Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[Jace on ice]

Is there a reliable source on what Tarkov's development budget was? I tried to find it for use in an argument once but all I could find was guesses and speculation probably because the devs are Russian.

 

[Love Is Blue]

Is there a reliable source on what Tarkov's development budget was? I tried to find it for use in an argument once but all I could find was guesses and speculation probably because the devs are Russian.

16 gallons of vodka and some stale bread

 

[Jace on ice]

16 gallons of vodka and some stale bread

Yea I can't imagine it was very high.

 

[Disc]

I truly believe that very few players can take a loss, own it, and keep coming back. Most people need something to point at for losing such as RNG, lag, bad timing, really anything but themselves. In games where variance plays a big role, like Magic the Gathering or poker, that’s part of the appeal. Skill matters, but eventually every dog will have his day and until then they can just blame it on luck.

I think more people can do it than you think, it’s just that there’s two big factors in a game that determine how much patience players have for it ballbusting them:
- How ‘fair’ a loss is
- How punishing a loss is

I would not say that extraction shooters excel at the former. I think you’re overselling the degree to which losses in marathon can purely be chalked up to skill - sure, there’s some degree to which a gunfight is ultimately decided by player skill, but sometimes you’ll just get out-kitted by someone, or they’ll catch you at a time when you’re already fighting someone else, or you’ll turn the wrong corner and find a shotgun ready to send you to the start screen. The very fact that players’ personal loot affects their stats means that many fights are just categorically unfair.

But whether you agree with me on that or not, that’s by far the lesser part of the problem. The real problem is that these games are *incredibly* punishing. Your best loot that you spent hours grinding to find the pieces for? Sorry mate, you happened to look left first instead of right when exiting a building and now your perfect kit is the property of some asshole squatting in the bushes. You can lose hours of work in seconds, very easily, and like I said just because you didn’t get lag doesn’t mean you didn’t get unfairly fucked over.

To make matters worse, that level of punishment encourages the cheapest and cheesiest of tactics, which feeds back into fights being unfair - because players want to minimise their risk of losing fights, they try to make sure they only engage on their terms. It's why 'some asshole squatting in the bushes' is such a consistent threat, it's a genuinely smart tactic in context.

It's not taking a loss that's a problem, it's the scale of the cause of the loss vs. the scale of the punishment for the loss. Extraction Shooters by design absolutely bust your balls over this, and it's why they're niche games - few people want to invest so much time only to lose it due to, at most charitable, a small mistake on their part.

Compare to two other examples of challenging games:
- Super Meat Boy deliberately goes to the other extreme, having you able to restart near instantly after a death. As a result, it's widely seen as a great challenging platformer, as it doesn't make you out to be an idiot for falling for an obvious trap.
- The Fromsoft games tend to be rather punishing, but they're also extremely fair in their difficulty - there's almost no trap you can't see coming if you look first. As a result, they're some of the most challenging yet popular games out there.

 

[The Ugly One]

The real problem is that these games are *incredibly* punishing. Your best loot that you spent hours grinding to find the pieces for? Sorry mate, you happened to look left first instead of right when exiting a building and now your perfect kit is the property of some asshole squatting in the bushes. You can lose hours of work in seconds, very easily, and like I said just because you didn’t get lag doesn’t mean you didn’t get unfairly fucked over.

For me, what is absolutely enraging about these games is when I spent 20 minutes kitting out for a raid and sitting in the queue, and I die 90 seconds after loading in to someone who was in the right place at the right time. I've been lucky myself that way. When that happens, I turn the game off, because it feels like I just wasted all that time that I now have to redo because I basically got a bad die roll. It's like spending time to stat up an AD&D character and getting killed by a save or die snakebite in room 1 of the dungeon. I would rather lose all my shit after a couple of high stakes fights, because at least I got to play the game for a while and knowingly upped the ante by staying longer and longer to hunt for better stuff.

The Fromsoft games tend to be rather punishing, but they're also extremely fair in their difficulty - there's almost no trap you can't see coming if you look first. As a result, they're some of the most challenging yet popular games out there.

The other thing is that you just lose souls when you die, and you'll get all those souls back as you slaughter your way back to where you died.

