's no gameplay footage to show, and talks in some very general terms about what the game is going to be - a PvP-focused extraction shooter. Ollie has already rounded up everything we know about Marathon, and this devlog sadly doesn't tell us anything new about the game. If anything it makes it sound less defined than before. Ziegler makes vague mention of player abilities, loot, and "runner" loadouts, while re-explaining some extraction shooter basics many first-person shooter fans will already know. He does give some indication of where the studio is in terms of production, even if he doesn't show anything.

"Some things are a little bit more complete, like our environments are starting to come together in a really, really beautiful way," he says. "Some of the character models we've been iterating through. So they're coming together but they're not fully there yet... So it's a little early to show you all of it as one piece."

There are some insubstantial teases of characters. One is codenamed "Thief" and another is codenamed "Stealth" who is unsurprisingly described as "hard to pin down". And Ziegler mentions that the studio will be recruiting more playtesters next year. He doesn't mention anything about the release date, or give much indication about other elements of the game.

In BBC comedy The Thick Of It, a government minister is scheduled to go on a news show. But he has absolutely nothing to announce or say. His vicious PR man, Malcolm Tucker, tells him to come up with something. "It better not be too boring," he commands. "And it better not be too interesting either, okay? And it better not cost too much. It can't be an old thing, obviously, and don't make it too new."

I can't help but suspect Ziegler's non-announcement is the result of the same kind of PR frogmarching and "visibility first" thinking. Bungie's silence around the game has not gone unnoticed, and it's likely the studio wanted to simply say "our game is still alive" without actually showing any work-in-progress. Compare this to the bare-faced development of Skate from Full Circle, or the almost worringly blasé treatment of Deadlock by Valve. Both of whom are happy to show things in various states of unreadiness.

Ultimately, however, it's up to Bungie to decide when they feel the game is good enough to show. It's not like they have been without road blocks in development. The studio has recently seen multiple management shake-ups amid mass layoffs. Ziegler himself is directing the game after the removal of previous director, Chris Barrett, for the latter's allegedly inappropriate behaviour. Some Bungie staff have also been reassigned to other divisions within Sony, who bought the studio back in 2022. None of this is likely to have helped the development of the shooter.