Marathon, Reprise
I’d been feeling all kinds of uneasy ahead of the currently-ongoing Stress Test for Marathon (2026), in that I had such a potently bad experience last couple go-arounds that I told myself I’d swear off it for good. Pushed to tears at one point during a previous network test, I hit what I think is a reasonable barrier of “I can’t do this again” and eventually felt comfortable with having that be that. It’s not for me, it will be for some, I’ve got a backlog of years of games to play. I’ll be fine!
I would save this for the end of a post, usually, but I think I should clarify at the outset here that this is my own perspective on this, and I am in no way passing judgement on anyone or saying this is, like, any kind of universal truth. It should hopefully be pretty clear that these are my feelings, so don’t take this as me criticising anyone. I have been having some very nasty internal feelings about all of this, and I want to write it down because I think there’s probably value to be found in the perspective. That’s all.
Alas, I’m sitting here, kind of mad at myself, because people around me are finding joy in something I can’t. A poisonous state of mind to be in. Why do I feel this way?
I spent a good chunk of the earliest playtest picking apart why I struggled with it from a mostly-gameplay perspective and while the game has gone considerable changes in pace and balance, I think that mostly still applies. This post isn’t about that. There’s something experiential about Marathon that percolates a misery in me, something that goes beyond how the guns feel or how long the revive timers are. What could possibly emotionally break me in a multiplayer videogame in a way that has never happened to me, not in hundreds of hours of Call of Duty, Straftat, Valorant, Apex, etc.
A discussion about the game, and extraction shooters in general, came up in a friend group earlier and some folks described the game in a way that I think put some stuff into place.
if everyone is hostile it's boring. if everyone's friendly it's boring. but when everyone's a big question mark it's exciting
And,
the game absolutely does bend towards encouraging you to be hostile, which makes the fact that you have the tools to communicate and not always be aggressive more potent. i’ve had three very memorable games so far where either someone requested a truce and i relented or i asked someone to let us pass and they did. without the hostile bent those moments mean less to me
It’s was a really concise summary of the experience Marathon is trying to create as an extraction shooter set “on a hostile world”, and it’s a set of sentences I was rotating in my head for most of school this afternoon. Why does this bother me so much. Not my friends saying this, I love them, but why does an experience that gets players to think this way create a feeling in me that makes me, like, ill.
I transitioned about a decade ago at this point (I did not realise it was that long ago until now, what the fuck) and many realities about being trans have had so long to sink in that it’s, just, life now. Clothes fit weird, meds are expensive, news cycles are a perpetual pear-wiggler, all that fun stuff. It’s fine! You live and you adjust.
The thing that for me, 10 years later, is as bad now as it was then is interacting with the outside world. It’s more than just “passing”, it’s having to steel myself the moment I step out the front door. I have errands to run today, will I be misgendered? How many people will look at me on the street on the way there? How many of them will clearly judge me when looking at me? Will any of them be hostile to me? Which one of them has read the wrong news article today? Are the interactions I’m having different than, I dunno, the 50-year old guy waiting behind me in line at the coffee shop? Even in a more-welcoming-than-most Canada, my guard has to be up to a degree where I probably come off pretty reserved and insular. I hate it. I can’t spend time thinking about it, because if I do I get really depressed. I cannot be myself unless I am in a closed environment where my emotional safety is guaranteed. This is not the normal human experience.
This is not a problem unique to me but I also recognize it’s a problem some transgender people don’t have. Some people have confidence! A lot of it! Some people are better about having their guard up or confronting others when they’re made to feel uncomfortable. I am not that person. I am compromised by anxiety, minimal confidence, and years of trauma. I cannot be the person society needs me to be to blend in or participate seamlessly. Being outside with my wife or my friends is essential because they’re a safety net, and without it I am left to a world that sees me one way when I exist as another.
The world, not literally but spiritually, is a really hostile place to be in. Existing is entirely dependent on my ability to not emotionally crash out from dysphoria, so every interaction requires me to place a level of trust in people that I’m not really sure any cis or non-minority really think about. On the best of days, it happens without me even thinking about it but on most days it is a persistent noise. An emotional tinnitus that I would give anything in the world to be rid of.
Core to the extraction shooter experience is the tension that you are at the mercy of every other players’ will, much like their mercy is at yours. The permanence of your items creates the stakes of the prisoner’s dilemma you’re subjected to, the genre being built on the organic and impossible-to-predict nature of those interactions. You are not forced to fight each other, but whoever wins is rewarded with the spoils of the one who loses.
That trust “check” that I was talking about is what’s happening here, right. You are put into a situation where the both of you can walk away unscathed, where no one gets hurt, but now you’re given an incentive to “win”. This is obviously not how two people meeting in the real world think, I’m not dumb I realise that, but a critical part of how we interact with the world is being gamified. Conceptually, that’s really fascinating and I understand why the genre is being explored by many as a result! What happens when, in a controlled environment, you subject people to a pressure cooker. We’re humans! The result will never be the same twice and that’s interesting!
The thing is that, like, I’ve played Tarkov? And Marauders, and ARC, and… probably one or two more I’m forgetting. DMZ? Whatever the COD one was. Not extensively, I have mostly walked away from all of those going “Neat, not for me though!”, but enough to wonder why the hell Marathon feels so much meaner than all of those ever did. They’re all built off the same foundation, why is Marathon that had me so fraught that I cried over it.
I don’t really know how much this ends up mapping out to player behavior, but what I think that makes Marathon stand out amidst the rest is that you play as Heroes. Like, in-the-Overwatch-sense ‘heroes’. If you don’t have a gun, you still have a “kit” of skills and tools to do something, and that something is almost-universally built around engaging in combat. Seeker mines, radar, stealth, missile barrages, etc. No matter your objective or desired experience in a given match, your lingua franca is the ability to fight. In ARC or Tarkov, you’re just, a guy. You either start with no gun, or with a pea shooter. From the outset, you are weak.
