Betting on Bungie

There are no video games in history I’ve sunk more playtime into than Destiny and Destiny 2. It started in mid-2014 with Destiny’s First Look Alpha, which instantly hooked me, through the public beta and the official release, as well as all of D1’s DLC, including its peak with The Taken King.

Destiny was the first game I played that had the perfect mixture of everything that drew me to gaming in the first place… mystery, story, complexity, tight mechanics and, of course, finding and collecting gear and items. It felt like magic—every few weeks someone would find something new, or the community would band together to solve a mystery.

I fondly remember my first raid experience—finding a group of strangers on Reddit who were willing to pull me into their fireteam and teach me how to beat Crota’s End¹ . I had no idea just how thrilling and complex raids could be, and hell, Crota’s End was one of the simplest. I became obsessed with running Vault of Glass every week, with friends or random players. We all held our breath every time someone opened raid chest, waiting to see if they got the mythical Gjallarhorn² .

Leading up to the public release of Destiny 2, the hype was huge. I even traveled up to Seattle for PAX West just so I could stand in line for an hour to play a few minutes of the game I had already played at home during an open beta. I purchased some tchotchkes, admired weapon replicas, and gabbed with other excited guardians (in Destiny’s universe, players are called guardians).

There have been incredible highs and awful lows. I’ve used it as a social background, chatting with friends while doing bounties, and as a team-building challenge to complete day-one raid races.

It’s not unfair to say the past few years of Destiny 2 have been a mess. After wrapping up the Light and Dark Saga—Bungie’s 10-year over-arching story from D1 through D2—with the excellent The Final Shape DLC, Destiny 2 immediately landed in a strange place. Many players felt closure for the first time in a decade; the story was complete and it was a nice soft landing to walk away from the game. Bungie switched from a “seasonal” model to an “episodes” model. Their claim was this switch would go from four smaller content releases per year to two bigger releases instead. In practice, episodes felt like seasons, but with less content. The game began to flounder, player counts dropped, and over the past two years since The Final Shape completed the main story, D2 has slipped quite a bit from that high point.

One of the primary pain points for most players, myself included, was the introduction of The Portal, a soulless, big menu of content to choose from with customization options and a “repeatable” design. This basically removed the entire feel of the universe from the game and suddenly players were just loading the same five-minute mission over and over to grind gear and levels. It was dreadfully boring.

It was also an idea Bungie themselves backed away from many years ago after they realized it would remove the soul from the franchise. And boy were they right. They’ve admitted this was a mistake and that The Portal doesn’t meet the needs or desires of the players, but who knows how long it will take to extricate it from the game (or how much permanent sentiment damage has already been done).

I have spent hundreds of hours in Destiny 2 post-The-Final-Shape and it has just never felt the same. I’ve enjoyed the day-in-day-out social aspect of the game (there are people I’ve been playing with for years at this point), but the game itself just felt empty and boring.

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While Bungie was chipping away at Destiny for over ten years, new genres in the video game space got immensely popular. The battle royale, first popularized by games like Pubg and then skyrocketed into mainstream culture by Fortnite’s version, was never touched by Bungie even in loose terms. Hero shooters were a close proxy to Destiny’s multiplayer, to some degree, but they exploded in popularity and ended up with large character rosters compared to Destiny’s three classes. And, in recent years, the rising popularity of extraction shooters.

In 2016, two years after Destiny 1 was released, Massive Entertainment released The Division. While The Division was also a looter-shooter, its systems were much more stat-driven than Destiny’s. If Destiny’s loot flow was a trickle, The Division gave players a waterfall. And, on top of the story campaign, it contained a novel concept for multiplayer called The Dark Zone. In the DZ, players would fight enemies and bosses, but could also “go rogue” and kill other players, stealing their loot. But to take that loot out into the rest of the game, you had to successfully extract it. The DZ was punishing for most casual players, but hardcore PvP fans seemed to really enjoy it. Eventually, Massive introduced a game mode called Survival, which tasks Agents with dropping into a blizzard with no gear, and asked them to scavenge, craft and shoot their way to extract within a certain amount of time. While Survival mode would award loot even upon death, its primary success metric was extracting successfully. It was (and still is!) enormously popular.

These days, most people would likely name Escape from Tarkov if they were asked about extraction shooters, but EFT is in its own league with how punishing and hardcore it is. Those who have played Tarkov either became obsessed or bounced off hard. It’s part of the reason people think extraction shooters are a niche genre not for anyone but the most insane, masochistic gamers. As someone who has spent a hundred or so hours in Escape from Tarkov before finally giving up, I understand why it seems insane for Bungie to build a game like this.

