The PVE Problem in Marathon

It took a week (while free) to go right back to the 10k high and 5k low.

What I dont get is that Tarkov have their PVE only mode Icebreaker out now, but is used as a way to make money and farm XP, because you already need to take your best gear to not die to the AI and armour and guns arent worth taking out since they weigh too much and take up too space. My hope is that the PVE exclusive mode coming later this season is more directed at players who want the full cryo experience while not having the looming PVP threat, while beefing up the AI and reducing the loot to Valuables/Salvage and heals + ammo. So you can get rich, but you cant just drag out 5 gold shields + guns every run.

I dont get my people play an EXTRACTION SHOOTER and only want pve, go play an mmo, or a single player/coop game. this weak mentality practically ruined arc raiders especially solo play. what is the point of playing a extraction shooter with no stakes of losing other than dying to a bot

It not that their isn't a PVE mode, it's that it's an ugly game. And pve is an afterthought.

Even with pve, there isn't any MMO feel.

Marathon should have been cheap to make, and added to Bungie..... It became a fiscal cancer and anchor to Bungie.

Their ended game literally doing +1000% better.

Stupid company.

So the other day a MARATHON dev said if we want Destiny 3 ....we have to support marathon .....fuck outta here !!!

things should be accomplishable even for those who arent great, and i dont need to sweat for every single second of my 300 hour playtime so far. let us have an easy mode, god forbid my sanity doesnt potentially break with every round start. the pvp lite mode has genuinely been heaven because its been easy, even boring at times AND SOMETIMES THATS WHAT WE NEED. i really do not need every venture, every mission, every single gosh darned run to be the make or break run for whatever im doing. sometimes i wanna take that 3 part single run mission on Narsh, hop into sponsored survival, and just get. it. done. no big fights, no snipers across the map, no invis shottys, no nothin. me, the bots, the mission. in and out. Marathon can be a Micheline star meal, but darn toot'n i just need a nucal drinkable cheeseburger sometimes.

yep i agree pve and pvp must be completely separated not only loot wise but also in progression. Kind of how Tarkov does it. Would be nice if they later also change some npc behavior or ad some npc that act as player but even that issent a urgency at the start. If marathon would have a complete separate pve mode on all maps i for sure woulld buy it bc that way i can learn maps and the mechanics in a chill way before i dip my toes in pvp.

i've become anti-pve with this game man i just want tdm with custom loadouts not interested in doing these goofy quests again

game is the best thats ever been right now… stop whining you play this game for a job sigh

The problem is streamers and content creators telling people what's the problem with marathon

Normal people don't like high stress pvp. That's why the numbers are absolutely cratering to way under cancellation levels.

Imma be honest. Extraction PvP is for people who no life the game. It's just the nature of the genre. And most people, casual players, don't have that kind of time to put in a game, just so they can have a chance of enjoying it. A PvE mode can help with that, so people can still have some progression or enjoyment from the game, without feeling like the PvP is monopolizing the waste of their time.

The purple sponsored kits were so disappointing to see, even though I got 3 of them (haven't used them). I was so excited for a wipe, but then on day 1 (when the servers actually allowed us to play) we were facing purple shield players already and it felt bad. Was hoping PvE would have the enemies turned up to 11 to compensate for the lack of teams.

PvP is a taste that's acquired with skill & knowledge ncrease. I used to hate running into PvP, but now I kind of like it. You gitgud with sweaty PvP.

I absolutely love Marathon.
But the reality is that the game needs to grow its player base. I'm for anything they do to achieve that. But there should be some sort of barrier in bringing over easily gotten, higher level equipment into the main arena. Personally, I never find much on P, DM, & now OP. And if I do, I never get out with it.

They should add this modes to destiny... But honestly i dont care about bungie, they should shutdown all their servers and stop making slop games

imo the sponsored pve modes are lots of fun, almost their entirely own gameplay loop. i also enjoy playing rook in sponsored perimeter bc i like to make friends, not exactly the most rewarding from a loot standpoint though usually lmao

After about 50 hours in season 1, I was done with Marathon. I love so much about the game but I'm just not good enough to stay afloat. By the end of those 50 hours I was still struggling to find green shields or pay/barter for enough health items. This season has been 30 hours of chill fun, just shooting bots on the survival maps. I almost never play the normal mode, and I don't see that changing. I'm sure I'm an outlier, but just wanted to share my experience.

Every sweat player has purple shields and gold loot week one (easily) so why shouldn’t casuals be able to get some decent loot?

An all gold casual player is still gonna lose to a purple sweaty player in most PvP interactions so I don’t see why people are soo salty, it’s not gonna change the economy it’s just gonna give opportunities to loose that gear you got in pve in PvP.

