Marathon

is fun

its fun

Great and Awful at the same time. Core mechanics and gameplay are very well done, with all the polish you would expect from a AAA dev. It was initially very fun, but quickly became unpleasant to play. The game has no tutorial, but it does need one. Conditions of extraction can be complex and often without any explicit instructions. This can become a liability for your team and people will have little pateience with you. Marathon suffers massively from a core design imbalance. Gun and armor rewards powerfully affect your likelihood of winning. The game rewards winning with more guns and armor, and punishes losing by taking them away. This doesn't sound unfair (afterall, you signed up for a hardcore extraction shooter) until you realize that the game reinforces a wealth gap between better and worse players. This is not ARC, it is closer to apex legends with PVE elements; this makes the wealth gap extremely punishing for casual players. Casual players became fodder for hardcore players as the season progressed, and Marathon lost most of its playerbase to demoralization. The skill floor continued to creep upwards until all that was left were hardcore players. The community has become toxic with little patience for anything but the most skilled or kitted players. The toxicity of the community is reinforced by the high stakes of the game and the imbalance of lost materials between casual and hardcore players. i.e. Casual players lose nothing when they fail to extract, while hardcore players lose some of their best items. Over time, casual players became a liability to a team of better players, and their presence is often resented. The continuuing problem is that the balance mechanics remain regardless of the skill level of the playerbase; as casual players leave someone still has to lose, most players still get relegated to being fodder, and players continue to leave due to demoralization. Even if you're very good, your presence is eventually resented as you begin to lose more frequently and show up with worse gear as the skill floor continues to rise. This could probably be fixed by a little bit of rubberbanding and reducing the rarity of high level items, but the devs seem to have gone in the opposite direction.