Bungie has claimed that it has a narrative plan for its extraction shooter, Marathon, that stretches years into the future.
Marathon launched for consoles and PC in March and is estimated to have sold around 1.2 million copies in its opening weeks, and potentially over 2 million to date.
Bungie has already broadly committed to the game’s future, but in a new interview with Games Radar, its creative director, Julia Nardin, has claimed that its development team has already planned out the framework for a years-long story.
“We know where we want to take the story over the next few years, but I don’t want to say it’s completely ‘locked in’ because it’s important to us that our players be able to help shape it,” he said, adding that putting player input into the narrative is “part of the magic of playing a live service game.”
According to Nardin, the backstory of what happened to Tau Ceti is “locked,” and Bungie plans to add more clues to the planet’s backstory as the game keeps “evolving in ways that are informed by its past and a future that excites our players.”
The director also emphasized the importance of new players being able to easily jump into the shooter, a problem Destiny suffered from, as it frequently ‘vaulted’ older game content, making the experience confusing for new players.
“It’s also important that players can jump into Marathon at any time,” he said. “They’ll always be able to uncover the mysteries of Tau Ceti’s past while experiencing its present. We want every season to be a new entry point, and for new players to be able to understand what’s going on regardless of how long we’ve all been running.”
Bungie says it’s aiming to release a steady stream of smaller updates for Marathon, instead of infrequent large ones, saying: “Our plan is to get improvements out as soon as we can, rather than wait to drop them all at the same time (even though this might make them less obvious).
