Joe Ziegler, the game’s director, shared some concept art from the game and talked about the reboot of their 30-year-old IP in a 10-minute video.

According to Ziegler, it’s too early to show any gameplay, but two characters (runners) were revealed: “We’re not going to show any gameplay footage today, but we’re going to show a little bit of a glimpse of some of the stuff we’ve been working on. Marathon is our take on what is essentially an extraction shooter. It’s a game that’s not for everyone, but if you’re interested in having some sort of intense survival experience and having a game where the stakes are really high and you feel like you’re being challenged to survive in a really, really, really harsh and interesting world, then Marathon is right up your alley. We give you a lot of different tools to do a lot of different things in the game. There’s tons of loot that you can find, there’s weapons. There’s equipment that you can equip that changes your stats or gives you, sort of tweaks some of the things that you can do in the game. There are utility consumables that are sort of like items that you can use within the world like things like mines or like grenades. There’s also consumables that help you sort of heal yourself and give you utility in that sort of way.

But beyond that, there’s this other layer that we like to call our runners, which is sort of the template that you equip all this stuff to. So each runner has a little subset of abilities, and then you can customize them however you want, depending on what you want to accomplish in the game. There’s a lot of different ways that running can unfold in our game with all these different pieces. There’s also a lot of different types of objectives and things like that that exist within the game. But of course every single one of them comes with its own risk. And there’s always the risk that if you don’t get out alive, you’re going to lose the things that you’re carrying.

Marathon is one of Bungie’s classic IPs. I think the first game came out in 1994. But what we’re doing with this world is we’re taking a lot of the familiar elements, especially a lot of the things around the mystery and the kind of creepiness and the, how do I put it, like the psychological kind of creepiness of the whole IP as it exists before. But we’re layering on some elements that we think will really help modernize it and also bring it into a new story that we can sort of tell and a new world that we can sort of continue to update and delight you all with over time. Where are we right now in terms of making this game? For the last couple of years we’ve been making a lot of aggressive changes to the game and we’ve been iterating pretty heavily and during that time we’ve been testing with a lot of players, a lot of players like you, also with developers. And so it’s kind of insanely awesome. And I’m filled with gratitude when I think about it because there are so many people who have just contributed by telling us “hey, this thing sucks” or “this thing is great” in ways that have really helped us diagnose, analyze, shape, and change the game in great ways.

There are a lot of different things at different stages in the game. Some things are a little more complete, like our environments are starting to come together in a really, really nice way. Some of the character models we’ve iterated through. So they’re coming together, but they’re not quite there yet. Our enemy models are still a little bit in the early stages. So we’re still iterating through them and getting those things to land in a strong way and some of the items are still kind of coming online.

One of the runners is codenamed Thief, which might give you an idea of how it plays in the game. If you notice the character kind of creepily peeking around the corner in this kind of quiet moment before she makes her move. That is kind of the theme of that character in a lot of ways and should give you an idea of what kind of gameplay that character is going to be coming from. There’s a lot of funny stories that come out of it, but also very, very crazy moments that this character brings to the game. This runner, codenamed Stealth, is obviously a stealthy type of runner and they’re sort of in that space where what we talked about with deception as a runner, as a runner utility trait, they really embody that and they’re really hard to pin down. And you can see that they have the tools to stalk the battlefield and show up in a way that allows them to kind of take advantage.

We’re looking to add a significant amount of players to each of our milestones as we go forward, and some of these big turns are opportunities for all of you to join us. Our goal is to ultimately make a game that you all feel like is worth your time and, because time is so precious, worth your time and really, really find the fun and find that storytelling space where you can create the memories that you want to create,” Ziegler said.

So the studio is optimistic, but we recently wrote about Bungie who had their creative department squeezed out by Sony. So who knows what will happen to the team in the future…

Source: Gematsu