Bungie has been working on a new game for some time, and the company finally teased it during Sony’s latest PlayStation Showcase. It turns out it’s a spiritual successor to the company’s Marathon trilogy of ‘90s PC shooters in the form of a multiplayer extraction shooter coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC with cross-play.
“Marathon will find players engaging one another as cybernetic mercenaries known as Runners, exploring a lost colony on the planet of Tau Ceti IV in search of riches, fame, and infamy,” the studio writes on the PlayStation Blog. The developers say it’s not a direct sequel to the original games but will have plenty of nods to that universe.
There’s no single-player campaign though, and the world will be structured around “evolving zones” where players fight over loot before their teams can extract them. To the degree there’s a narrative, it sounds like it will be based on players’ actions and discoveries, similar to the meta-narrative in Destiny 2 when completed raids and community quests unlock new content and areas.
For the last nine years, Bungie’s been known as the Destiny studio, continually pumping out sequels, expansions, and new seasons for its sci-fi MMO. That was great for fans of the sprawling space opera and its endless loot chase, but it also separated one of the best gaming studios around from players unwilling to commit to Destiny like it was a second job.
Prior to Destiny, Bungie spent several years as part of Microsoft making Halo, another beloved sci-fi shooter that helped put Xbox on the map. Its service to the tech giant ended with Halo: Reach, the fifth game in the series, and it’s been singularly focused on one game ever since, until today.
Sony purchased Bungie for $3.6 billion last year and has stated that the studio’s live-service experience will be central to helping PlayStation Studios create a bunch of new online multiplayer games in the coming years. While Bungie remains an independent publishing operation within Sony, it’s clear the studio is core to the company’s ambition to release more games-as-a-service moving forward.
But this doesn’t mean Destiny 2 is likely to be sunset anytime soon. Bungie has long shut down rumors of a sequel in the near future and has been signaling that the game will remain a platform for new updates even after 2024’s expansion. Called The Final Shape and first teased years ago, The Final Shape is expected to wrap up Destiny 2‘s current narrative arc and set up its next one. After all, there are plenty more solar systems left in the galaxy to explore, and there will always be more loot to chase.
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