Bungie's Marathon Adding Popular Destiny 2 Feature

Summary

A recent Bungie job listing hints at seasonal in-game events for the upcoming Marathon revival.
Bungie's current live-service game, Destiny 2, already follows the limited-time event model to improve player retention and replayability.
New details about Marathon may be inbound in the coming months, possibly even pre-orders for a late 2025 launch.

A newly-discovered job listing indicates that Bungie's upcoming Marathon revival will feature seasonal in-game events. Bungie already follows this limited-time model with its current live-service juggernaut, Destiny 2, and it seems quite likely that the studio's next game will keep up the tradition as well.

Announced during the May 2023 PlayStation Showcase, Marathon is a revival of Bungie's 1994 first-person shooter series of the same name. However, this new iteration of Marathon is a significant departure from the original thanks to its live-service extraction shooter trappings. Marathon players will take on the role of cybernetic mercenaries dubbed "Runners" and explore a lost planet where 30,000 people have mysteriously vanished. Since Marathon's reveal nearly two years ago, Bungie has been very tight-lipped about the game, with only leaks and job postings occasionally providing glimpses into what it could offer.

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By Viraaj Bhatnagar

The Game Post recently spotted a Bungie job listing seeking a Staff Events Systems Designer who can help the studio build "compelling seasonal events" for Marathon. Furthermore, the limited-time Marathon events must "seamlessly blend with tactical gameplay, world-building, and a dynamic live-service model." These small nuggets of information strongly hint at the possibility of holiday-themed activities or narrative-driven updates in Marathon, which very much falls in line with how Bungie has handled Destiny 2's content pipeline so far.

Marathon's Player Retention Methods May Take a Page Out of the Destiny 2 Playbook

For instance, Bungie supports Destiny 2 with seasonal events like the Halloween-themed Festival of the Lost, which features haunted missions and expectedly crops up during the fall. In the spring, Destiny 2 players can participate in Guardian Games, where all three Guardian classes compete for supremacy. Seasonal events aren't exactly exclusive to Destiny 2, with other live-service games like Forza Horizon 5 also following the same practice. For Marathon, though, it does signal that Bungie is sticking to its tried-and-tested formulae for replayability and player retention instead of attempting to reinvent the live-service wheel.

Thankfully, it seems Bungie fans soon won't have to scrounge up job postings to gather Marathon information, as the studio is gearing up to release more details about the game in the coming months. Additionally, some recent leaks also suggest that Bungie may commence pre-orders for Marathon sometime soon, fueling speculation about a 2025 launch for the live-service extraction shooter. Only time will tell what Bungie has in store for those looking forward to Marathon, but at least it doesn't seem to be very long until they get their answers.

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