It’s been a while since we’ve heard about Marathon, but now some news has come through the grapevine – albeit, unofficially.
As reported by Paul Tassi for Forbes, the first leaks from the current playtests have finally come out. While we won’t put too much weight into the finer details of these leaks, it’s definitely a big deal that leaks have happened at all.
In the fallout of Marathon’s poor reception at reveal, which ballooned into a crisis after a plagiarism scandal, Sony delayed the game to an undetermined date. Bungie than launched the newest rounds of playtests for external feedback with newly minted non-disclosure agreements.
Tassi’s source @itrocksiza apparently got their hands on this information without signing an NDA, and so neither they or Tassi are under any legal obligation to keep it secret. Tassi did decide not to share images ‘to be nice,’ but given the nature of the plagiarism scandal, this may be a move to protect Bungie’s developers.
We do believe Bungie will be acting in good faith to address the plagiarism of art assets by artist fern hook, but the secrecy may be partly because Bungie is still trying to figure out where those elements are in the game to scrub them out. For that reason, they may still be unable to show the game, the same reason it was not shown in the livestream last month with game director Joe Ziegler and creative director Joe Cross.
Most of the changes are related to gameplay, but there are indication the game’s graphics is undergoing evolution as well. Tassi claims new outdoor screenshots show better lighting and density compared to the last publicly seen alpha. Subsequently, Bungie has made good on the promise in the trailers, by experimenting with player corpses staying in the playfield, though apparently with duffel bags still around. These bodies leave pools of blue blood as well, just like we have seen in the trailers.
It’s been about two weeks since these NDA playtests started so let’s be clear; it’s unreasonable to expect Bungie to have fixed Marathon’s issues that quickly. If PlayStation’s Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst is good at his word, Bungie will be given the opportunity to make the changes necessary to turn the game around.
Hulst has expressed confidence to investors that they can still salvage this project, and they will simply undergo the cycle of testing and iterating. To give Hulst credit here, of course, he didn’t get to the position where he is now, or as the head of Guerrilla Games before that, if he didn’t know enough about game development to turn projects around.
So these are the first steps to Marathon’s recovery and presumably, Bungie’s comeback.
