Marathon
It was not exactly the biggest secret in the world, but it’s now clear where an enormous chunk of Destiny’s PvP-based team went after leaving the game. That would be over to Marathon, the just-revealed extraction shooter that Bungie and Sony have high, live-service hopes for.
But now that Marathon has been revealed as Bungie’s primary PvP focus, what happens to Destiny 2 PvP from here?
PvP has struggled badly in Destiny in recent years, not just in terms of metas, but mainly in terms of what kind of resources were devoted to it. It went years with zero new maps, now we’re on the slow pace of maybe one fully new map a year, and if we’re lucky, the return of 1-2 that were vaulted, and maybe one from Destiny 1.
Lobby balancing is all over the place for events like Iron Banner. Trials has done backflips to try to get player engagement up. A new ladder system has had decidedly mixed results. But despite all the problems, it’s important to not overlook the fact that PvP is an enormous part of Destiny 2, even after all this time. On any given day, depending on what’s happening, PvP can be 30-40% of the entire population with hundreds of thousands of players. Despite Bungie’s decline in support, it’s still putting up numbers most games would be envious of.
But it’s hard not to think once Marathon is fully launched, it will need even more devs to sustain it, to keep producing content for it, balance it, etc. We’ve already seen more devs leave Destiny for Marathon. Years after much of the PvP team left, we’re seeing more recent departures like Senior Design Lead Kevin Yanes, responsible in part for brilliant Destiny additions like Strand, now going to work on a new game. That game, surprise, was revealed to be Marathon.
Shaxx
In a perfect world, Bungie would keep expanding in size in order to support both Marathon and bolster Destiny 2, specifically the PvP side. We have indeed seen this happen in PvE, with seasons far larger than they’ve been with the possible exception of when Activision had two full support studios helping them. Even PvP has gotten a little bit better, as there were at least two years there where it quite literally had almost zero additions, and instead had maps taken away by sunsetting (notice in all this we are not talking about Gambit at all, which was created by some of the same people who left for Marathon like Lars Bakken).
The dream is that Bungie has multiple, healthy games where one will not come at the cost of the other. But I think we have already seen Marathon pull away enormous talent from Bungie in many areas. Granted, the game is still producing good stuff, but that is mostly on the PvE side and PvP, though perhaps somewhat improved from a few years ago, feels like it needs far, far more support than it has, and there is concern it may actually get less when Marathon arrives. A mode with this many dedicated players still logging on after all these years deservers better. I hope Bungie can bolster this side of the game, and at the very least, make a new commitment to it after The Final Shape serves as some level of reset.
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