Between disconcerting development reports and a volatile industry, I admit I've been kind of pessimistic about Marathon for a while. Compared to hero shooters and battle royales, extraction shooters have built a relatively small but loyal market – a hard space to break into. The genre is designed around commitment and putting down roots. Bungie is an FPS elite with mountains of live service experience, but it hasn't been a PvP powerhouse in over a decade, and this genre has spat out the bones of plenty of other games already.
My Destiny 2 friends and I have repeatedly exchanged worries about whether Marathon might just beef it Concord-style. So I was encouraged to learn for myself, in an eight-hour Marathon hands-on preview, that this game has potential. It plays well – really well. It's probably the most polished extraction shooter there is. But that's just evaluating it as a shooter; as a thing that people are expected to buy and play for a long time and eventually put money into again, Marathon has big questions to answer.
