Bungie’s latest update on Marathon shows Runners, teases playtests

More than a year after announcing sci-fi extraction shooter Marathon, developer Bungie revealed a smattering of new details about its next game on Monday, including a peek at two character classes and confirmation of planned playtests coming in 2025. The latest update on Marathon was atypical of Bungie’s style — instead of a slickly produced “ViDoc,” as the developer likes to call them, the new video is a no-frills, talk-to-the-camera info dump from game director Joe Zeigler. In some ways, it scans like a proof-of-life video from the beleaguered developer of Destiny.

After Bungie announced Marathon in May 2023, it said it planned to go “dark to focus on the game” and pledged to show gameplay the next time it talked about its extraction shooter. Zeigler acknowledged that pledge, saying the studio isn’t ready to show gameplay just yet. Instead, Zeigler pitches the concept of Marathon as an “intense” extraction shooter where players fight over loot, then try to survive and escape with their haul. The developer also showed two types of Runners — Marathon’s cybernetic mercenaries — with the Thief and Stealth types.

While showing concept art for the Thief, Zeigler said, “If you notice the character creepily peeking around the corner in that quiet moment before she makes her move — this is sort of like the theme of that character in a lot of ways, and should give you a hint as to what kind of gameplay that character is going to be driving from. There’s a lot of hilarious stories that come from [the Thief] but also very, very crazy moments that this character contributes to the game.”

Referring to the Stealth Runner, Zeigler said that it will use deception as a utility trait. “They’re really hard to pin down,” he said, “and you can see that they have the tools to stalk the battlefield and show up in ways that allow them to kind of take advantage.”

In discussing the state of Marathon, Zeigler said that Bungie is “on track” and has been “doing a lot of aggressive changes to the game” based on early testing with players and content creators. “There’s so many people who’ve contributed by telling us, ‘Hey, this thing sucks’ or ‘This thing is great’ in a way that really has helped us diagnose, analyze, and shape and shift the game in great ways,” he said.

Players may be able to get their hands on Marathon sometime in 2025, when Bungie will start expanding its playtests “wider and wider,” Zeigler said. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Marathon will launch in 2025, but it sounds like Bungie is getting closer to both showing gameplay and letting a larger pool of players start going hands-on with its follow-up to Destiny 2.

Zeigler, who was formerly the game director of Riot Games’ shooter Valorant, announced in March that he’d taken over as game director for Marathon. He replaced Bungie veteran Christopher Barrett, who Bloomberg reported had been fired for misconduct.

Marathon will be released on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.