Bungie Delays Marathon as Team Focuses on Gameplay Updates and New Features - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 17 June 2025 / 4,733 Views
Bungie has announced the science-fiction player-versus-player extraction shooter, Marathon, has been delayed from September 23 with no new release date.
Marathon is in development for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.
Read the update on the game below:
Thank you not only for your passionate feedback around the Marathon reveal and Alpha playtest, but also for your patience while we took the time to listen closely and chart our next steps.
Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We've taken this to heart, and we know we need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion within our Dev team, we’ve made the decision to delay the September 23rd release.
The Alpha test created an opportunity for us to calibrate and focus the game on what will make it uniquely compelling—survival under pressure, mystery and lore around every corner, raid-like endgame challenges, and Bungie’s genre-defining FPS combat.
We’re using this time to empower the team to create the intense, high-stakes experience that a title like Marathon is built around. This means deepening the relationship between the developers and the game’s most important voices: our players.
Over the next few months, we’ll continue closed testing(including participants from the Alpha) to deploy gameplay updates and test new features as they come online.
Some of our immediate focus areas will be:
- Upping the Survival Game
- More challenging and engaging AI encounters
- More rewarding runs, with new types of loot and dynamic events
- Making combat more tense and strategic
- Doubling down on the Marathon Universe
- Increased visual fidelity
- More narrative and environmental storytelling to discover and interact with
- A darker tone that delivers on the themes of the original trilogy
- Adding more social experiences
- A better player experience for solo/duos
- Prox chat, so social stories can come to life
You’ll hear from us again later this Fall when we can share the progress we’ve made, alongside the game’s new release date. Thank you again for your patience and— much more importantly— your passion. Your continued feedback will help us make Marathon the incredible gaming experience we all know it can be.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Kill it.
Probably for the best.
A day after the investors interview. Timed so they don't need to address this during that.
Yeah, after playing the alpha, I knew there was 0% chance this game wasn't getting delayed. It felt like a game still in the middle of development rather than a game that was only a matter of months away from releasing.
I think the only way I would be interested in playing this is if they added a proper campaign and arena multiplayer. This would cause a serious delay, but ultimately sell a lot more copies. Or they can release a more polished version they have now and still have a reasonable high chance of failure.
Adding a campaign would mean they probably also have to team up with another Ps-studio. Maybe Guerilla could provide some assistance to that end. Bungie hasn't made a SP campaign for a very long time and might not have the personell best suited for that.
Guerilla would be a good fit to help. Bungie needs to do something to spice this game up because I think more of the same isn't going to cut it.
In my opinion all they have to do is make it like Destiny was at the beginning when your character actually had a story going on amongst the gaas stuff but unlike Destiny that failed to build on the characters story by never following through with the characters personal story, and instead abruptly leaving it by the wayside like it never happened and moving on every time it got interesting .
Now if Bungie keep the gaas stuff they know how to do but add a story around your character and importantly continue to thread the story through the game it should help the game without having to overcome the problems you outlined with Bungie building in a sp campaign.
Basically a modern version of the original trilogy lol. That's gonna be a massive "what could have been" for me after playing the original games last year.
I never played the original trilogy but I've heard good things. It comes off as a huge missed opportunity to not capitalize on what made the original games enjoyable and not build from it. Instead they went in a completely different direction.
Gameplay-wise, they were essentially "doom clones" but it was probably the first FPS game that emphasized the narrative. The narrative and lore of the games are S-tier even today. The big caveat being you had to read all of it through terminals, but it put together this very compelling story of a rogue AI and being at war with an alien race. Which Halo was inspired by down the road.
But the games had this eerie, almost creepy atmosphere to them that would've been amazing to see it modernized, along with the story and lore of that universe. Instead, we got this punk-style aesthetic and not entirely sure what kind of narrative can be interwoven through an Extraction Shooter lol
And of course, they had arena multiplayer!
I never played it. Did the game do anything different than other shooters??
Conceptually, it was a more inviting version of Escape from Tarkov. The genre of shooter Marathon is aiming for is called Extraction Shooters, and those kinds of games typically considered a "hardcore" that are not meant to be fun in the traditional way.
What Bungie has made up to this point adds a bit more fun to the genre, but it was still very half baked. Felt like a game still in the middle of development rather than a game that was only several months away from releasing.
I'm guessing fall 2026
How about getting rid of the fucking lootboxes?
Release it now to offset most of the development cost.
