First GTA 6 and now Marathon, which has become the latest high-profile game to be delayed.
Developed by Bungie for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, Marathon is a player-vs-player extraction shooter originally pencilled in for a September 23 release.
Unfortunately, however, the Marathon developer has decided to delay the FPS following negative fan feedback from the recent Alpha test.
Even worse is that Marathon doesn’t actually have a new release date, with Bungie instead promising to reveal more this autumn.
According to a Bungie blog post, Bungie will hold more closed gameplay tests in the coming months. If you participated in the Alpha, then it’s worth regularly checking your email in case you get an invite.
“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,” Bungie explains.
“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.”
Bungie has also outlined some of the specific areas it will focus on during the additional development time.
The studio wants to up the survival elements of the game, including creating more challenging and engaging AI encounters, more rewarding runs, complete with better loot and more dynamic events, as well as making combat even more tense and dramatic.
Bungie has also said it will “double down on the Marathon Universe”, which means increased visual fidelity, more narrative and environmental storytelling and a darker tone.
The darker tone will seemingly have more in common with the themes of the original trilogy of games.
Finally, the full release will have more social experiences, specifically improvements to solo and duos, as well as proximity chat.