I really don't get the plan here.
The weekend-only schedule for the true endgame content feels strange as someone used to playing more open mmo games, but destiny has clearly used it to great effect over the years.
Presumably, the goal of gating content like that is twofold:
1: Make sure everyone has time to prep for a weekend raid night whether they're in a pug or not, and gather players up on that weekend to make pugging for that easier.
2: Conversely, drive players to other content for the rest of week, so there's days to do them too.
It's a solid enough plan, but there's two big problems for an extraction shooter requiring a straight loot check:
1: Because of gear loss, there's a meaningful need to spend time gearing up each week, so you have a buffer - and if you don't have that buffer, you can easily lose your endgame weekend just prepping for next endgame weekend. And thanks to the PVP, you're just as likely to lose gear as you are to gain it, so your prep can very easily backfire and leave you even less ready than when you started.
2: If players struggle with the endgame weekend's content, they don't have until the end of the weekend - they have until their gear reserves run out. Which means that players wanting to grind the endgame can get cut very short due to bad luck. And worse, you can't just get a good set or two and then goof off doing whatever; you have to spend time building that buffer back up again.
Trust modern bungie to repeat all their microtransactions-related mistakes from yesteryear, but preserve the endgame content delivery regardless of how many systems that completely redefine it change around it.
The only content that has ever been timegated to solely weekends in Destiny is Trials of Osiris (and that single year of Trials of the Nine), and that's never been a big deal because it's a niche PVP activity in the mix of all of the rest of the game's content. Funnel the tryhards into the single endgame PVP mode for a couple of days so you get a decent population, let them do their Lighthouse runs, and then have them wait until the next go around so they want to keep coming back. Iron Banner is like this to an extent as well, except it's for a full week every couple of months (with Trials off for that weekend so people stick with the one activity).
But like you said, while this works for Trials in Destiny, it's retarded for Marathon to limit access to the big dick endgame mode in that way. Instead of gearing up and hopping in when you're ready, you have to sit around and wait until they open the doors again. And then if you get a few bad runs and burn through your stash, it's either burn more of the Cryo Archive window heading back to the lower-tier grind to hope to squeeze in another attempt, or quit for the weekend and hope the next week goes better.
Destiny has never had a problem with having raids accessible every day of the week. This is clearly being done to juice numbers for streamers to promote the game to their audience, not because it's good game design. (I mean, I have opinions about extraction shooters being a good idea in general, but I readily admit I'm not the audience so there's nothing objective about my thoughts there.)
Do we think they hit the free to play button soon?
It took the Destiny franchise five years before they made it F2P, and even then the game is sorely limited on what you can do without buying expansions. But that was based off of the game already having done gangbusters in actual game sales; remember that they had millions of daily players for quite a while there. Even if we assume a million copies of Marathon have been sold to date, that's nowhere near as good.
I could see them going to a similar model as D2 eventually, where you get the base game for free and then have to pay for the latest batch of content, but I don't think they can afford to swap off of the current model just yet, and not just because the people who already bought in would feel betrayed by having the game go free to play so soon. They would only do it if they think that the increased number of players coming in because it's free to play would spend enough on microtransactions to make up the difference; that is to say, if the population quadruples and players spend more than $10 apiece on skins, it would be worth it to switch. I imagine they're already getting an idea of what people are willing to spend internally, though it wouldn't surprise me if those numbers aren't good either. As I said before, who wants to play digital dress-up with such ugly character models?
The style of Mirror's Edge had a clear purpose, beyond the striking explosion of fresh color and brightness after the industry had been hyperfixating on the brown filter for so long. In the game you need to make split-second decisions on where to go and what to do, the gameplay loop falls apart if the player can't maintain the speed and momentum or gets lots, so the minimalist style with bold colors that draw attention to the different paths you can take exists for a specific purpose.
Marathon just looks like vomit, it assaults the senses, it reminds me of that new, gay Jaguar commercial that basically killed the company. It's like they deliberately wanted to offend not just the sensibilities of most players, but also everyone's senses. Doesn't help that the style also has nothing to do with the gritty art direction of the original Marathon games.
The irony is that weird visuals do exist in the original Marathon games, but only where it makes sense: the Pfhor ships. They're weird, they're alien, they've got really funky ships with bright colors throughout, so it's very striking when you make the jump from the Marathon or Lh'owon to a Pfhor battlecruiser. They were very deliberate with the textures and color palettes for each of the environments, easily cluing you in as a player to where you were supposed to be: human, Pfhor, ancient ruins, the Jjaro station. It's the same visual language that persisted into Halo (human/Covenant/Forerunner) and Destiny (human races and alien races).
I get that the levels thus far are all UESC-related, whether it's colony buildings or the Marathon itself, so it all looking samey makes sense. But nothing in the design language actually says this was built by humans for humans, especially not in the same way as the original trilogy did. There were definitely some nonsense rooms in those games where you just kind of had to guess at what part of the ship you were supposed to be in, but it all looked industrial and sturdy, like it was built tough because it had to be to survive the rigors of space. This game's environments look like they're made out of plastic tarps and shipping crates that someone splashed neon paint on at random.
