I miss the glory days of Destiny

It is somewhat comical because marathon is a decent game. The writing was on the wall however when it came to the audience it would attract, and it certainly is not attracting [i]most[/i] Destiny players. It's not attracting halo players, it's not attracting even Ark or Tarkov players, at least in amounts that would indicate it. I'm afraid that Marathon's greatest strength of being the most enjoyable extraction shooter i have played is also its greatest weakness: It's an extraction shooter - that's all it is, and that's likely all it ever will be. If you do not want to play an extraction shooter and an extraction shooter only, you're not playing Marathon. I think that something not touched on is since the game emphasizes PVP as in literally rewarding you for killing players (and I don't just mean XP) coupled with how a gunfight between teams inevitably plays out, I think it would not be a stretch to say that there is a subsect of Destiny players that it may be attracting - the Trials players. If i were to be extremely reductionist, marathon is essentially just trials matches if they were one round over and over. Since this is reductionist I am obviously ignoring nuance of the game, but what I am attempting to illustrate is that alongside Trials comes the twitch streamers, and just like parts of destiny, this game is much better when you have a pre-made team coordinating after almost every action done than it is matchmaking or running solo, and this is excluding how the contracts work. I said it much before Marathon was out that the game will bleed its casual audience once they realize what the gameplay loop is like. They are only going to tolerate being reamed over and over for so long. We're already seeing that each day, but I do think longevity wise it will not be a Concord 3 situation, it will just die very slowly. "Expanding" your audience is just as dangerous as limiting it - you'll either end up with a watered-down experience or a niche one respectively. Halo Infinite tried the former, and Marathon the latter - even if I personally think it wasn't entirely intentional, it's just the reality of the market. Spoiler part is all speculation, not important [spoiler]If I were to put on my aging and rusting Spinfoil hat, I would go as far as to say Marathon is a beta test for things they wish to attempt in Destiny 3 - as portions of Reach I speculate were for Destiny 1, the amror abilites being the most obvious, like jetpack feeling strangely similar to titan lift, SPRINT..., evade, but also things like bloom on hip fire for precision weapons (first occurrence in halo) or the general progression of "your" spartan, and how that translates to "your" guardian. In a hypothetical Destiny 3 situation I see a few things that would indicate something like this for Marathon. The first of which being networking wise, since to my knowledge Marathon is running fully dedicated servers, unlike Destiny's hybrid peer to peer with a dedicated server for the API and items. Secondly, animations and chip mods, some of which are straight up ripped from destiny.[/spoiler]

Now you know how the rest of us felt when Destiny came out.

If you think you're ready, we can probably find a spot for you in DC.