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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.
00:21The world didn't feel lived in.
00:26Tau City 4 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.
01:11Do you want something?
01:12No, no, no, no, no.
01:13Sorry.
01:14The Marathon ship is essentially a ship that we sent out from Earth.
01:17An Earth that was overpopulated to explore and colonize a star
01:19of the world.
01:20The Marathon ship is essentially a ship that we sent out from Earth.
01:24An Earth that was overpopulated to explore and colonize a star far away that we call Tau Ceti.
01:35In a lot of ways, it's like the tale of humanity trying to go out into the dark void of space.
01:41Find a place to colonize and failing terribly at it.
01:57Everyone's gone.
01:58Something catastrophic happened.
01:59And it's not just their absence that's important.
02:03It's the things that they left behind.
02:05The modern race to Tau Ceti all started when a mysterious signal came through the galaxy.
02:12The turmoil that sort of ensues gives rise to all these corporations
02:16that were invested in this Marathon project now going, what happened?
02:21How do we recoup our investment?
02:23And then layered on top of that is the greed and corruption
02:27of all of the different factions and corporations and revolutionary groups.
02:33In our version of the world, we send people out, not just to discover what happened,
02:37but also to collect from the things that remain there.
02:40And 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
03:02that 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
03:09to scavenge it for anything that might be of value.
03:12As a runner, you've left your body behind.
03:14You've traveled light years so that you can have access to the ultimate payday.
03:20With extraction shooters, it is all about survival.
03:23There are other people who want the same things that you want,
03:26and it's up to you to vest them.
03:29But 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?
03:44And then there's the loud bombastic action moments where the minute something is alerted,
04:00the minute you're in that fight, now it's go time.
04:03Players particularly pose a lot of danger to you.
04:09They can make a lot of decisions that you might find illogical
04:12and completely trick you into scenarios.
04:17Sometimes the best loot box is another player that you see a longer run.
04:21So there's a few different ways you can play the game.
04:23So one of them is you can play in crew, both with your friends and also through crew fill,
04:28which will just match you with two other players.
04:30You can play solo, and you'll jump into a game with a bunch of other solo players.
04:34In 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,
04:42but, you know, you are playing a tense alliance game
04:45where it's really up to them whether or not they decide to honor or respect that alliance you might have created.
04:53It's all about figuring out what's your investment, what's your stake,
04:55when to get in, when to get 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 the 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 dangerous.
05:23Our 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, you know, responsive to light,
05:45a little bit more responsive to the player, things will part, water will pool.
05:48Layering all these different things, the world becomes much more alive.
05:53It feels like a real place.
05:55And then when you're feeling like a real place and you feel in danger,
06:00now your run matters.
06:07I look back at some of the alpha shots and it's kind of hard to tell when it's sunny or when it's rainy.
06:12Weather feels like weather now.
06:14But like when it's sunny, you get this really nice like bleaching effect.
06:17It feels bright. It feels like warm when it's sunny now.
06:22I 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.
06:28We also have like decay on the runners themselves.
06:31Like you'll actually see them fall apart.
06:34We'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.
06:44You know that their killer is probably close and you are not safe.
06:48If everybody is just a messy goop, you're probably okay.
06:56Audio is a huge gameplay component in Marathon.
06:58Every sound plays a function.
07:00Liftups tell players everything.
07:16It's telling you what is the type of threat that's around you.
07:18Where are they at?
07:19Are they above you?
07:20Are they far away?
07:21Are they close by?
07:22So if I'm in bio research and I hear a particular material type, I know, hey, they're on the second 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 intent of this place.
07:44There 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 before.
07:53The job was how can I make what I'm seeing this race to survival even more nervous and even more terrifying or even more thrilling.
08:03We have four zones and each one of those zones has its own sort of approach to kind of level design and what it asked players to kind of think about and do.
08:22You're going to start with perimeter.
08:24You're 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.
08:31But it's also a little more straightforward.
08:33It really brings the sense of scale.
08:35It sits like in our fantasy as expansion site for the colony on the very edges of where they had settled on Tau Ceti.
08:42UESC are also there trying to understand what has happened and secure the area.
08:48Death is a part of Marathon.
08:50It happens a lot even on perimeter, which we talked about as a more friendly zone to new runners.
08:57You are still going to die a lot.
09:01Attention, unauthorized runner.
09:06You are trespassing in a military security zone.
09:14It 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.
09:24They 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 remote AI?
09:36The elite tier is sort of like this dark blue.
09:40The mini boss tier is more of like a lilac.
09:43The boss 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.
09:51You are getting into marsh.
09:57You are starting to understand something bad happened here.
10:00And you are seeing signs of that in a way that wasn't apparent on Perimeter.
10:03On Dire Marsh, we've got the anomaly.
10:06And 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
10:23that 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.
10:30And you're going to need somewhere to farm.
10:33Each map has different weather systems.
10:35It has different dynamic events that can happen.
10:37And 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 PBE activities.
10:47Each of our zones has these bigger events that don't happen every session.
10:52But when they do happen, you'll know they're happening.
10:55Building these types of events into the world shake up your run and make you decide, like, what do you want to risk?
11:04Then you get to Outpost.
11:09An Outpost is a more functional, thriving UESC facility.
11:16There's scan drones flying overhead.
11:19The 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.
