4 hours ago
5
Marathon is set in a cyberpunk future in which the air is thick with data and information. You play a runner, a human that's given up their body to become a being of bits and bytes whose consciousness can be transferred into whatever artificial shell they choose. We can't begin to perceive life in that world. A world where to see the data as it flew through the air it would be an onslaught to the senses, overwhelming and impossible to make sense of.
Scatch that. The experience of a tsunami of stimuli is easy to recreate: you simply need to try and follow Marathon's tutorial popups and story cinematics while also on a Discord server with your friends.
I've been enjoying what I've played of Marathon so far, however, for a game that is built to be a multiplayer experience, much of its presentation seems to assume you are playing on your own. There is so much information on screen and little time to absorb it, a task made more difficult when someone is telling you about the boardgames they're packing for their stag do.
I could tell my friend to shush for a moment. Likewise, when I was jabbering about what I was batchcooking at the weekend, he could have told me to be quiet because the faction representative of the CyberAcme megacorporation was telling him something important about the UNSC forces of Tau Ceti IV. But this is a game that is supposed to be played together and enjoyed together, so why does playing it with friends often feel like we're both sat on the same sofa but watching different movies?
While this isn't a problem unique to Marathon, it's more obviously frustrating in Bungie's game because it looks like a story I don't want to miss. Between its Ghost In The Shell aesthetic, which fills the screens with 90s typefaces and screen-tearing visual artefacts, and writing that's gorged itself on William Gibson, Marathon stands out for its unusual stylings. I want to be following it in a way that I don't really care about the story in Arc Raiders. Yet it's also that presentation that makes it so hard to parse while distracted by people in Discord talking about their tea.
The good news is that a lot of Marathon's salient points are rehashed in codex entries. After you complete a faction's introductory mission, for instance, an in-fiction report summarising who they are and what they want is added to your library. Certainly, this is useful for catching up on what I've missed, but it still feels like an offcut of the actual storybeat – the dialogue sequence and snazzy cinematic where the faction and their spokesperson are introduced.
Adding the faction's introduction cinematic to the codex entry would be an improvement, but I'm looking for a more fundamental change in how stories in multiplayer games are told. Developers must expect that players could be talking to each other at any and all times, and adapt their storytelling tools to fit. At the moment, storytelling in games like Marathon, Arc Raiders, and Destiny 2 can feel like I'm expected to read a history book about a football club while sitting in the stands of a game. If the story I've been given is going to elevate the action before me, it's unfair to tell me to absorb it while being shoved and shouted at in every direction.
As I've been writing this, I've been thinking about the scene in Half-Life 2 when you visit Dr Kleiner's lab. In a game without cutscenes, where the player at any time can look the wrong way or wander off, Valve created a space where you were locked in and couldn't escape the scene-setting dialogue, but they also left you with the tools to mess around and keep yourself entertained within that space. Yes, Kleiner was telling you some interesting lore about City 17, but also, I could throw boxes around the lab and smash his computer monitors.
That sort of sequence absolutely wouldn't work in Marathon. Locking players in a room and having a talking head speak at them would feel at odds with the DNA of a game where various squads of humans are independently moving through a map. I'm not suggesting Bungie copy the storytelling of Half-Life (they've proven themselves perfectly able of telling stories in single player games with the Halo series), what I'm saying is I don't think they've hit on the right tools to tell the story they want to tell in the game they're making.
The cinematic may just not be a suitable storytelling device in this kind of game. Likewise, big chunks of text aren't something you can easily read while you've another player in your ear. I don't know what the solution is, but my overriding feeling while playing Bungie's multiplayer game is I need to be alone to enjoy it, and that can't be the result they're hoping for.
English (US) ·