meds are way too expensive early on for sure
lol funny timing too; I have just dumped about $6k in cash and more in vault stuff trying to do a single run contract in solo Dire Marsh. And it is an easy one. Doing free kits for a while now.
The current state of dire marsh is really bad. First there are a bunch of quests that make you run all over the place and intersection/algae labs are chokes that control cross map movement. Then the only reason for late game, coordinated, highly geared teams to be on the map is lockdown or warden events. The risk for those is getting jumped while you’re fighting heavy pve, so the meta is to get control of the roof of algae labs with snipers with thermals and eliminate everyone you see.
Lockdown doesn’t even spawn for up to ten minutes, and you can easily hear people fighting the warden with plenty of time to get there before they finish it. That means the best players in the lobby have nothing to do for the first 10-15 minutes except try to hunt down all the schmucks trying to complete quests. At least outpost the quests don’t make you control pinwheel, taking on the most sweaty teams is optional.
The last time I succeeded at a dire marsh quest that involved algae labs, my team won an encounter in intersection and eliminated a team, putting us off to a great start! Then we tried to approach algae labs and a teammate got insta downed and finished by a team sitting on the roof with three snipers team shooting approachers. We spent ten+ minutes sitting in a building in intersection watching the roof to see if they’d leave, then decided to activate the guarded exfil nearby as bait hoping they’d try to finish us off and let us loop around behind. They didn’t come running but maybe they figured we actually left because we were re finally able to get our 3rd back up and start the contract with like 8 minutes left. That was a highly successful run, and we sat in place pinned by snipers for like 13 minutes!
The gameplay is awesome and the game is addicting but I’m thinking about setting it down. With a combination of how hard progressing is compared to the upcoming wipe timing, how many parts of the game it’s becoming apparent don’t respect my time (I’ve never even seen a marathon key and I’m 60 hours in), and seriously wondering how long the game with disappointing sales runway will be I’m thinking maybe I play other games instead. I don’t think Bungie is getting rescued financially by micro transactions because the store doesn’t have anything I or anyone I talk to feels must have, and there’s no break glass in case of emergency bikini skin options I can see.
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Yeah Sony won’t bail this out for sure and Bungie needs a win both with this and Sony. I am willing to cut them slack in terms of balancing- the game inly recently launched and has already had QoL fixes, etc. But yeah they cannot pull a Destiny and rest on their laurels here.
Dire Marsh - if I don’t spawn i near my contract, I just do Plan B on that run - loot and scoot. It’s not a map you’re gonna live to see the other side of more than half the time.
You are also totally right about the monetization. I am a bungie superfan and even I wouldn’t consider Premium right now, much less microtransactions. And I say that having dumped a ton in to Destiny 2 Silver for cosmetics. There just isn’t enough compelling reason to do so in Marathon… yet.
I am confident they will, if they have time. Again they can’t rest on their laurels here.
To be honest I kind of look forward to the wipe. Even Perimeter now has sweatlords running around in blue shields and shotguns, and with a free kit you are just kind of toast in that situation.
All in all though I think it is natural that some warts are showing a few weeks in. It’s a brand new game. Bungie just needs to fix them. I am still loving the game surprisingly much.
So, I have this ROG Ally that I play PC games on, right? It’s one of these deals:
And I have it docked and hooked up to a mouse, keyboard, and big ole monitor. Anyway, it has a “turbo mode” that I’ve never used because I didn’t have a strong enough power supply. I finally broke down and bought an Anker Macbook charger that pushes 100 watts, and that got me there. It’s allowing me to revisit some games that I have tried in the past but didn’t quite have the performance for, so I have dipped my toes back into Starfield.
I’m enjoying Starfield well enough. It’s not the “Skyrim in space” that I was hoping for, but I think the criticisms against it are a bit overwrought. It’s fun so far. SOme of the systems are a bit too big for it’s britches, and it doesn’t explain mechanics well to the player, but I think I’ll be able to latch on. I’m still in the tutorial stages though, so we’ll see.
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It’s actually a really good game marred by a terrible launch and early (patched) flaws, and which had a really great idea for replayability that Bethesda then totally dropped the ball on and let die.
If you can install mods, there is apparently an utterly amazing Star Wars total conversion for it.
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This is spot on. Most of my runs end in failure but I still keep going back.
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Really looking forward to Saros. Returnal is one of my favourite games and this looks like more of the same but better.
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Video game ost vinyl? The music is great, but again I don’t really feel any pull to spend money here.
