Marathon is a live-service, pvp-focused extraction shooter from Bungie, the studio that created Halo and Destiny.
Of course, almost none of the original developers responsible for those hit games are working at Bungie today. They were completely overrun years ago by woke DEI activists. The staff pictures aren't hard to find. The company Twitter never misses an opportunity to signal their progressivist bonafides. There are trannies at every level of the company.
Not surprisingly, the game is flopping pretty hard relative to its budget, which is estimated to be multiple hundreds of millions. A lot of industry simps are claiming it's not that bad because Concord and Highguard were so much worse, but that's not how this shit works; just because your game has more than 500 players doesn't mean it's a success.
I digress. The point of this lengthy post is to identify a shift in strategy among woke devs. I think some of them have realized that overtly woke character designs and aesthetics are not going to fly in the AAA space anymore. Too many high profile ultra expensive failures. At the same time, tranny devs would rather die than submit to popular mainstream beauty standards. These freaks would rather walk into the sea than give the chuds even one good female protagonist.
So what's the tranny's solution to the free market problem? Queer-coded asexual art and character designs. If you can't make your game and characters purple and gay, then do the next best thing: make your game a garish, asexual neon nightmare. No one can accuse you of wokeness if your aesthetics aren't even human, right?
But here's the thing: live-service games rely on skins to generate profit, and seemingly very few people are interested in financially supporting these - again - queer-coded asexual designs. No one is cosplaying this garbage. Woke devs think they've found a plausibly deniable loophole, a strategy for rejecting human beauty norms without giving up the game, but it turns out this aesthetic still triggers people's lizard brains.
Just a theory. Hope this game continues to fail.
Edit: right on cue, an Overwatch developer has attacked gamers as "unemployed" for the sin of discussing Marathon's bad player numbers. Wonder if this dev is a tranny, too...
I never played the original trilogy, but a presume that art style morphed into Halo CE. If current Bungie wasn't hijacked, they'd apply the bright neon colors and shapes over an OG Halo base, and gameplay wise just make a single player game. Then, a Bungie-era Halo multiplayer suite, with a Reach level forge.
Nope. All these triple-A studios and publishers are copying venture capital math. 19 expensive failures to justify 1 big success. And that's the successful investment firms, a majority fail or will fail. 18 modest successes are not allowed, because c-suite blowhards care not for industry specifics, only chasing their cohort (upper middle-class finance types).
The original games are pretty colorful but don't have anything resembling the weird asexualized / antihuman aesthetic of the new Marathon.
I have to assume that all of the people who were glazing nuMarathon for the "artstyle" were botted, because there's nothing appealing to any normal person about playing a post-op transexual in a world that looks like a corrupt Adobe InDesign doc.
This is interesting in small doses. If I wanted a corpo dystopia without going the usual cyberpunk style, it fits. Would make a good level.
But it's just an assault on the retinas. Do I want to spend 30 mins with johhny silverhand infiltrating and destroying this corp? Yeah. Do I want to play it for hours upon hours? Absolutely fucking not.
I imagine that even of those who do appreciate it, a fair chunk of us appreciate it at a distance.