Bungie says marathon development is ‘on schedule’, shares new screenshots

Destiny maker Bungie is working on Marathon, a PvP extraction shooter announced in 2023. The studio has now provided an update on the game, saying its development was “on schedule.” However, Bungie didn’t reveal any Marathon gameplay, instead choosing to share concept art images of the shooter and provide sparse details about its development.

Marathon developer update

In a developer update video Posted to YouTube on Monday, Marathon game director Joe Ziegler broke Bungie’s silence on the sci-fi extraction shooter. In the video, Ziegler shared a development update on the game, saying that Bungie wasn’t quite ready to show gameplay yet. But the game director said several aspects of development were “on track.”

“Over the last few years we’ve made a lot of aggressive changes to the game, and we’ve done quite a bit of iteration. And during that time we tested with a lot of players,” Ziegler said.

“Where the game is now, there are different things at different stages of the game. Some things are a little more complete, like our environments are starting to come together in a very, very beautiful way. We’ve gone through some of the character models, so they’re coming together, but they’re not quite there yet. Our enemy models are early stage capabilities,” he added.

The developer said that while it was still a bit early to show gameplay to players, development on “all of these things is on track.”

“They’re not all together. But when they all come together, we’re really looking forward to showing you what that looks like, especially during play,” Ziegler said.

New concept art

In the Developer Update video, Bungie also shared some new concept art images from Marathon. The first screenshot was of a “Runner” from the game, codenamed “Thief,” while the second was of a different character, codenamed “Stealth,” a Runner with a focus on stealth gameplay.

Bungie said it would reveal more of the game’s content in 2025, which is when they plan to expand the Marathon playtests as well. “We want to add a significant number of players to each of our milestones in the future,” said Ziegler.

The Destiny developer hadn’t provided an update on Marathon in 17 months since it was revealed with a teaser trailer on PlayStation Showcase in May 2023. Before Monday’s updates, the Marathon X handle’s last post was on May 27, 2023, when the game was first released. announced. “Now we’re going dark to focus on the game… and when we come back – we’ll have gameplay to show!” the post had said.

In August, Bungie announced it would lay off 220 employees and make structural changes to the studio and its operations as part of cost-cutting measures. Studio CEO Pete Parsons claimed at the time that the company needed to make “substantial changes” to its cost structure and “focus development efforts squarely on Destiny and Marathon.”

Marathon doesn’t have a release date yet, but the game can be wishlisted on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox stores.