Bungie Has Delayed ‘Marathon’ Indefinitely
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Well I'll be damned, they actually found a way to avoid the same mistakes Concord made.
I'm not certain that delaying would necessarily have done much good for Concord either. Maybe they could avoid the game becoming an example of how not to design characters, but I think even then it would still last about a year at best before players dried up.
I did hear that somewhere on reddit that there is an ironic following that's trying to do a fan server for it, but I don't see much point without them doing severe reworks to everything.
Assuming "indefinitely" is short hand for cancelled.
Maybe, but we'll have to see what they actually do during the delay. Plus, the internet being the internet, even if they do improve things it's likely a lot of people will just write it off on full release since the initial reception was so poor.
There are too many fundamental design flaws in the game -- they have to rework the entire shader system to make the colours less intrusive during gameplay. It's hard to see things at a distance correctly, and the characters and environment blend too much.
They need to completely rework (or add) binaural voice comms, which will require work from the network team and the audio team (unless they half-arse it).
None of the characters are cool, and they will need to either add cool characters or rework the characters they have, which is months worth of work.
They also either need to add a proper single-player mode, because the world-building seems more story-based than what the extraction-shooter elements propose, and the extraction-shooter elements just aren't good for retention due to the shallow gameplay mechanics.
From the overhauls to testing, gameplay re-balancing, and QA, that's at least -- at least -- two years worth of work.
Even then, there's no guarantee people will even care enough to want to give it a second look, as you don't get a second chance at first impressions, and nothing during the first impressions looked impressive at all. So it's likely that even after a complete rework, the game could still end up being Concord 2.0.
Sounds like scrapping it would be a smarter plan.
It'll be a marathon to get the marathon.
I could totally see this game being a second Hyenas if things go badly enough, or this being the game that ultimately costs Bungie the ultimate toll.
A big question is how the failure of this game will lead to Sony thinking through their live service game plans. Will they just scrap it entirely?
Alriiiight let's fucking gooooooooooooo.
And by go I mean away - from whatever the fuck thought that was a good idea.
fuggin' oof.
Lmao
Concord 2