Marathon ARG Unlocks New Content
- Marathon uses an ARG to help unlock the new Cryo Archive map and hidden lore.
- Its bold “Graphic Realism” style – drawing on Mirror’s Edge and Aeon Flux – has impressed some players but raised UI concerns.
- Rival extraction shooter ARC Raiders remains its closest competitor in the PvPvE space.
Marathon, the new PvPvE shooter from Bungie, released on March 5 on all major platforms and has its work cut out for it to stand out from the rest of the live shooter crowd. One way it’s doing this is via an ARG (alternate reality game), which tasks players with deciphering in-game clues to unlock content related to the “Cryo Archive,” which is a new map. Previous unlocks include hidden cinematics and lore, plus the video snippet below.
Marathon is an extraction shooter where players take on the role of a “Runner,” a cybernetic shell with various skills, to scavenge an abandoned colony built on Tau Ceti, a planet near a sun very similar to our own. Other than rival Runners, players also face UESC security forces and unpredictable environments. There are also copious references to Bungie’s original trilogy of Marathon games released in 1994, as Game Director Christopher Barrett explained in an interview in May 2023.
“We have a tremendous amount of respect for the original Marathon games and, from the very start, we’ve wanted to honor that, especially the mythology, story, and themes of the world. At the same time, our vision for this game is something new. It’s not a direct sequel to the originals, but something that certainly belongs in the same universe and that feels like a Bungie game.”
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Art Theft and Aesthetic Value
Marathon has grabbed eyeballs as much for its acid graphics-adjacent aesthetic as for being Bungie’s first new game in a decade. Although there was some controversy last May around artwork used in-game being stolen from artist Fern “4nt1r34l” Hook (aka Antireal), Bungie has since credited her as a Visual Design Consultant.
Bungie’s Senior Art Director, Joseph Cross (who left Bungie in December 2025, although in a move unrelated to the Antireal controversy) called the overall look “Graphic Realism” in an X post, and noted that “A lot of you have already identified many of our visual influences, Mirrors Edge, Aeon Flux, Ghost in the Shell, Otomo, Koji Morimoto, The Designers Republic, Chris Cunningham, are all definitely in our ‘stew’ of inspiration.”
While the game’s look has garnered praise, all gamers aren’t taken with it. After players got their first hands-on with a Server Slam last month, the internet was flooded with complaints about clunky UI and confusing visual design. As one Reddit user put it: “
Having to put the cursor over two items that visually are exactly the same just for a pop up to show that they are different is diabolical.”
Bungie confirmed after the Server Slam that it would continue to tweak the UI, as well as gameplay and features, such as creating more opportunities for PvP and fixing voice-chat lag.
ARG Raiders
Marathon’s closest competitor is Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders, which also operates on a retail, rather than free-to-play, basis (both games cost $40). It’s also an extraction shooter with an emphasis on PvPvE combat, a retro-futuristic vibe, and a focus on its community. It’s also managed to keep hold of a decent number of gamers on PC, a platform notorious for hemorrhaging live service players; ARC Raiders most recently hit its highest peak of 197,336 players on PC, with Marathon currently averaging around 62,800 players at peak times.
ARC Raiders has weathered its own controversy, too: most notably its use of AI for voices, which led to a two-star review. The majority of gamers were angrier at the review than the use of AI, but even so, Embark Studios’ CEO (and now also Nexon’s executive chairman) Patrick Söderlund, recently revealed that a lot of the AI content has since been replaced.
“We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices,” he said in an interview with GameIndustry.biz. “There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is. We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines without recording them, and then we know what to record. It’s also a way for us to work, not replace actors. We don’t necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.”
Where Marathon has potentially got the jump on ARC Raiders though is in its current ARG promotion. Not to be confused with an augmented reality game (like Pokémon GO), an alternate reality game is focused on in-game content, with Marathon players already completing six of a supposed seven step process to unlock the Cryo Archive map. This is the first floor of the UESC spaceship (the titular “Marathon”) that’s hovering over the planet, and is part of what Bungie has called in a news post “end game” content to close the game’s first Season.
Many gamers understand that this was always going to be released by Marathon, but hopefully deciphering ARG clues has caused it to be unlocked sooner (it’s currently shown in-game as a “Redacted” map). This also ties into initial comments by Game Director Christopher Barrett, who said “Our design philosophy here is to have players affect the story of the world through their choices and their actions. This approach also lets us shape the overall narrative direction of the game experience while giving players a direct sense of agency and power.”
“Beyond just the ‘story of your last run’ however, we want to give players the chance to affect these persistent zones and the larger world as a result,” he added. “For example, imagine a crew discovering a previously undiscovered artifact that, when activated, opens a new area of the map for all players to explore. In essence, we’re creating a game where the actions of players can have ramifications for the world and players with each unfolding season.”
Bungie has promised that players will start to see their impact on Tau Ceti with Season 2: Nightfall, which launches in June and runs until August. This will include a nighttime version of the Dire Marsh zone, a new Runner, and of course more weapons, mods, cores, contracts, and game features like the Cradle, which will give players more control over a Runner’s stats.