My first match day one I got slapped by a purple player, followed by running into multiple purple squads throughout the day so this fear of casuals getting good loot is just ridiculous.

Sweats are ALWAYS gonna have good gear week one meanwhile I grinded my but off all last season only to have 2 gold items in my vault (I play as a friendly solo most of the time meaning I usually get killed by rats sneaking me while I’m trying to complete a contract and blasting the friendly voice option..)

Makes the grind incredibly hard for people not wanting to ambush other players or play like a ghost the whole match..

Pve solves all of that and the only downside is now sweats have to face gold and purple solos and casuals in PvP.

No more ambushing free kit players at exfill just to steal their quest item and 2 pieces of green salvage..

Sounds like an absolute win to me all around

It feels like a problem because it’s a half measure. They can do some phenomenal experiences with PvE, but are the proper systems there to support it as an independent experience? I think not

PvE mode is just more fun man, it's just nice being able to do stuff and not have some freak about to bust you wide open

If they really want to save the game, they are going to have to find ways for the people who don't like PvP to avoid it altogether. PvP in most games is basically a side mode where once people are done with the PvE/campaign, they can jump in and get more out of the game. If they just switch it up and say, "PvP is the game, here's some PvE that you can jump in and do as side content, but in the interest of getting people in the PvP," it won't work.

I bought this game for the PvP/extraction mode, knowing that I might only play it an hour here and there. That's what I did all season 1. Jump in and play a few rounds here and there between other games. I'd usually move on after dying a bunch of times back to back, feeling like I was pretty much wasting my time.

Then they added the survival mode this season, and I have played the game WAY more than expected. I'm just not that into PvP and not willing to play it for hours on end, but the new mode allows me to fight the bots, loot the map and do the contracts, things I almost never do in extraction/PvP because I'm always getting 3rd, 4th or 5th partied. If they add a dedicated PvE mode that is meant by itself to be a genuine way to play the game (no free kit requirement or nerfs to loot), I think that it will bring in players, like myself, who might then jump in an extraction/PvP mode here and there but play it mostly PvE.

I don't like it when people compare this game constantly to ARC Raiders, but I have no choice right now. What gave ARC Raiders their massive success is the ability to play it in a PvE centric way. The problem is that ARC Raiders seems very opposed to allowing a dedicated pvE mode, and now PvE players are leaving the game because of the PvP and PvP players are leaving mostly because of cheaters. (Obviously there are also people leaving/not playing right now because of lack of endgame content as well, but we'll see how that goes in October).

I have a lot of similar thoughts on the pve mode, I think another thing you could potentially do is have there be a season level cap on them so that people who are good at the game/have a lot of time to play the game can't spam the mode to farm the best stuff in the game, but allow them to run it as rook still to actually incentivize people to do it if its the only way you can to actually make the pvp lite actually happen bc yeah as it currently is you rarely ever see rooks and now that its perimeter I don't think I've seen one at all in it. If loot launched how it currently is and we didn't have those free sponsored kits I think this season could have been so much more fun, bc I have a lot of the same feelings as some people in the community have that it really feels like wipe never happened for some people while everyone else is gonna have to spend the next 2 months getting to where these people got in a week and that feels genuinely abysmal and really makes it hard to wanna keep playing. Cryo these last two days have been rough last season I started playing cryo when they added free kits every week and in that small amount of time was able to get all my vaults and compiler done, n I haven't exfilled once yet bc I keep running into gold mizzy's already and its just not fun it feels exactly like the last 3 days of Cryo in season 1 did and that was a really brutal couple days it was at least more fun bc everyone had golds but rn its only those handful of people who played night marsh for 8+ hours a day maxing out their cradles and vaults n now are just rolling people. As well as the way people have shifted in playing cryo you either get pushed in 3 minutes and die or nothing happens for 10 to 15 minutes and then if you happen to run into a team and fight the rest of the lobby comes running in to 3rd to be last on map n theres really nothing you can do outside of the maybe 10% chance you outplay everyone. I love this game truly but this season with the bugs, the server issues, the loot econ and meta not shifting and being very stale I'm struggling to play when my friends aren't on and that was never an issue last season no matter how much I got shit on in a day or had a heartbreaking loss where I coulda exfilled with something I really wanted I always had the urge to play n now I like some of the things but I'm really not having fun most of the time.

Keeping the dogshit vision of marathon is the reason why the game is fucked right now

You want PVE players to play PVP, then go Left4Dead. Have PVP players take on the shape of big robots monsters that can’t hide in bushes or act like friends and you’ll get all the PVP tension you want and then some.

