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00:00Players want more challenge.
00:09The whole point of an extraction shooter
00:11is that you're challenged to even survive in this world.
00:16We heard loud and clear from the Alpha.
00:18The world didn't feel dangerous.
00:20The world didn't feel lived in.
00:26Taos City Floor to us is this place that really doesn't want you there.
00:29And that sort of survival narrative really fits really well
00:32with the kind of world that we're creating.
00:34The world needs to feel like there is something sinister
00:37underneath the surface, even when the colors are really bright.
00:40You should not be here.
00:42We want to marry the classic Bungie game feel
00:45where you are blasting stuff in the face and it feels amazing
00:49with the sort of high tension of the survival genre.
00:54If you want good loot, you have to go to places
00:57where you're taking risks.
00:58Either risks from other players or risks from AI.
01:01So we have all these tools now.
01:03Rook with ProxChat and the way the game works
01:06and sort of how tense it is.
01:08I think all those things work together really well.
01:10We have another Rook.
01:11No, no, no, no, no, no.
01:12Sorry.
01:13The marathon ship is essentially a ship that we sent out from around the world.
01:14We have another Rook.
01:15No, no, no, no.
01:16Sorry.
01:17The marathon ship is essentially a ship that we sent out from Earth, an Earth that was overpopulated
01:20to explore and colonize a star far away that we call Talceti.
01:39In a lot of ways, it's like the tale of humanity trying to go out into the dark void of space,
01:42find a place to colonize, and failing terribly at it.
01:45Everyone's gone.
01:46Something catastrophic happened.
01:47And it's not just their absence that's important.
01:48It's the things that they left behind.
01:49The modern race to Tau Ceti all started when a mysterious signal came through the galaxy.
01:56The turmoil that sort of ensues gives rise to all these corporations that were invested in this marathon.
02:01In a lot of ways, it's like the tale of humanity trying to go out into the dark void of space,
02:05find a place to colonize, and failing terribly at it.
02:08Everyone's gone.
02:09Something catastrophic happened.
02:10And it's not just their absence that's important, it's the things that they left behind.
02:13The modern race to Tau Ceti all started when a mysterious signal came through the galaxy.
02:18They were invested in this marathon project, now going, what happened?
02:22How do we recoup our investment?
02:24And then layered on top of that is the greed and corruption of all of the different factions,
02:30and corporations, and revolutionary groups.
02:33In our version of the world, we send people out, not just to discover what happened,
02:38but also to collect from the things that remain there, and those people are runners.
02:43As a runner, you're a biocybernetic mercenary who's traded their human body for a biosynthetic one.
02:50You're not an unkillable godslayer.
02:52You are a mercenary, a disposable mercenary.
02:55You will live, you will die.
02:57They are not people.
02:58You are the person.
02:59You go into that shell and adopt the personality matrix that is specifically designed to help you do the thing that you need to do.
03:06And you've been hired by these factions to come to Tau Ceti to scavenge it for anything that might be of value.
03:12As a runner, you've left your body behind.
03:15You've traveled light years so that you can have access to the ultimate payday.
03:21With extraction shooters, it is all about survival.
03:24There are other people who want the same things that you want, and it's up to you to vest them.
03:33But there's quiet periods where you're listening for the anticipation of something.
03:38Could there be another crew in the distance?
03:40Did I just hear a gunshot?
03:42Did I hear AI just alert?
03:45I'm gonna get you.
03:46I'm gonna get you.
03:47I'm gonna get you.
03:48I'm gonna get you.
03:49I'm gonna be back.
03:50I'm gonna get you.
03:52I'm gonna get you.
03:53I'm gonna get you.
03:54I'm gonna get you.
03:56And then there's the loud, bombastic action moments where the minute something is alerted, the minute you're in that fight, now it's go time.
04:05Players particularly pose a lot of danger to you.
04:10They can make a lot of decisions that you might find illogical, and completely trick you into scenarios.
04:15Sometimes the best loot box is another player that you see a longer run.
04:22So there's a few different ways you can play the game, so one of them is you can play in
04:25crew, both with your friends and also through crew fill, which will just match you with
04:30two other players.
04:31You can play solo, and you'll jump into a game with a bunch of other solo players.
04:35In solo I think the stakes are a bit higher, right?
04:37You have only yourself to align.