In ARC, that weakness is exacerbated by powerful and plentiful PvE enemies, the PvP element is an added danger certainly but they’re far from the primary threat. It’s what makes organic co-operation so powerful! There is a non-zero chance that you encounter another player with no good tools or ability to fight, and vice-versa. You both understand the baseline you come from, the odds you face as weaklings, an immediate form of respect is built around it, and I believe it’s the foundation to what makes that game a success and a pretty tense-but-otherwise friendly experience.¹
Marathon’s heroes and kits teach you that the primary mode of interaction with the world is not “exist as a person” but engage. There is no peaceful way to use a shoulder-mounted missile and, maybe more cynically, there is no good reason to assume that a gamer will look at a button with an ability and not just press it when given the chance. It’s free. It has a cooldown, but in a game of punishing pertinence to its weaponry, these are the one thing you will always and forever have. You are given a language to speak with and it’s not proximity chat.² The game is not literally telling you to be hostile but how does it facilitate other venues? Does it make encounters less frequent, emphasizing how risky it would be to die after so much progress made? Does it provide you with gestures or signage to immediately show amnesty if you don’t have a microphone plugged in? Are you given opportunities to organically work with other players as often as you’re given opportunities to fight them?
Moreover, the field in Marathon is pretty level. You, other players, and the UESC are all of equal threat. The game wants this! Everything hits equally hard, everything dies as often. The inability to visually distinguish players from UESC, I feel, is by design in that regard. Everything is a threat. The world exists in a way for you to perceive everything as something that wants you dead. Would it not make clear differentiation if it didn’t, both visually and mechanically? "The purpose of a system is what it does” and so forth, right. It gives you the option to broker peace but how is it stacking those odds in favor of other possibilities.
There’s a toxicity to extraction games that’s inherent to a genre built on “you can take advantage of players’ trust” but the audience for those games so far have been pretty self-selecting. Marathon feels like a step above that, where the density of its systems and mechanics laid its desires bare to a degree I couldn’t handle anymore. It asks players to be vulnerable in a game where the primary language is aggression and deceit. This is not any different from other extraction shooters, in the end. It's what the genre is. But the repeated degree to which I experienced the cruelty of this across some 50-odd hours total was just too much for me to bear. Maybe I got unlucky. It is statistically improbable but possible that I just rolled 1s over and over and over and over. The more I played though, the more my mindset changed to how I could take advantage of a given situation to screw other players over because those are the tools I was given. My scans got better, our backstabs got stealthier, our opening shots got more ambitious, and the consequences of fighting got so much heavier.
I spend so much of my life having to be on edge that today might be the day someone ruins my week, surviving only by trusting others knowing I am rolling dice every time. Why am I playing a game that mimics this betrayal of trust and gamifies it. I couldn’t handle it. I can’t handle a game who’s primary mode of interaction is to expose them to the constant mental calculus I have to do and tell them there’s a net benefit to hurting the other person. I think there's an underestimation on how some people don't need coping mechanisms for this kind of thing, in conversations and approaches to the genre. Most people live in a world where there is no resistance to their existence alone, and the aggression I see mirrored here is invisible to them outside of the game. To many, it's an unknown and interesting thing to experience instead of an exhausting constant.
I don’t think this is solved by getting rid of “heroes”, I don’t think this is solved by giving players a big white flag hologram you can throw up. This is not a thing I’m writing because I have an answer, or even an insight on how the game is built or anything. It’s just thoughts and if I don’t get them out, my tummy hurts. It got me kinda thinking in the end about how these were, to some degree, the same accusations laid against From's Souls series all the way up to Elden Ring. If you play online, you open yourself up to invasions. You can open the door to other players and have them help you, but the door stays open for an aggressor to come in and fuck all of you up. The devil's bargain you sign to experience a new kind of interaction, (initially) powered by the PS3’s ability to be online in a way the previous generation couldn’t. All of those games, however, let you play offline. If this was not an experience you wanted, if this was not a deal you wanted to make, you could opt-out.
This is really not helped by everything else Marathon is doing that is extremely up my alley. It is a far-future dystopian hard sci-fi game about corporations pilfering a failed colonization attempt, where sentient artificial and extra-terrestrial intelligences seek to advantageously strike on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for power. Its art design is one of the most vibrant and bold depictions of fabricated space I’ve ever seen. The UESC (PvE enemies) are INCREDIBLY fun to fight, challenging in a way that is akin to Bungie’s hallmark “Legendary” difficulties. It is, for lack of a better term, “made for me”. Maybe more important than all, my friends whom I care deeply about poured their heart and souls into this for years. I cannot stress this enough that, despite everything I’ve written here, there is nothing I want more in the world than to love this game.
I am weak and I have survived this far only from the kindness of others, and I have been unable to process something I want to adore so much adopt and encourage a hostility that spiritually breaks me.
¹: You do not have to hand it to ARC Raiders, a game compromised by its willful and proud usage of generative AI. I’m comparing the two games’ approaches here but let me be unequivocal in saying: fuck that game, fuck Embark, and if you play it you should stop.
²: I have not delved into this because it’s less about the experience the game cultivates and more about “existing as a trans person” but the audiences for these games hold proximity chat as a kind of staple of the genre, which any trans person will tell you is basically like sticking your head in a guillotine. I refuse to elaborate on why I don’t want to talk into a microphone at another player and inevitably retort “I go by she/her, actually”.