There are other games that have their own cult following and popularity, like Hunt: Showdown and, to a lesser degree, Call of Duty’s DMZ mode. You didn’t have to be hardcore to understand the loop, to enjoy the big risk/big reward suspense and tension.

I was one of the people who found the genre exciting. Was I good at it? No, not really. But I enjoyed the loop even if I needed to occasionally take a break from the punishment. I played The Division’s Survival mode hundreds of times, and I think I successfully extracted only twice. But I kept coming back for more. I tried Escape from Tarkov and enjoyed it somewhat, but it was too focused on military realism and punishing “realism” with its weapons and systems, something I personally do not enjoy. Call of Duty’s DMZ mode was interesting, but CoD’s gameplay style is better suited to fast-action multiplayer or battle royale modes, in my opinion.

And then, back in October of 2025, ARC Raiders was released. I had been excitedly looking forward to the game’s wide release because it looked like exactly what I wanted: an extraction shooter with lore, fantasy elements, and a unique look and feel, balanced for a wide audience and supported by a studio which had recently shipped a surprise hit in The Finals. ARC Raiders took off. It’s a fantastic game. The launch was far bigger than people expected, and the response seemed overwhelmingly positive from all types of gamers. People coming from Tarkov, who initially laughed off ARC Raiders as a silly game for casuals, found themselves enjoying it. Lobbies filled up. Some were cutthroat and high-tension murder-fests, some were care bear solo lobbies where everyone ran together to kill the ARC.

Suddenly, Bungie’s idea to release a non-F2P extraction shooter didn’t seem as much of a long-shot. Is it different than the MMORPG-esque looter-shooter Destiny 2? Certainly. But is that bad? Not from my perspective. The genre is nascent, but isn’t that an opportunity? If Bungie is going to invest years and millions of dollars in a new franchise title, I’d like to hope they have some pretty good ideas for how to make this new game, in this young genre, worth playing.

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I never played the original Marathon game—I didn’t own a Mac in 1994. For me, that era of gaming was the Super Nintendo and games like Super Metroid, NBA Jam and Donkey Kong Country. So when Bungie announced their first new game in over 12 years was a revival of the Marathon brand, I didn’t have any personal connection or excitement by default. Given the state of Destiny, I was excited for just about anything Bungie would do to become a multi-game studio. But the lore of Marathon, the story or characters—they were all unfamiliar to me.

Turns out, Bungie went deep on lore here. The factions each tell their own story of the world of Tau Ceti IV, with cinematics and terrific voice acting. Why did the colony ship UESC Marathon lose contact? Where are the colonists? These are mysteries we’ll have to discover together. There’s an overwhelming amount of detail in every corridor, room and expanse. Tau Ceti feels like a living place, crawling with UESC kill bots, bugs and other hazards. There are quests, secrets, puzzles and lore to tease out and solve.

The core loop of an extraction shooter is to build your loadout, deploy, scavenge and fight, extract with your gear. If you die, you lose it all. That loop is fast in Marathon. Time to kill is extremely low. If a player gets the drop on you, your reaction must be immediate or you’re dead. The UESC are punishing, with player-like AI and an obsession with killing runners. They hunt you down and don’t stop damaging you when you’re down. At times, UESC will overrun you in tight corridors, diving in for melee attacks, going invis and flanking you, putting up shields and throwing grenades. Noise is a key gameplay element. Gunshots, footsteps and even looting add tension and give away your position to robots and hostile runners alike. Most runs, by the time I manage to extract, my hands are sweaty and my heart is racing as my runner’s consciousness is beamed to the cloud.

It helps that Marathon is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. The sheer vibe of the overall aesthetic is so exactly my thing, you could hook this game up to my vein and just pump it in. The vibrant colors, the simplicity of shapes, the mixture of organic and synthetic, and the graphic design is just a ten out of ten. Every single environment, every weather effect, every explosion is gorgeous. I spent half of the Server Slam playtest taking screenshots, and they don’t even do this game justice.

I could fill this post with countless screenshots, but it would be better to see it for yourself. Watch the spectacular Reveal Cinematic short film, the Launch Cinematic Music Video, or The Loop for a quick hit to see what the gameplay looks like in motion.

Bungie delivered some of the best hours of my video-gaming life with Destiny and Destiny 2. While I’m immensely saddened by the current state of D2, I have hope for the future. I know Bungie is capable of building amazing games, with amazing worlds. I love their art, their music, their feel. I trust them, for better and for worse. And so I’m betting on Bungie. I’m betting on Marathon. I hope it is a huge success. I hope it enables Bungie to keep pushing forward, to build that highly-desired Destiny 3. To grow Marathon, learn from their successes and failures.

It’s time to ready up. Choose a shell, establish the neural link, ready up. Be careful out there.

I’ll look for you on Tau Ceti, runner.