04:39You still have proc strat, so you can call out to other solos, but you know, you are
04:43playing a tense Alliance game where it's really up to them whether or not they decide
04:48to honor or respect that Alliance you might have created.
04:53It's all about figuring out what's your investment, what's your stake, when to get in, when to
04:56get out, and when to kill the other guy.
04:58Being good at Marathon is like playing poker with guns.
05:06One of the things we've really focused on is making sure the environments are selling
05:11the tone we want to hit with the game.
05:13We've brought a little bit of groundedness, a little bit of grit, a little bit of darkness,
05:18a little bit of that mood that kind of is necessary for an extraction shooter to feel
05:23dangerous.
05:24Our biggest goal has always been player immersion.
05:28We're trying to keep everything as believable and realistic as possible.
05:32So we cranked up all the material responses, feel accurate, feel realistic.
05:36You know, you'll get gloss, you'll get crud and mud.
05:39And no one of those things is all that sexy, but when you layer in just a little bit more,
05:44you know, responsive to light, a little bit more responsive to the player, things will
05:47part, water will pool.
05:49Layer in all these different things.
05:51Now the world becomes much more alive.
05:54It feels like a real place.
05:55And then when you're feeling like a real place and you feel in danger, now your run matters.
06:07Look back at some of the alpha shots and it's kind of hard to tell when it's sunny or when
06:11it's rainy.
06:13Weather feels like weather now, but like when it's sunny, you get this really nice like bleaching
06:17effect.
06:18It feels bright.
06:19It feels like warm when it's sunny now.
06:21I feel like we're just celebrating that color so much more.
06:25I think it just contributes to the whole effect.
06:27So we have dead bodies in the game now.
06:29We also have like decay on the runners themselves, like you'll actually see them fall apart.
06:35We're actually dropping the body.
06:36The body stays there and the body slowly decays over time as you loot it.
06:40So you come into a room and you see a bunch of carnage, but you see one body is still pristine.
06:45You know that their killer is probably close and you are not safe.
06:48If everybody is just a messy goop, you're probably okay.
06:52Audio is a huge gameplay component in Marathon.
06:59Every sound plays a function.
07:19Lift-ups tell players everything.
07:24It's telling you what is the type of threat that's around you?
07:26Where are they at?
07:27Are they above you?
07:28Are they far away?
07:29Are they close by?
07:30So if I'm in bio research and I hear a particular material type, I know, hey, they're on the
07:34second floor and they're in this room.
07:37Our hero is the world.
07:39So we're constantly trying to figure out where can music help reinforce what is the vibe and
07:43intent of this place?
07:45There was the discussion about the interaction between score and sound design.
07:49And I wanted to create a score that wasn't just like full of instruments you've heard
07:53before.
07:54The job was how can I make what I'm seeing this race to survival even more nervous and even
08:00more terrifying and even more thrilling.
08:12We have four zones and each one of those zones has its own sort of approach to kind of level
08:17design and what it asked players to kind of think about and do.
08:20You're going to start with perimeter, kind of on the outskirts of the colony.
08:26It's a little more spread out.
08:27You got a little bit more areas to be safe and to sneak around, but it's also a little
08:31more straightforward.
08:33It really brings this sense of scale.
08:35It sits like in our fantasy as expansion site for the colony on the very edges of where
08:41they had settled on Tau Ceti.
08:43UESC are also there trying to understand what has happened and secure the area.
08:49Death is a part of Marathon.
08:50It happens a lot.
08:51Even on Burmutter, which we talk about as a more friendly zone to new runners, you are
08:58still going to die a lot.
08:59Attention, unauthorized runner.
09:05You are trespassing in a military security zone.
09:15It was really important to us that the UESC were not trivial to fight.
09:19When you face them on Tau Ceti as a runner, you are the outlaw.
09:22You are trespassing.
09:23They have a little bit of this haunted tone.
09:26So you can see they have this floating locomotion.
09:28They get these sparks.
09:29They have these sigils over their faces.
09:31Sometimes their behavior feels almost like they're possessed a little bit.
09:34Like, are they taking in commands from a remote AI?
09:37The elite tier is sort of like the stark blue.
09:40The mini boss tier is more like a lilac.
09:43Boss tier is just going to be dipped in red.
09:45They have these tendrils that latch out and leach onto you and start sucking away at your consciousness.
09:56You're getting into marsh.
