If there's one thing most players could agree on about Marathon in its opening weeks, it is that Bungie's reimagining of the classic shooter series is mercilessly difficult. To borrow a phrase from philosopher Thomas Hobbes, every encounter with another player is nasty, brutish and short. One nano-second you're looting a bio-scanner, the next you're lying on the floor being stabbed in the chest by a space ninja. If you're skilled or lucky, the roles are reversed, but the end result is the same – absolute carnage.
In my first ten days or so with the game, I was successfully extracting perhaps 15-25 percent of the time, and it was always worse when I was playing on a team with strangers. Having come from 200 hours in Arc Raiders where servers can often be ridiculously friendly ("You loot the harvester first". "No, you, I insist". "Oh, I couldn't possibly", etc), it has been somewhat shocking – but also incredibly liberating.
