Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[Lammy]

In theory what could they even do with Destiny? Didn't they defeat the big bad evil?

They could just go with:
He wasn't nearly as big, bad, or evil as this new antagonist

They already set this up
Destiny 1's big bad was vaguely the force called "The Darkness" and then they made it into a crazy alien guy using it in Destiny 2 with a character named "The Witness" who used the power of The Darkness (and was masquerading as a personification of The Darkness itself in Destiny 1) to try to cause the heat death of the universe, who got killed super ultra dead by the player character and other protagonists
But now there's this bigger badder guy called "The Winnower" that created The Darkness in the first place (or maybe even just is The Darkness)
The Winnower was known about in the game's lore before The Witness even was concepted as part of the story, but it was intentionally ambiguous as to whether The Winnower even existed, or if the idea of him was just a loose concept to explain and personify The Darkness; but they immediately established him as an existent and definitely real thing in a lore sidenote shortly after killing off The Witness
The story has also teased leaving the solar system and going to other places like the homeworlds of the enemy alien factions, but since Bungie can't just copy-paste existing assets to make those it hasn't happened

I think Destiny 3 is probably still Bungie/Sony's best play to salvage Bungie as a studio, but I'm doubtful that they have the talent, competency, or humility to do that instead of tripling and quadrupling down on Concord 3 Marathon
Shutting down the studio for a 4 billion tax write-off is probably the most logistically sound play though lol

 

[Pod 042]

You think it's more plausible that they would kill off both Marathon and Destiny 2 (the other live service game that they bought) and then spend 200 or 300 million and at least four years of development to producing a Destiny 3.

I'm the delusional one here?

What's the other option? Oni remake?

Total studio shut down and a 4 billion dollar tax right off?

Bungie still has over a billion in capital, money has been lost but the coffers aren't dry yet. And No, the plausible outcome is:
>D2 gets its AoT and goes into maintenance mode
>Marathon goes lights out as staff are moved to D3
>Sony gives them a dev timeline of 2.5 years
>Budget is 25 million per quarter with deadlines
>Failure to meet deadlines means less funding
>Bungie works in survival mode until D3

That's their only winning play. No one remembers their other IPs and Sony won't write them off completely. Investing into Marathon further is a waste. It's never going to exceed D2s current concurrent player count so it's not going to grow. Thinking Marathon is going to come back is like the Anthem fanboys thinking Anthem 2.0 was going to actually happen. If you remember what happened, over two years Anthem 2.0 was abandoned in favor of developing other noteworthy IPs(DA and ME). I may be delusional but I remember history. History says Sony will force Bungie to go back to a well known, marketable franchise instead of sinking money into this failed endeavor. Bookmark this post and call me a fag but I've seen this scenario play out before more than once. D3 may be shit because of it, but it's what we're likely going to get.

 

[creaturestorm]

Sony gives them a dev timeline of 2.5 years

Aint no fucking way they are making a game in 2.5 years unless its a total remix of existing D2 assets in which case all the people cheering for the death of marathon will be cheering for the death of D3.

It's never going to exceed D2s current concurrent player count so it's not going to grow.

I dont know about that one

 

[Leaf Wage Slave Jr]

I dont know about that one

I think the biggest thing that’ll determine Marathon’s fate will be where the player count finally stabilizes. Right now, while we’re past the initial hemorrhaging every new game goes through, it’s still swinging fairly wildly.

If they can manage to consistently stay above 10k AND have those remaining players be the type to spend heavily on whatever mtx Marathon has, it might be enough to at least keep the lights on for a year or two. We all know a handful of whales can keep the lights on after all, even if most of the titles that logic applies to generally don’t have Marathon’s fuck huge budget.

That said, there’s the X Factor of pride - Sony’s Live Service push has been a complete failure outside of Helldivers 2, a game thats devs seem to actively try to piss off their community to say nothing of Sony trying to push PSN on PC users, and is stained with the albatross that is Concord. If anything keeps Marathon alive, it’s probably an attempt to justify the amount spent chasing that dragon…

So making a prediction - the thing that gets Marathon shut down is for it to be used as a distraction when Horizon Hunters fucking bombs and Hulst is desperate to keep his baby alive….