09:57You're starting to understand something bad happened here, and you're seeing signs of that
10:01in a way that wasn't apparent on Perimeter.
10:03On Dire Marsh, we've got the Anomaly, and it's this strange alien entity that has erupted up out of the ground.
10:11You're really feeling signs that this is more of an epicenter of where things went wrong on this colony.
10:16It's got a different style of gameplay.
10:18It's more like a central complex that is rich with overlapping areas and regions that you can find yourself kind of bleeding from one encounter to another.
10:27It's a great map to go in when you just want some action, and you're going to need somewhere to farm.
10:33Each map has different weather systems.
10:35It has different dynamic events that can happen, and your approach to them is never going to be consistent.
10:41One of the needs that the design team thought that we should have is more challenging PPE activities.
10:47Each of our zones has these bigger events that don't happen every session, but when they do happen, you'll know they're happening.
10:57Building these types of events into the world shake up your run and make you decide, like, what do you want to risk?
11:03Then you get to Outpost.
11:08And Outpost is a more functional, thriving UESC facility.
11:16There's scan drones flying overhead.
11:18The UESC is everywhere.
11:20There's tripwires.
11:21There's weather hazards.
11:23It's a lot of stuff you're up against from the get-go.
11:25Outpost is a smaller map, but it's also a lot more vertical.
11:28It's built around a specific building that we call the pinwheel.
11:31This is just this meat grinder of a structure that's like a corkscrewed building that has nooks and crannies and hallways, and it just becomes a real, you know, real cluster when you're in there fighting.
11:41The floor is raised on Outpost and nothing is free.
11:53The pinwheel hosts some of the best loot opportunities.
12:00But it's noisy, players are going to know you're doing it, so there's extra risks.
12:17The character you're going to spend the most time with is the zones.
12:23Understanding each personality of every zone.
12:25That's the storytelling every player gets.
12:27Every time you're on the planet, you can look up and see the ship floating and looming in the skybox.
12:33Reminding you of why this place even exists, but also reminding you that something up happened here, and you've got to figure out what it was.
12:42Marathon has a lot of loot in it.
12:49It's a huge pie.
12:50There's a ton of different implants at every rarity.
12:53There's a ton of different runner cores for each runner.
12:56There's over 400 weapon mods.
12:58Like, it's just an outlandish number of items to collect.
13:02There's going to be a really interesting period of discoverability where players sort of figure out what are the pieces that I have available to me?
13:08How do I get them, and how do I put them together into something that's awesome?
13:24You can go through and look at how many iconic weapons have come from Bungie.
13:28And it's something that we really want to hold up and make sure that we're matching that legacy.
13:34Visually, they're all really, really distinct and clearly marathon.
13:38But we wanted animation-wise a majority of them to feel recognizable.
13:42So when you put them in your hands, you knew how to use them.
13:45Mods will basically allow you to increase certain stats on the guns, that battery SMG.
13:50The gold mod, full-blown, turns it into the needle.
13:56The sidearm is a gun that is effective in close quarters, but maybe not too much outside of that.
14:09But the gold mod on this gun puts a suppressor on it.
14:12And then when I kill something with this gun, I turn invisible.
14:18And then that lends it to other build crafting if I want to sort of stack into how invisible can I be.
14:26Even some weapon mods can improve stats and your runner shells capabilities.
14:36So there's lots of different ways to raise the floor of your stats so that you're coming into each run strong.
14:42Runnershells are a bioprinted body that you inhabit when you go down to Tau Ceti to scavenge the ruins of the Lost Colony.
15:10Each of our launch shells is really an archetype of gameplay.
15:15So if you want to play like a frontline tank, if you want to play a rat character that wants to sneak around,
15:22if you want to find those rats, we have a shell for you.
15:33The idea there is like, have a broad spectrum that everyone can kind of find a little bit of a home to,
15:39and then we're going to build on top of that.
15:41Cores and implants mold the kit into a play style that you want.
15:49So examples of those are like, on Thief, I get a second grapple.
15:53On Destroyer, I pull out my riot barricade and as it takes damage, it's actually converting that damage into shield back to me.
15:59And these can be used in combination with each other to shift the gameplay style of your runner kit.
16:08At any point you feel like you don't want to risk anything or maybe you're down on your luck and you want the opportunity to get back, Rook's your guy.
16:15Rook is a prototype runner shell.
