Marathon’s release signals the dire state of shooters in 2026

Everyone who’s played or even looked at Marathon can agree its vibes are off the charts. But it’s also an extraction shooter, meaning anyone who wants to soak up those vibes needs to play a tense game mode with confusing rules that allows absolutely no room for error. This has led many to wish developer Bungie had instead designed Marathon as a traditional FPS. I’d go a step further: It doesn’t even necessarily need to be Marathon. I’ll take any great FPS campaign at this point.

[Spoiler warning: This article veers into “old man yells at cloud” territory.]

Marathon, released March 5 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, is just about the opposite of what anyone craving a traditional FPS campaign would want to play. You and up to two other players are sent to an open area on an exoplanet, where you have to find as much loot as you can and escape before time runs out. The stakes are high; death can come from NPCs or fellow players, at which point you’re sent right back to where you started. Rich lore aside, the stories you experience in Marathon are more emergent in nature — moments that you and your party create while playing. Clear structure and direction are eschewed in favor of the holy art of letting you do what you want.

It follows a similar format to Arc Raiders, the enormously popular 2025 third-person shooter that also has impeccable vibes. In Arc Raiders, you and any team members are sent to an open area in post-apocalypse Italy, tasked with finding as much loot as you can and escaping the level before time runs out. The stakes are similar to Marathon (though the players reportedly are kinder) and like Bungie’s game, the storytelling is largely conveyed through your unique experiences. The structure, as with Marathon, is what you make of it.

The open-ended nature of Marathon and Arc Raiders is why people flock to those games. But there’s a turn-brain-off allure to traditional shooters that is simply absent from extraction shooters, which require some degree of critical thinking. To be clear, it’s not so much that I’m pining for a typical three-act narrative — shooters aren’t exactly known for their Oscar-worthy scripts — but rather the trappings that come with these games: the expensive-looking set pieces, point-A-to-point-B direction that makes you feel like you’re part of a story and not just a world. For a fleeting moment during the 2025 Game Awards, it seemed like Highguard was exactly the type of FPS we’ve been waiting for, before it quickly became clear the game was another disastrous live-service foray. Developer Wildlight Entertainment released Highguard on Jan. 26 with a single multiplayer mode. As of this week, it is now offline.

The thing is, even when a luxuriously produced FPS campaign does come out, it doesn’t always hit the mark. Battlefield 6 launched in 2025 with a campaign alongside its robust multiplayer mode, but the narrative is a politically incoherent mess, and the missions failed to capture the large-scale chaos that has long defined Battlefield. Around the same time, Black Ops 7 also launched with a campaign. It too is a politically incoherent mess (not much surprise there), and while it’s fun messing around with a friend, the open-ended missions felt more like they were chasing trends of loot shooters and battle royales than offering a true-to-form string of story missions. Compared to its immediate predecessor, Black Ops 6, which included a truly excellent campaign, it was a downgrade.

Image: Battlefield Studios/EA

Single-player shooter fans have been starving for a while now. But Marathon’s multiplayer focus in particular stings. Bungie has made some of the most venerable shooter campaigns in gaming, most notably the original run of Halo games in the 2000s. Some of the best parts of Destiny and Destiny 2, which frontloaded a loot grind in the eternal quest of driving KPIs, were linear missions that played like traditional FPS levels. It’s natural for fans of this studio to want the studio to flex those chops in a new game — especially with those visuals. Bungie fully turning away from its single-player roots feels like the true end of an era.

The highwater marks of the genre aren’t even that old — like Halo 4, Doom (2016), Wolfenstein: The New Order, Crysis 3, and so on. Yet they seem more and more like they’re becoming relics of the past. There is, however, one game that could conceivably do it all, reversing the tide to make everyone happy. One shooter that could sate the live service gods, in their ill-fitting suits, and also sell 87 gazillion copies on the back of its story missions alone. Some call it the ping that was promised. The Elessar of Loud Games That Go Boom. We need you, Titanfall 3, you’re our only hope.