Without PvE I wouldn't have picked up the game. Having an option to clear corp contracts in peace was a good start for me as a new player.

Really like your ideas. Hope Bungie are paying attention or at least people can provide feedback on this. Also suggest no gold on the pve (PvP lite) mode.

Damn it's almost like this game was dying and Bungie is trying to throw whatever they can to retain or gain players. It's almost like nobody is asking for PVP games in a market saturated in them!!

When instead you have casual every day people just wanting PVE / Co-op games that they can drop in and out of between real life who aren't content creators who have made X thing their entire livelihood.

It's almost like when you actually take a look at Extraction shooters as a genre they fall into an even more niche, and extreme segment of PVP looter shooter.

Extraction shooters being the more extreme end of the survival genre, instead of it being a casual pick up and play like a Battleroyal where everyone outside of skill starts fresh with no gear. Instead you might end the day on a utter and entire loss....and that doesn't reset the next day, you will log back in to right where you left off and have to pick up and rebuild from there, in a PVP only environment that does not sound like something that will retain players.

Why come back to a game that just got done feeling like shit at the end from the day prior to rebuild and restart if there doesn't feel like there is any other progression path to rebuild outside of PVP which you could be fucking dogshit at.

When the loop only includes high skill/high time investment players and filters out low skill/low investable time players. All that leads to is a dwindling population and eventually death.

You can't stop the sweaty no lifes from optimizing the shit out of the way they play your game. Not in the age of the internet where information can be shared/mined and posted the minute it is found.

But what you can do is provide an avenue to the other players to have a chance against the ones that spend hours a day doing nothing but optimizing and filtering the game part out of the game.

Sponsored runs and PVE are that answer that bungie came up with to try and remedy both a dying player count and a need to provide less sweaty players a way to rebuild in an already harsh environment.

The thing with extraction shooters is they remove a key element from what makes games like Day Z and Rust work.....you aren't existing in a single massive map at all times where you can choose to avoid other players to go somewhere that isn't full of PVP to get regeared and then go back to try and get even better gear from the 4 stack down by a monument.

Instead you are forced to have to conflict with other players to regear if shit goes sideways.

PvE is that choice of being able to avoid the massive blood bath at launch site....the ability to get Sulfer from around the map instead of having to go to a quarry or giant excavator. The ability to get a lucky find at a gas station or scrounging enough scrap to buy something from a vendor.

The only difference here is it's guaranteed that you won't run into other players instead of a chance that the spot on the map you chose to go to is quiet and stays that way while you loot.

But in a game where there is no constant world map that you persist on even when logged off that is the trade off.

The other option is do what tarkov did and separate the two experiences and hope that the PVP doesn't eat itself alive and that the PVE is fun enough for those players to keep playing your game. Never for the two to cross paths loot pool wise.

In a game that is already being hailed as a failure and doomed to die bungie doesn't have the luxury of separating the two from each other currently and they are testing the waters to see what works.

As someone who dropped ARC Raiders when content creators ruined the dynamic of will they won't they and only picks it back up to run solo friendly lobbies, I don't care for the strict PVP forced, I will happily take whatever PVE mode is given on offer and if that PVE mode allows me to mix gear between it and the PVP great I'll dip my toes in the PVP queue everyonce and a while if I have a contract that requires it or friends who want to play that mode.

Otherwise if it goes the way of Tarkov....You'll likely never see me in the PVP mode because I just don't care for what it has to offer.

I'm not casual enough to be unskilled at PVP I dropped 2k hours in Destiny 2 mainly as a solo PVP player. I quit D2 when bungie started to cut content and ignore the PVP side of D2 I was solo I don't have enough people to go do the end game Raids for a challenge...I couldn't Queue into a grandmaster nightfall and they didn't have the in game LFG system.

When I am forced to sweat just to play a game, I'm not having fun and nor are the people who become my point and click adventure targets.


And don't even get me started on what kind of breeding ground PVP only games are for fucking cheaters. The lowest of the low types of people who only have "fun" when they can't possibly lose.

PvE was at least fun. I go to Cryo and it's already Misriahs all over the place. I can't. Vault 6 and Compiler just seem impossible now.

So Marathon had free to play and had less than 5k additional purchases. Max players at a little over 15k. Games been dead for over a month now. The last two days they offered silk if you logged in. Again no pickup.

Remember when the glazers claimed that this free weekend would bring in so many new players....yeah.... After that ended, the player numbers are pretty much where it's been. Idek if making the game free will make the game interesting for new players... You can only blame the haters for so long... A huge fundamental change of the game will need to be done in order to get new players, which will change a lot of the stuff the current fans like.