11:26Outpost is a smaller map, but it's also a lot more vertical.
11:29It's built around a specific building that we call the pinwheel.
11:32This is just this meat grinder of a structure that's like a corkscrewed building that has nooks and crannies and hallways.
11:39And it just becomes a real, you know, real cluster when you're in there fighting.
11:51The floor is raised on Outpost and nothing is free.
11:54The pinwheel hosts some of the best loot opportunities.
12:06But it's noisy, players are going to know you're doing it, so there's extra risks.
12:18The character you're going to spend the most time with is the zone.
12:22Understanding each personality of every zone.
12:26That's the storytelling every player gets.
12:28Every time you're on the planet, you can look up and see the ship floating and looming in the skybox.
12:34Reminding you of why this place even exists.
12:37But also reminding you that something up happened here.
12:40And you've got to figure out what it was.
12:48Marathon has a lot of loot in it.
12:49It's a huge pie.
12:50There's a ton of different implants at every rarity.
12:52There's a ton of different runner cores for each runner.
12:55There'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
13:06what are the pieces that I have available to me?
13:08How do I get them?
13:09And how do I put them together into something that's awesome?
13:11You 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.
13:35Visually, they're all really, really distinct and clearly Marathon.
13:39But we wanted animation-wise a majority of them to feel recognizable.
13:43So when you put them in your hands, you knew how to use them.
13:46Mods will basically allow you to increase certain stats on the guns.
13:50That battery SMG.
13:51The gold mod, full-blown, turns it into the Needless.
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.
14:13And then when I kill something with this gun, I turn invisible.
14:16And then that lends it to other build crafting if I want to sort of stack into how invisible can I be.
14:32Even some weapon mods can improve stats and your runner shells capabilities.
14:37So there's lots of different ways to raise the floor of your stats so that you're coming into each run strong.
14:46Runnershells are a bioprinted body that you inhabit when you go down to Tau Ceti to scavenge the ruins of the Lost Colony.
15:08Each of our launch shells is really an archetype of gameplay.
15:11So if you want to play like a frontline tank, if you want to play a rat character that wants to sneak around, if you want to find those rats, we have a shell for you.
15:26The idea there is like, have a broad spectrum that everyone can kind of find a little bit of a home to, and 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.
16:00And these can be used in combination with each other to shift the gameplay style of your runner kit.
16:07At 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.
16:19It'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.
16:38This 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.
17:07Each 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.
17:23So they might ask you to go and find specific weapons or mods.
17:28Congratulations, 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.
17:50Mida is all about destruction.
17:53They are going to give you grenades, they're going to give you claymores, they're going to let you blow the place up.
17:58And they are irreverent and dangerous.
18:02They might ask you to upload this malware into a UESC dropship.
18:08And as it leaves, it explodes and careens off into the distance.
18:13We are big plans. Exclusive. Visionary.
18:17Each of our factions has an upgrade tree that you unlock progressively as you gain reputation with them.
18:23And 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.
18:33You're getting gold items.
18:34In addition, these faction upgrades can increase your runner's base stats.
18:38And those base stat upgrades are permanent for the rest of the season.
18:48Access denied.
18:49Darius, you know me. Did you miss your last round of maintenance?
18:52Don't search. Don't dig. Don't question.
18:55Darius?
18:56Access denied.
18:57Hey, it's okay. It's just me.
19:00We're not alone.
19:04The Codex is a suite of achievements, collectibles, audio logs, things that you're finding in Run
19:10that we're going to track for you over time.
19:15The more you find these items, the more story you're unlocking about them and what their role is in the world,
19:20why 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.
19:46So it's everything from your first steps on the world of Tales 34 all the way through to becoming a vidmaster
19:52and taking on the most extreme challenges.
19:55The marathon ship is the hardest place to survive in this game.
20:07And if you're not ready to take your best stuff, you're not going to survive.
20:11It's like a heist for a runner.
20:18Cryo Archive is big in and of itself, but it's also cold. It's also hostile.
20:28It's going to test every aspect of the survival game.
20:31Probably going to be forced to run into players in ways you haven't been on other maps.
20:38You're going to run into basically every type of environmental threat you have faced before.
20:43You'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.
20:52It's really cool because each of the vaults is more successively challenging than the next.
21:02And that seventh vault is where you both are going to get the coolest thing,
21:05but 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,
21:16or if they're actually there to keep something else in.
21:22I think the thing that I'm most excited about for Marathon is getting into the hands of our players.
21:38The biggest thing I want people to take away from Marathon is that it still feels amazing.
21:44It still feels like it has that spark.
21:46It takes all the aspects that I think Bungie is really good at.
21:50First-person feel and gunplay.
21:53The super deep, crazy sci-fi lore.
21:56And it mixes up all those things together in a really amazing PvP package.
22:01It really comes down to every single discipline that's working on the game.
22:05The animation has to be good. The sound has to be good.
22:07Everything has to be working in harmony.
22:09That's when the controller fades away, the screen fades away.
22:12You're just immersed in the world.
22:14That is what we're trying to live up to with Marathon.
22:20It is a mad dash. I'm not going to front about that.
22:22It's a mad dash to finish, but that's when you've got to put in the elbow grease and get your sweat and blood it takes to get this done.
22:31Dude, what is this? What is it? Five people in the X-Track!
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