 

[The Ugly One]

You need to attract cannon fodder for pvpve otherwise you just have late game tarkov where it turns into a cock fighting ring for people who are trying to chase the dopamine high of clearing lobbies and it becomes intolerable to play unless you're trying to do the same thing

The fundamental problem of every multiplayer game is that the bottom 5% drops out because it isn't fun. This creates a new bottom 5%. Oh sure, you used to be middle of the pack, but the shitters & scrubs stopped playing. Now you're the scrub, despite having objectively gotten better at the game. So you quit. Eventually the distribution compresses around an overall very high level, where if you even blink you get your face kicked in, similar to how pro sports work.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

The fundamental problem of every multiplayer game is that the bottom 5% drops out because it isn't fun. This creates a new bottom 5%. Oh sure, you used to be middle of the pack, but the shitters & scrubs stopped playing. Now you're the scrub, despite having objectively gotten better at the game. So you quit. Eventually the distribution compresses around an overall very high level, where if you even blink you get your face kicked in, similar to how pro sports work.

yea RTS's and fighting games are the prime examples, you can't just have fun in those games, because the required skill floor is way above what can be expected of your average player, depending on the fighting game at least.

I was very good at MVC3, but "very good" is nothing, its not even close to good enough to play ranked, so even I, who can play most fighting games decently well, eventually gets completely edged out.

 

[big pauper]

The fundamental problem of every multiplayer game is that the bottom 5% drops out because it isn't fun. This creates a new bottom 5%. Oh sure, you used to be middle of the pack, but the shitters & scrubs stopped playing. Now you're the scrub, despite having objectively gotten better at the game. So you quit. Eventually the distribution compresses around an overall very high level, where if you even blink you get your face kicked in, similar to how pro sports work.

you need to provide something for the shitters to stick around for so they don't drop out. for the longest time tarkov had an open economy, it just had a shadow world of people playing for the money and providing easy cannon fodder for the sweaty players. but nikkita literally did not want to pay for that shit man. those players aren't buying new copies of the game and hosting costs money. he got rid of all of that stuff and put a hollow command economy in its place because he knows that he makes more money out of hackers than he does legit players

For me, what is absolutely enraging about these games is when I spent 20 minutes kitting out for a raid and sitting in the queue, and I die 90 seconds after loading in to someone who was in the right place at the right time. I've been lucky myself that way. When that happens, I turn the game off, because it feels like I just wasted all that time that I now have to redo because I basically got a bad die roll. It's like spending time to stat up an AD&D character and getting killed by a save or die snakebite in room 1 of the dungeon. I would rather lose all my shit after a couple of high stakes fights, because at least I got to play the game for a while and knowingly upped the ante by staying longer and longer to hunt for better stuff.

at the height of its popularity im pretty sure the only thing they did was try and stop this from occuring. It's why the game even has an "average life" statistic because its useless to players. they are keeping track of that shit. They just stopped caring.

 

[The Ugly One]

at the height of its popularity im pretty sure the only thing they did was try and stop this from occuring. It's why the game even has an "average life" statistic because its useless to players. they are keeping track of that shit. They just stopped caring.

I played Arena Breakout a bit, and it spawned me in right behind some poor sap. He probably got 9 seconds of playtime before getting sent back to the loading screen.

 

[mentally retarded user]

I knew it was over.

 

[Toxic BRAAAAP Mask]

Good point, I wonder if a potential Bungie writedown because of Marathon would be higher than the one for Destiny 2.

 

[NoStepOnSnake]

It's weekends only! So if you've got plans or work, you wont be playing the new map for another week maybe.

I guess all of us who work 24-hour jobs are fucked. I genuinely do not like weekend only content since that usually fucks me over.

 

[The Lаughing Man]

Currently as of 09:00 UTC, Marathon has been beat by an early access extraction shooter.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

I won't be happy till the "Players Right now" is in the negatives, impossibly.

 

[creaturestorm]

but sometimes you’ll just get out-kitted by someone, or they’ll catch you at a time when you’re already fighting someone else, or you’ll turn the wrong corner and find a shotgun ready to send you to the start screen. The very fact that players’ personal loot affects their stats means that many fights are just categorically unfair.

Getting out kitted by some one is something a player has direct control over. The problem is bad players cant hold onto their kits, they aren't good enough to keep them and so they aren't good enough to kill players in a better or even worse.

Side note: This is what makes the character builds via gear fucking stupid. You might discover an interesting build and only get to play with it for 5 minutes before it's gone forever.

Anyways, getting caught in a bad position or getting ratted is 100% skill issue in 3s, teams are constantly moving and making sound. A player corner camping with a shotgun is dong it because they heard you before you heard them. Third parties are probably your best example, some times multiple teams will hear gun fire and run straight to it. This was an issue in the previous sound change, we had noticed that any time we fought an enemy team there was a high likelihood that we would have to immediately fight another and possibly a third. Still in most cases this is manageable, you just need to withdraw, heal, and re-engage. You might lose a team member or two in the process, but you can pick them back up. If there are 5 dead players with kits on the ground the third party cant take everything.

