Changing Tunes

It feels as though the wind behind Marathon’s sails have shifted a bit this weekend, and while many might immediately jump to point out the obvious resurgence of Destiny 2’s player count, that’s not exactly what I’m talking about, though I’d be remiss to not entertain the idea that these two things are intrinsically intertwined.

Over the past weekend I’ve seen the tune change, a handful of once staunch and dedicated players have revised their original sentiments to suggest that the game was never good, that they’d been lying to themselves, caught up in the hype, or any number and combination of reasons that they simply do not enjoy the game anymore. While it’s one thing to fall out of love with anything, it’s another thing to attempt to retroactively change your prior opinion on it. While this isn’t particularly widespread, it is a bit of an “I’d only have two quarters, but it’s weird that it happened twice” type of situation.

Far be it from me to specifically indict people on something as reasonable changing their opinions, I’d never be that arrogant or hypocritical, opinions can and should change. Marathon’s Season 2 has been nothing if not divisive, not necessarily for the best reasons. From the opening weeks’ loot economy debacle to the general sense of the game’s first “major” update being lackluster, it’s all felt off. In short, there are reasons for sentiments to have shifted, coupled with Destiny 2’s EoS update effectively crippling Marathon’s Season 2 launch window, Bungie’s reboot is averaging historic lows, but I do not personally believe it’s solely due to a lack of quality, there’s something much more existentially interesting going on that plays into the hand of modern day, social-media fueled passion campaigns that have had an increasing ability to debase things worthy of praise, and champion things that are better off left to natural selection.

It is certainly not up to me to be the sole arbiter of whether something “deserves” to live or not, public consensus will do as she pleases in the house she built, but I will reserve my right to analyze the goings on.

But first, in keeping with that analogy, some much needed house keeping.

I am not a Marathon account, creator, or authority figure, despite the fact that I can and will be labelled as such by many of the people I interact with on a daily basis, my account shifted to its current hyperfixation in March, prior to that it was about two years of admittedly deranged ranting about socio-political and economic issues, much of which I still prioritize talking about when screens are put away. I am no more interested in Marathon than I was in Bloodborne when it released 11 (fuck me) years ago, or Splinter Cell during my earlier adolescent years. 

I find it important to make this clear so that people get it out of their head that I’m intrinsically tied to this game’s survival, being paid to talk about it, or that I’m bullshitting for clout. I happen to really like this game, and whether it unceremoniously goes offline tomorrow or survives until the heat death of the universe, it will not change how much I’ve enjoyed it. At the very least, I will remember the emotional weight of its announcement trailer and the people it introduced me to for years to come.

With that out of the way, we should get back to what I’m actually getting at today; the statements that are being walked back.

This morning I came across a tweet that conveyed the sentiment that there was some sort of mass gaslighting involved in getting people to think Marathon was good, and that outside of the game’s endgame experience, Cryo Archive, that it plainly “sucked”. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this sentiment, but it is the first time I’ve seen it from someone with nearly 1000 hours in the game. The idea that there was some sort of mass gaslighting campaign is nothing more than a self admission of being influenceable, and a readiness to buy into hype wherever it may come from.

Outside of that, I’ve also seen a much larger number of players who would rather vocalize what doesn’t work than what does. Moreover, I’ve also seen a strange attempt to position the title as something its not in favor of putting it down to push a separate agenda, to clarify, a fairly popular tweet suggesting that Marathon’s primary competition in the gaming space is Destiny, that’s as much of a stretch as suggesting that Cyberpunk and Mouse P.I. For Hire are competitors simply because they’re both first person narrative games. The purpose of that comparison is obvious, though, to emphasize to nobody but Sony Interactive Entertainment that Bungie’s financial priority should lie with the Destiny franchise. It’s also an attempt to farm reactions in an attempt to amplify one’s own opinions. As someone with a few “bigger tweets” under my belt, I am all too familiar with what resonates on twitter dot com. I don’t want to get into that, though. So far all of this has been a needlessly long thesis.

I wonder what makes people retcon their own opinions, what makes people come to the conclusion that they hate something they’ve spent 1000 intimate hours with, or what drives them to claim that something is in a particularly weak state but come back to it daily, religiously. Alternatively, what makes them publicly lambast things they love in private, primordial human condition shit, I suppose; the need to belong. Yes, this is dramatic, so very, very dramatic.

During the last week of Season 1 I went on vacation, which naturally disconnected me for an extended period of time for the first time since launch. By the time I’d gotten back Season 2 was just starting, and every week has seemed a bit less communal. Players have segmented into groups that do not intersect anymore even for one off games, the same 9 people rotate the same 3 trio squads, any given discord of 150+ members has about 15 active users, and while social media is rife with well received fan art, it’s consistently underscored by “I wish this game didn’t look so cool”; a plague that’s followed Marathon since its inception.

On the other side of the coin, you’ll find 400,000 people ready to claim that they’ve spent every day of the last 2 years playing Destiny 2, when the statistics are public knowledge; one of y’all is lying, and I’m not exactly sure why.

In the case of Marathon I imagine there’s a certain subset of the playerbase getting ready to escape the house before it may or may not burn down, in the case of Destiny 2 I imagine there’s a subset of players that will not admit that their two years of indifference towards the title makes them at least partially culpable for its EoS.

You’ll hear the counter arguments, though, “I never left”, “it’s not my fault the game sucked for two years”, “life got in the way”, etc. Those arguments are not invalid, quite the contrary, but it does not make the consequence any less precedented. Players stopped returning to a game that was expensive to maintain, not all of them, but too many of them. 

This happens a lot, players that shit on Advanced Warfare and now have rose tinted lenses about Exo Suits in Call of Duty, I remember the audible eye-rolling when it was announced that Black Ops 3 would be futuristic, and when it was announced that Infinite Warfare would follow in that path. Nowadays you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t want an Advanced Warfare remake or sequel.

This constant desire to project opinions one perceives as being agreeable is damaging, that people’s less popular interests can’t have their own validity until they become more societally acceptable positions is destructive.

When I was in middle school I had a couple friends of mine who very vocally liked superheroes and a whole other assortment of then-dorky hobbies; we were not-so-endearingly nicknamed the “dinosaur squad” by the “popular kids” (I’m shuddering just thinking about it). A decade later everyone has seen their fair share of marvel movies, everyone likes dinosaurs, everyone has childhood memories of watching Yu-Gi-Oh on Toonami.

In a decade or so, when Marathon is remembered as more of a cult classic, you will similarly find people who reminisce about a game they didn’t play, just as today you’ll find far too many people say they stuck through Plunder. The math will never add up. Far too many people who said they played every Destiny 2 season who have yet to post their commemorative emblems, far too many people who have memories of fighting Gehrman, far too many people who wax poetic about Call of Duty: Ghosts’ Extinction mode, far too many people who played the original Marathon trilogy but would give you a thousand yard stare if you said “Aleph One” in public.

Marathon 2026 is, undoubtedly, caught in this crossfire. It is quite possibly one of the last times we will ever see this happen at such a massive scale before the industry fucking implodes.

I imagine in 15 years if we’re not fighting each other for the last can of soup in an abandoned supermarket, we’re all going to see far too many people like a tweet that says “Remember Marathon?”

Enjoy the things you enjoy, there’s no need to lie about it, it will be gone one day.