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It’s entirely electronic music so vinyl is a weird call as well
I’ve thought about this for a minute, and after the wipe it will be the same thing after a day or less. You only need level 10 to get outpost and you can open pinwheel with free kits easily enough. That’s definitely less than 10 hours of focused game time and they’ll stock up on blue shields and meta cores and weapons to wipe the other maps. Unless cryo isn’t open immediately they’ll hit the level requirement there after a day or three and blast through lobbies trying to run here and there for quests.
I don’t know what the solution is but there’s no tradeoff currently for trying to wipe the lobby instead of doing quests or events and that’s a problem.
I think they need to have high quality loot drop rates increase over the first 2 months of the split to max or similar so that not a massive dropoff for deciding to do something other than rush pinwheel then cryo on reset though.
Oh and nerf triage hard. He’s in the three best combat shells for trios and the econ advantage of running one or two is insane. Triple heal drone CD or make his ult only revive knocks not full finishes or both or something.
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It’s definitely going to be interesting times after the wipe. I actually wonder how many people they’ll lose.
I went to the lose everything ship and lost everything 4 more times. I think I’m setting it aside until/unless my apex buddies buy it and we run trios, and maybe not even then. I’m leaning towards it getting put on the pile of games that I don’t play because they don’t respect my time.
I absolutely got my $40 out of it though!
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This is what I thought when the Finals was released. So we always ran as a full premade, and we always were matched against randos that were already decked out with full cosmetics (just an indicator for how much time they already had in the game) who wiped the floor with us.
Matchmaking with premades against randos always is a problem, they have to account for that and give the premade a penalty, for us, this always was too steep.
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Man solo queue is a vastly different vibe than matchmade. I kinda love that.
This is my last marathon post because I don’t want to fill this thread with negativity, but Bungie/Sony created an incredible game with intriguing lore and great guns and aesthetics. They obviously don’t have anyone who understands how to make a pvp micro transaction based game work though, and I think the game is doomed because of that. I don’t think you can really have a successful live service pvp game without being free to play, with all of the predatory and negative monetizing baggage that brings is a starting point.
There are so many ways that the game pushes me away from playing from economy to limited stock in the store to cryo only being open on weekends to the minimum buy in for cryo making it a part time job to get the gear and learn the map. You could have cryo load you into a room locked for 30 seconds full of weapons and consumables so you can put together their free kit and try to run the raid when your vault is looking empty. They don’t seem to have sbmm, but most of the friction in progression is from PVP, that obviously makes quest design impossible to work for most players.
There’s so much good stuff in this game but I think it’s in the death spiral with no new content likely to be developed and that’s a huge bummer.
Anyhow the game reminded me 3v3 squad pvp is a lot of fun (when there’s sbmm) so I think I’m reinstalling apex. I’m sure that’s what Sony was hoping for developing this game right?
All valid concerns and yeah I just burned a whole day progressing for minor gains. Got a total of one rep level for two factions. The Cryo free kit is nice though, I grabbed it for Dire Marsh, and while I burned a day, I did have a lot of fun doing it 
The monetization aspect is interesting. So far I am not even remotely tempted, and I have dumped a ton of money into Destiny 2 microtransations. But with Destiny there’s also the many different progression paths, and in particular, PvP and PvE are separate, and the PvPvE aspect of D2 (Gambit) is its least popular. To be fair though, that’s mostly due to it being kind of halfassed content-wise.
SBMM - Bungie has been bad at this in D2. Historically, some players always wanted it while some players did not. I always have, no desire to spawn in with noobs vs sweaties.
I do think it’s too early to call a death spiral, we will see what they can do. First obvious thing would to fix the economy. Next would be to get us off just the colony maps and up onto the Marathon for additional internal maps - and then tone down the spawns for the colony, throwing that many people in to Dire Marsh is insane. I saw Dire Marsh described as “Straight up Vietnam” and yeah the tension from Vietnam war movies is a spot on take.
Given that the game has been out for under a month, some initial learnings are natural. They still have time.
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I played Rainbow Six Siege for years on PC and Console, but rarely with a full team. Loved it to the point of following the esport scene, which I’ve never done with any other game.
But recently, man it’s been rough. I’ve been playing cross-play with some friends on ps5 while I and another are on pc and it’s gotten rare to have a game that felt legit. Just people snapping to heads and tracing through walls. An old friend said “this isn’t fun anymore.” About Siege but also about the state of modern gaming.
So the last week we’ve been rotating old CoD Zombies and Sniper Elite 4. I really like the strategic depth of something like Siege (I’m a Castle main, remodel the map sorta guy - for those that know) but it’s been nice to just chill a bit.
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