Marathon’s Gameplay Reveal Needs More Than Cute Alien Cats To Win Over Players

Bungie is set to finally reveal more details about Marathon, an upcoming shooter that could compete with its own Destiny 2. Marathon’s existence was announced in 2023, but outside of a cinematic trailer, next to nothing about the game itself has been shown to the public. Now, after Bungie fans have solved a complex alternate reality game, the developer is set to show off how the game actually plays in early April.

Putting its 2023 announcement aside, our real first look at Marathon will come on Saturday, April 12. At 1PM Eastern, Bungie will host a livestream on its Twitch and YouTube channels to share development updates, and more importantly for prospective players, show off some actual gameplay.

Bungie led up to the new announcement with a series of cryptic puzzles and mysterious social media posts to build hype while teasing that something big was coming. Then, late on April 6, Bungie dropped a trailer announcing the date of the livestream while still concealing any explicit reveal of what Marathon will entail. The trailer shows a view from a security camera that’s been toppled over while the sounds of sci-fi laser guns echo in the distance. After one combatant is apparently killed, the trailer ends with some sort of pink alien kitty cat curling up by their side as a light erupts into the sky in the distance — presumably a ship taking off after extracting whatever its pilots were fighting over.

Bungie frankly has a lot to prove with Marathon. The game is a reboot of a first-person shooter Bungie originally released in 1994, which is in some ways a precursor to Destiny, though they’re not canonically related. But where the original Marathon is a primarily single player, story-based shooter, the reboot is a multiplayer extraction shooter that pits teams against each other in player-versus-player matches. Destiny certainly has plenty of PvP in it, but abandoning the idea of a narrative campaign for disconnected multiplayer battles could be a disappointment for players who are also attached to the series’ story.

Marathon’s development cycle has also seen enough trouble to make fans worry. The game’s original director was fired after an investigation of misconduct alleged by multiple women working at Bungie during his time there. The developer also laid off 220 workers, or 17 percent of the workforce, in 2024, while moving 155 more people into parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment. Destiny 2 has also been in a rough spot recently, with the Lightfall expansion meeting with widespread criticism before The Final Shape somewhat redeemed the game’s reputation. The game is far from its peak of popularity, and even Bungie fans may be weary of Marathon at the moment.

Marathon is also likely facing an uphill battle due to how much players and the games industry as a whole have turned on live-service shooters since Bungie’s initial announcement. That turn away from the entire live-service model was most dramatically illustrated by the PlayStation 5 exclusive Concord launching and almost immediately being shut down in 2024, but it’s led to countless other cancelled and failed projects along the way.

Despite all the doom and gloom, it’s still worth tuning in to Bungie’s Marathon reveal stream when it airs on Saturday, at least for fans of the studio. Bungie has already shown that it can make a wildly engaging multiplayer shooter in a tough environment, and even with its ups and downs, Destiny 2 remains one of the most successful live-service games around. Marathon might not be quite what fans of the original game were expecting, but its gameplay reveal on April 12 could finally show us whether the change in direction is a winning move.