The game’s biggest issue is that the devs dragged their feet on a PvE mode for so long that they already lost half their player base, so most people who quit won't even know it's there. Forcing PvE players into PvP just to unlock campaign rewards is a massive misstep driven by the delusional idea that everyone just wants to farm gear for PvP. Honestly, the forced PvP is exactly what's killing the game, and forcing PvE fans into a mode they hate and probably suck at makes zero sense. The argument that a PvE mode ruins the high-stakes "flow" is totally irrelevant for a game barely scraping 10k daily players, especially since nobody plays PvP just for the loot anyway. If they just separated PvE and PvP storage or added minimum map requirements, it would easily fix the gear-carrying issue, but the devs are completely blind to the fact that people just want a pure PvE experience without being shoved back into a dying PvP ecosystem.

there should be a pve solo and trio dungeon like game modes this is mainly for weapons (rare and epics weapons only no faction quests or materials for faction upgrades) and cradle points that way you can go back to the pvpve and keep up with the pvp and get materials for faction upgrades + do faction quests while cryo is the endgame dungeon that tests your skills since its pvpve
by making the lower difficulty dungeons only have weapon loot type (backbakcs + shields) and not having faction upgrades materials avaliable or quests; this ensures players are tackling faction quests in game modes with pvpve (players will just end up playing solo and lvl up to skip to cryo instead of dealing with modes like outpost for pvpve)

The PvP ruins an otherwise decent time. All the lore and backstory is wasted on a PvP game.
It just needs more stuff to do and/or a full campaign.

The PVE is great. The whole game needs to have it, up to and including Cryo.

You are smart.

Most D2 players are PvE only players in it, a big chunk also play both PvE and PvP and just a FEW percentage is PvP only.. Marathon MUST have a PvE only mode with story campaigns and make the Exraction side as an OPTIONAL gamemode or its dead soon! Game look good, the OG marathon has a sick and amazing story. it is impossible to d oa good lore around the game while you have to be good at pvp and most players are casual pve players.. whether yall like it or not it NEEDS PvE only mode.. not PvP-Lite.. but a PvE only mode! Period.

Edit: If the PvE hoarders are a bad thing, jsut mark weapons earned from PvE mode and vice versa. If a weapon earned in PvE it cant be brought into PvP mode. SImple. Problem solved, and everyone can enjoy their desired mode as the want without fluctuate the other modes loot economy..

i think the big misunderstanding here is that most people that will come to the game for the pve mode dont want to play the pvpve mode whatsoever.

what will attract casuals to the game is a closed pve loop, the pvp is what pushes them out of the game, the high stakes are simply too high, and the reduced stakes in the pve mode is what is attractive, but the complete lack of progression with the requirement of sponsored kits makes the mode lackluster, and results in people leaving the game again because all it does is push you towards the pvp that they already know they dont like.

At the end of the day all that overinflated loot is being lost in cryo and ranked

The game really needs an invasion system like Elden Ring. Keep it PvE, but let solo players or squads invade you. The team should get an immediate alert when it happens, and invaders get rewards for winning. If you hate PvP, you can just use an item to turn invasions off completely.This gives players total control. It’s actually how I got into PvP myself because I could do it at my own pace without pressure. It really helps people see that PvP isn't the whole game—it's just a fun, optional way to play. Until they become PvP fiends, and you push all the modes the game has under the PvP umbrella so you can directly jump into survival and fun.

It’s pretty amazing sponsored marsh didn’t make me quit yet but I have faith they will cook

Yeah the loot inflation from the purple sponsored kits and PvE Night Marsh was very short sighted.Week 1 Season 2 feeling much the same as Week 12 Season 1 doesnt make me excited to play early in the wipe, now I wonder should i just wait til the next C.A.R.R.I style event so the exp is better and i dont have to grind as many hours this season.

"Stuck to their guns" is the same way Titanfall 1 "stuck to its guns" in the sense that the internal back and forth and flailing left them with only enough time to double down on PvP. I doubt it was some sort of noble stance but just what they had to do because of the situation they backed themselves into and lack of resources. Now that Sony has killed Destiny they can lay off half of Bungie and give the rest of the Destiny resources to Marathon for PvE. Thing is that won't save it. The game is too sweaty for casuals and the casuals are where the numbers come from, not these mobs that go around screaming "dead game" or the hardcore.

The solution is taxes. Have there be a 75% value to all new items you get from pve can’t be used in PvP

Bottom line here is if they don’t expand the player base the game,and possibly the studio is finished. PVE may be the only way to do this to bring in more casual players

the game is brutal the bots are already tough and now you have kitted up greedy purple shields runners, I wish they also make a campaign with coop, the only way most of us will do cryo is if they have a pve only mode but with tougher bots