Basic real world military tactics and maneuvering stop a lot of this nonsense.

-Cover and concealment awareness or "If we take fire, where am I moving to?"
-Getting off the 'X'
-Skylining, silhouette discipline, terrain masking to avoid detection
-Sound discipline/possibly light discipline with the new map
-Stacking when pushing an enemy team

Your best loot that you spent hours grinding to find the pieces for? Sorry mate, you happened to look left first instead of right when exiting a building and now your perfect kit is the property of some asshole squatting in the bushes.

At around lvl 70 this stops being a thing. Your best loot comes from the vendor, the new frustration is your 'builds' get lost, the traders arent as comprehensive as Tarkov. You can buy purple guns all day, but you cant regularly buy a purple gun that turns you invisible when you head shot some one, you might end up with a purple gun that doubles your melee dmg after you shoot them. It's inconsistent.

To make matters worse, that level of punishment encourages the cheapest and cheesiest of tactics, which feeds back into fights being unfair - because players want to minimise their risk of losing fights, they try to make sure they only engage on their terms. It's why 'some asshole squatting in the bushes' is such a consistent threat, it's a genuinely smart tactic in context.

This doesn't happen in 3s, only solos and maybe duos. Two game modes the game is not designed around, but were included due to player demand.

You have to remember that there is a class that can instantly revive two team mates from down or dead state. This is not Tarkov, dying in Raid only matters if your whole team got wiped. As much as people like to talk shit about classes like Vandal, there isnt any other class in the game that can keep up with her, if she decides to leave, the team you just killed will be getting back up again.

 

[The Ugly One]

Getting out kitted by some one is something a player has direct control over. The problem is bad players cant hold onto their kits, they aren't good enough to keep them and so they aren't good enough to players in a better or even worse.

Any time two players run into each other, somebody is going to lose their kit. The average player will, just by the laws of statistics, lose around 50% of firefights. I doubt anywhere over 1% of players can be good enough to win nearly every fight. You're basically saying that if you're not having a good time, it's your fault for not being in the top 1%, but it's mathematically impossible for 99% of players to be in the top 1%. You talk about the game like someone who is in the top 10%-1% most dedicated players, but "just be in the top tier" isn't viable for, well, the majority of players.

This is why people don't have fun and quit. A game that is designed, intentionally, consciously, to not be fun for the majority of players won't hold on to the majority of players. For a game to have staying power, it has to be fun for the majority of players, not just the top 10%.

 

[big pauper]

Is there a reliable source on what Tarkov's development budget was? I tried to find it for use in an argument once but all I could find was guesses and speculation probably because the devs are Russian.

I legitimately don't think battlestate games has an accountant. The company seems like its just run by nikkita himself and all of the problems are downstream of working for a conman. they obviously run a skeleton crew that's weighed heavily in favor of artists. they have like, maybe three programmers? the game was plagued by extremely basic technical issues for years, leaving boxes unchecked in the unity SDK type shit. over the years they've shown off dozens of guns, armor, vehicles, and environment sets that have no place in the game with obviously no roadmap to ever implement them. the appearance of managing a limited amount of resources to accomplish a goal falls apart when you examine the goals they set for themselves. brass tacks - the company is getting bankrolled by russian oligarchy for culture war reasons and being a predatory conman he is just going to make sure the only person that benefits is himself.

 

[The Ugly One]

the company is getting bankrolled by russian oligarchy for culture war reasons and being a predatory conman he is just going to make sure the only person that benefits is himself

Russia would be a formidable geopolitical foe if this wasn't how their entire economy worked.

 

[big pauper]

Russia would be a formidable geopolitical foe if this wasn't how their entire economy worked.

it's hardly a 'formidable geopolitical foe' when this whole thing was just trying to distract people from playing Stalker 2. the game is called 'escape from tarkov(sky)' like come on

i'm really only half joking, the game did enter development like a year after russia invaded ukraine to fill a very obvious hole in the market and never had a sensible monitization scheme. raelly makes u think

 

[Frightened Rabbit]

it's hardly a 'formidable geopolitical foe' when this whole thing was just trying to distract people from playing Stalker 2. the game is called 'escape from tarkov(sky)' like come on

Tarkov is just another in a long line of games from BSG and Nikita that are made just so they get closer to their true purpose of making their Single Player Action Survival game called Russian 2028. Contract Wars and Tarkov are all prequels and competency training + fund gathering for this one single goal, and it seems like Nikita still wants to make it years later.
When you think about Tarkov, you gotta realise that the idea of the world and of Tarkov itself already exited before even the war in Crimea.