Did you know Bungie made Marathon? Not that one, this one, the one currently running a server slam ahead of launch on March 5. The studio's a Ship of Theseus at this point but you can clearly see Bungie's DNA in Marathon's stellar gunplay, superlative soundscape, and retina-hijacking environments. My four hours with the server slam have been fantastic simply from an FPS perspective. Pardon my flowery language: it feels great to shoot guns. But this isn't a simple shooter. It's a complicated shooter – an extraction shooter. And it's in the extraction half that bad habits – revealed to me over thousands of hours of Destiny – really communicate that this is a Bungie game. With UI that's simultaneously overwhelming and uninformative, Marathon is very rapidly doing my head in.
Remember when Destiny 2 finally added a transmog system – a bog-standard cosmetic feature that other MMOs solved many moons prior – and managed to turn it into a multi-stage, fractally padded, currency-saddled, pay-to-skip mess? Bungie is a bee, but an Eldritch one. Sugar goes in, honey comes out. Guns go in and the best gunplay you've ever seen in your life comes out. But sometimes, when the hour strikes 12 and the animals wisely retreat to the safety of the forest, incredibly simple and established systems will go in and unfathomable, horrifying spaghetti not meant for human eyes will come out.
