“You will die… die a lot” – Marathon will be much more hardcore than many people think, believes shooter expert Kevin.
As an extraction shooter, Marathon is currently often compared to Arc Raiders. On the one hand, this is obvious because Arc Raiders was the first to make this previously niche genre truly mainstream.
On the other hand, it’s also misleading because Marathon tends to be much more uncompromising in its PvP approach than the accessible, casual, and sometimes extremely co-op-heavy Arc Raiders.
If you take a closer look at the marketing for Marathon, it quickly becomes clear who Bungie is actually trying to appeal to with the new shooter: Marathon is going to be tough and sweaty, and we’re going to die. Often. Really, really often.
Leisurely open-world exploration is not on the agenda here.
Love how like 80% of this games marketing is “you’re gonna fucking die” https://t.co/ZK45I1DjGo
— Jotunn💾 (@Jotunn_art) February 4, 2026
“Death isn’t fair, and neither is this video,” says a recent clip about Marathon on X (formerly Twitter). One user comments: “I love how ‘you’re going to die’ is basically 80 percent of the marketing for this game.” Marathon reposted the comment. And he’s not wrong: in the officially curated teaser clips from the playtests, the developers don’t shy away from demonstrating the potential frustration of Marathon.
“I’m down. No, oh man, what a load of crap,” echoes through the voice chat. In official promotional material for a multiplayer shooter, this is an absolute rarity. Bungie shows how things really are, unvarnished. Painstakingly collected loot is lost in a fraction of a second.
One user expresses their concerns on X, writing: “I can’t imagine anything worse than PvP ruining my beautiful raid.” Marathon dryly counters: “Then just kill all the enemy runners first.” The message is clear: Git gud.
Marathon is not a shooter you can sit back and relax with. And that’s especially true in Ranked mode: According to a recent leak, players must purchase a so-called Holotag in order to play Ranked at all, and they must also have a certain minimum amount of gear. After that, the goal is to collect as much valuable loot as possible.
This leads to one of three outcomes:
- Loot target achieved and escaped alive: Rank increase
- Loot target missed and escaped alive: Rank unchanged
- Did not escape the round alive: Rank decrease
Holotags come in different rarity levels, can be looted from enemies, and count toward the loot target. In summary: Just surviving (which is hard enough in the extraction genre) is not enough here – if you want to move up, you have to invest a lot, fight, win, and grab the rarest items.
One map in the game will be the eponymous Marathon spaceship. And that’s where things get really tough: “It’s the hardest place to survive in the whole game. All the dangers are concentrated in one place, along with the most brutal UESC units. You’ll need the best gear, otherwise you won’t last long there,“ say the developers, almost threateningly.
And then they even add: ”But even on the beginner map Perimeter, you’ll die… a lot.” So it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Marathon will be geared towards the competitive scene and tough PvP matches – AI opponents or not.
This clearly sets Marathon apart from Arc Raiders, but it could also scare off casual players. We’ll see if it pays off when it’s released on March 5.
