‘Marathon’ Earned Its Recent Review Scores, Which Shouldn’t Be Controversial
Marathon has had a wild ride over the past year, publicly, and over the last six years, privately. Now, it has finally been released and has been the focus of intense debate. Most recently, a number of high review scores are coming in from major outlets like IGN, Gamespot and PC Gamer (all 9/10s), which have pushed its metascore up into the low 80s.
There are three sides to this debate, and the side where Marathon does not deserve these recent high scores makes the least amount of sense. We’ll start with that.
1) Recent Marathon critic scores are tracking almost identically with Marathon user scores. The game has an 89% positive rating on Steam (where you must own the game to rate it). It has a 4.57/5 score on PlayStation, the same, if not a bit higher. And both of those are higher than that overall 81 metascore.
The point here is that all the noise doesn’t need to erase the fact that, for what it is, a hardcore extraction shooter, it is a very good game. Changes have improved gunplay and looting, and it has opened the door to some of the most complex, interesting maps in the extraction genre. These scores among players who have stuck with the game make sense in that context.
2) Yes, Marathon is very hardcore and only getting more hardcore over time. The high intensity of these complicated levels, this very tough AI, and players that are getting increasingly higher-skilled and better geared make this an excruciatingly difficult experience for some players. But an extraction shooter, or any game, being very hard and “not for everyone” does not make it bad, just because some people are bouncing off. If you are looking for an ultra-hardcore extraction shooter experience, there is really nothing like Marathon on the market.
3) This is all divorced from the conversation about Marathon being a financial success or having a good enough player count. Things are not great in this regard, which is not an opinion; it’s just how it is. This game took six years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and these sales (~1.2 million, by last count) are not close to what the game needs to offset that. Similarly, its player count is dropping in time, and depending on where that settles, plus Destiny being close to dead, and that is not ideal for Bungie.
That does not mean Sony is about to pull a Concord and shut it down. It will not for the indefinite future, and Bungie’s years-long plans remain in place, at least on its end. But the idea that if a game did not meet sales expectations, that must mean it’s bad, is not something that needs to be joined together. Have you ever met Square Enix? It became a meme that practically all of its very good slate of games, from Tomb Raider to Guardians of the Galaxy to Deus Ex “underperformed,” and future plans were shelved, but that didn’t take away from their quality. This industry now has insane budgets often paired with equally insane sales expectations.
Marathon can be very good. It can be very good mainly for harder-core players. It can be good and still not have sold enough copies or not have enough people playing. Life isn’t fair sometimes, but the idea here is just…if you don’t like it, don’t play it, if you do, keep going and ignore all this. It’s going to be around a while.
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