I gotta talk about Marathon (and games nowadays)

I knooow I sorta talked crazy about Bungie by using them as an example of a team that sold out in my other blog post (a lot of which I still do agree with, becoming triple-A and signing with corporations like Microsoft, Activision, or Sony is bound to tie a rope to somewhere for a team that will directly reflect the quality and creativity of their games), but I have to say that despite all of that, I was quite excited about Marathon. You can easily say I've had an insane addiction to Marathon content this past month.

Coming up to its launch, I was watching every bit of footage from either the Alpha or the Server Slam, watching the lore videos at 2x speed just to not be out of the loop when people uncover more story, overall just diving straight in.

The horror when I realized I couldn't play it on my laptop with Linux on it!! Being fair, Bungie has always been hostile towards Linux users even with their previous game Destiny 2, saying they would outright ban them. But with how easy it has become in recent years to play pretty much any steam game on Linux distros, even multiplayer games with anti-cheat, you could call me foolishly hopeful.

Normally I'm not a big multiplayer-only games guy. Chances are, the gameplay of Marathon would probably not have been my cup of tea. Extraction shooters have always seemed a bit too daunting to me, it took me a while to get over multiplayer-anxiety even growing up lol, and to put so much on the line for each encounter feels like lining up at a stress-and-anxiety booth. But the art style really drew me in, and coming from a studio that I've basically enjoyed every game I played from, it was difficult not to get myself excited (If only it was a single-player story game T_T)

So what? Right?

Thing is, for a while I've felt that there hasn't been a game for me. And I understand the absurdity of that, games aren't easy to make, and I'm not saying that the folks at Bungie didn't do a wonderful job making the game, the game amazes me all the time with it's attention to detail in its art and sound design. But I can't help but think if not for the already existing genre that has proven itself successful, thanks to Escape From Tarkov and Arc Raiders, this game would certainly play differently.

I'm basically saying money influenced the creative direction of this game, and that fact is what keeps bothering me like a subliminal message whenever I try to get more into it.

If you're not about the gameplay at all and are a fan of the original Marathon games from the 90s wanting to play this new entry in the series, you'll need to sit through hours of play after you may get maybe 30 seconds of dialogue from a character that really doesn't push anything forward in the way that a story enthusiast would like. It's a problem I had with Destiny 2's story telling as well. A story told through NPCs that stand in a designated spot existing in what is practically menu-hell with a few lines of voice acted dialogue (rest being just multi-paragraph rambling of semi-relevant information), treating the player as a distinct character despite every player seeing the same story and hearing the same lines, is something I just don't find engaging at all.

I know I'm not the only one with this sentiment. Be it the gameplay, or the story, I've felt that studios and mega-corporations regularly compromise on some level that is not fully satisfying to a player like myself. Not just that, games are treated like products, despite many people that would consider games to be a form of art. But if it is art, then why do dev teams get layoffs and switch core members of their teams, advertise with "studio that brought you XYZ" despite none of the original employees that worked on those projects actually still working for the studio today, and kill games if they don't bring a profit? Bungie is no stranger to this either, having had their share of layoffs against some of the most talented and experienced designers and writers in their teams (shortly after an acquisition of all things). I personally think this is one of the core problems to me with the current games industry.

Art is made by artists. Games today are made by replaceable employees. There's a reason that when a music band loses a few members, you can expect that they will disband shortly after (exceptions exist of course, just a general statement). Art is personal. Teams are formed based on what each member contributes to the vision of the projects and the other members therein. This is why people say that the soul is in the indie space. To tie it back to what I had mentioned in the previous blog post, it really does seem to me that putting profit into the equation when talking about creative elements like visuals, writing, music, and gameplay experience will water down those elements. You can want a project to be successful, but when you mess with the elements of a project to become more popular with an audience, I think something is lost.

(a little bit of pixel art :)

Holy yap amirite! Thank you for reading all my rambling!! Let me know what you think!!!