Fuck, I promised myself I wouldn’t say anything else about this, but this is too juicy fruit not to bite.
There was this official tl;dr about Marathon upcoming development. And I find it profoundly aggressive to the quietness of my brain, not to address:
1- start with a false premise
2- build on top of the false premise
3- blame the gods
4- reinforce the false premise
Bungie represents the true nature of evil.
More prosaically:
1- No, you didn’t.
2- Only if the money supports it. This isn’t under your control, therefore useless to say (noise, not information).
3- The “pain points” aren’t in the performance, they are in the original design. You are either blind, or decided not to see.
4- “we’re adding more fun”, see point 2.
Reiterating:
“building systems to make progression more interesting” = “more interesting” = nothing.
“adding new fun content” = nothing.
You either have things to say, offer information, or you don’t. “We’re making the game more fun” is not information, it’s just illustrating baseless wishes and desires. You aren’t a cult, you aren’t a church. You aren’t propaganda. SAY SOMETHING REAL, PLEASE.
I utterly despise people who promise something they have no control on, just to be patronizing and pandering. “Don’t worry, it will be alright” is the true message of the Devil, but at least the Devil would have some control on what it promises.
If you promise something, to me, that you have no direct control on, then you obtain the very opposite result because my brain light up: ALARM! ALAAAAAARM! This person is trying to deceive you!
The last point, point 5, is where it counts. But it depends on execution.
As I wrote, yes, you need the whole range of the experience. But they shouldn’t overlap. You need to work on the HINGES (hinges = progression) of the game. PvE maps need be separate. (but you don’t know any of this)
So we already know the outcome: this merging of PvE with PvP, the way they intend it, will dilute the PvP experience.
Therefore the game will only get blander, if broader in scope. Some new players in, but still bad retention.
The core design here, about the hinges of the game, and so its progression: PvE and PvP should minimally overlap, to work. They need to be structured adjacent to each other. ADJACENT, not overlapping!
If you add PvE modes to PvP content, you DILUTE it, not make it better.
It’s even philosophical:
if your ideas overlap, you have a contradiction = you’re wrong
if your ideas are adjacent, then it means you have a coherent, possibly more complete description of your own reality
P.S.
Later in that article there’s a “WHAT WE’VE LEARNED” section, “Where do we start? Developing a new game is always a challenge, and creating a live game in 2026 is no simple effort. There are millions of moving parts to a game, especially a player-driven and systems-dense game such as Marathon.”
No, I’m sorry. This is a load of bullshit. Either you already knew all those things, and so there was nothing to learn other than a deliberate choice, or you’re plainly incompetent.
Don’t like this “know-it-all” arrogant attitude of mine? It doesn’t matter, there are out there plenty of random youtube videos that I remember I’ve watched, both in the original reveal a year ago, to the last beta a few months ago. They all more or less covered and criticized the same design points, that are the same ones addressed in this article and flagged as “lessons learned.”
(the fact much of that space is used to explain the tricky act of balancing queues: offering more options without diluting players across and therefore increase queue times, is precisely the tangible sign of the contradiction I highlighted above. You can’t overlap PvE and PvP, you’re diluting them, exactly as you’re already seen in these “experiments” but worse, because the more you embrace this the more you AMPLIFY this. See my original idea on how to solve this design knot. If PvE and PvP content are SEPARATE, and PvE progression precedes PvP progression with a tiny overlap, then you reduce, close to zero, the “sloshing” of PvP players DOWN to PvE modes, to farm. Because PvE progression doesn’t bring any PvP progression, therefore it’s useless for established PvP players to farm PvE. There’s no reward or practical use. You preserve the PvP pool exactly as it is, while GETTING NEW PLAYERS into the PvE, that in a further phase will grow the PvP pool. Without a true contamination and without dilution. But if you can’t learn from the lessons of the past, you certainly cannot anticipate the lessons that will come from the future)
You either have eyes to see, or you don’t. I don’t even truly think you are THAT incompetent. I simply believe that Marathon, just like Destiny, is a game conceived from elitism.
Now you die by your own poison.
P.P.S.
This needs emphasis. This is literally the soul of game design and one of the main lessons. I’ve written often how game design is split between art and rationality. The side of rationality can be solved. You learn from it same as you learn another discipline.
In this case, in your own words, you’re witnessing precisely the problem without having it into focus, as it should. You’re obsessively tweaking those matchmaking queues because you’re stuck in the problem. In the contradiction. Rather than SOLVING that knot, you keep nudging it back and forth without a satisfying solution. Because the tweaking is, clearly, not the solution. The contradiction, the knot, the tension between contradicting goals is precisely what you should expect to obtain, given the unsolved nature of the problem.
Throughout the season we added more queues which inevitably split the population more and led to some increased queue times.
were focused on making sure players with less experience and knowledge were being kept away from those with more. This resulted in some good, which is newer players being protected for longer, and some bad, which is some unfortunate small pooling happening in the later parts of the season. The result was a constant battle we fought between match quality and queue times.
The more you go into this, the more the contradiction comes out. Your goal isn’t to scatter players across an even larger surface. Your goal is to host more players. Grow the number of players, or the game is dead. Your efforts shouldn’t be about moving your current players, but moving IN new players along those who already left. They need a new piece of game that is built for them, as you simply neglected all of this (see the cause: deliberate elitism). If your idea for a solution is break down already existing pieces of the game, to make them more accessible, then the result is that you directly dilute them. IT IS SIMPLY THE LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE. Precisely as you have ALREADY observed and will CERTAINLY observe in your “upcoming experiments.”
In science you don’t test everything. You can’t. You go test precisely the breaking points where you can maximize what you learn from. Obvious lessons you don’t need to test, to learn.
PvE maps and modes need be SEPARATE (from PvP).
PvE progression need to be at the very bottom of PvP progression. Adjacent, not overlapping, not replacing.
If built this way, PvP players would have no purpose other than deliberate choice, to “slosh” back to PvE modes (and diluting their presence in PvP queues) because they are already past this progression, therefore the practical progression goal is not there
PvE modes would be there to attract PvE players, WHO DON’T CURRENTLY PLAY THE GAME. It’s not there to attract PvP players, hence again diluting them across several modes.
UNDERSTAND THE SHAPE OF THE GAME. UNDERSTAND PROGRESSION SYSTEMS. DO NOT CROSS THE STREAMS, DO NOT GENERATE MORE CONTRADICTIONS THAN THOSE ALREADY PLAGUING THIS WORLD.