16:20It's a mode where we make it easy for you to just kind of drop into a match that's in progress and run about and try to scavenge as much as possible.
16:29You are going in solo to a run that's already in progress.
16:32You don't have a team, you have a very limited loadout, but you're not risking anything.
16:37This lets you kind of get in, grab a little bit of loot, and then bail.
16:42So when you get like a really powerful gun or implant or core, it is unlocking some new space or new challenge that you've never done before.
16:52And the loot is helping you reach greater heights.
17:02Faction agents are such a big vehicle for tone and narrative for the world.
17:05Each faction has their own motivations, their own desires, the things they're going to ask you to do.
17:14We've got Traxxas. They're the most powerful corporation in human history.
17:18They have very long arms and very deep pockets to kind of get what they want.
17:24So they might ask you to go and find specific weapons or mods.
17:29Congratulations, winner. Your last performance evaluation was rated on track.
17:35If you're a PvP player, one of the factions is called Arachne.
17:40They're essentially a death cult.
17:42What that translates to is that they're asking you to go and kill other runners.
17:46The sacred thermodynamics of violence.
17:49Mida is all about destruction. They are going to give you grenades, they're going to give you claymores, they're going to let you blow the place up.
17:57And they are irreverent and dangerous. They might ask you to upload this malware into a UESC dropship.
18:07And as it leaves, it explodes and careens off into the distance.
18:14We have big plans. Explosive. Visionary.
18:18Each of our factions has an upgrade tree that you unlock progressively as you gain reputation with them.
18:22And along the way, you're going to unlock these capstones that are these special upgrades.
18:28When you unlock that final capstone, you're gaining access to the best stuff in the market. You're getting gold items.
18:34In addition, these faction upgrades can increase your runner's base stats, and those base stat upgrades are permanent for the rest of the season.
18:48Access denied.
18:50Darius, you know me. Did you miss your last round of maintenance?
18:53Don't search. Don't dig. Don't question me.
18:56Access denied.
18:58Hey, it's okay. It's just me.
19:00I'm not alone.
19:01You're not alone.
19:04The Codex is a suite of achievements, collectibles, audio logs, things that you're finding in Run that we're going to track for you over time.
19:14The more you find these items, the more story you're unlocking about them and what their role is in the world, why they're here, who cared about them, why they're as valuable as they are.
19:25I'm repeating myself with these entries, but any fears inherent in the scope of this endeavor seem unfounded.
19:32Within the Codex, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can unlock.
19:35Runner skins, weapon skins, weapon charms, stickers, emblems, backgrounds for your profile, and titles.
19:45So it's everything from your first steps on the world of Tales 34, all the way through to becoming a vidmaster and taking on the most extreme challenges.
19:54The marathon ship is the hardest place to survive in this game.
20:07And if you're not ready to take your best stuff, well, you're not going to survive.
20:10It's like a heist for a runner.
20:15Cryo Archive is big in and of itself, but it's also cold. It's also hostile.
20:24It's going to test every aspect of the survival game.
20:31You're probably going to be forced to run into players in ways you haven't been on other maps.
20:35You're going to run into basically every type of environmental threat you have faced before.
20:44You're going to fight a who's who of the highest tier UESC units.
20:48And the UESC are there in this presence you haven't seen before.
20:57It's really cool because each of the vaults is more successively challenging than the next.
21:01And that seventh vault is where you both are going to get the coolest thing, but also where you're going to learn the most about what happened to this place.
21:10At some point in your journey in Cryo Archive, you might start wondering if the UESC are there to keep you out or if they're actually there to keep something else in.
21:18I think the thing that I'm most excited about for Marathon is getting into the hands of our players.
21:37The biggest thing I want people to take away from Marathon is that it still feels amazing. It still feels like it has that spark.
21:45It takes all the aspects that I think Bungie is really good at. First-person feel and gunplay, the super deep, crazy sci-fi lore, and it mixes up all those things together in a really amazing PvP package.
22:00It really comes down to every single discipline that's working on the game. The animation has to be good, the sound has to be good, everything has to be working in harmony.
22:09That's when the controller fades away, the screen fades away, you're just immersed in the world.
22:13That is what we're trying to live up to with Marathon.
22:19It is a mad dash. I'm not going to front about that. It's a mad dash to the finish, but that's when you've got to put in the elbow grease and extra sweat and what it takes to get this done.
22:30What is this? What is it? Five people in the X-Track!
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