Bungie thinks Marathon can coexist with games like Escape from Tarkov and help players get to "the survival storytelling a little bit faster"

Bungie's walking into a crowded genre with its Marathon reboot, which is actually a PvPvE extraction shooter this time around. But despite going up against some tough competition, the famed FPS studio thinks its newest game can coexist with the genre's already established hits like Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, game director Joe Ziegler said that the plan is two-fold. For people who are already knee-deep in other extraction shooters, Marathon is being built to provide "a new and interesting experience that really helps you get to the heart of why you enjoy the other extraction shooters that you're playing."

The other piece of the puzzle is targeting people who have only ever dipped their toes in the genre, and pulling them in completely with a game that forgoes the genre's usual jank.

"But really, I think a big opportunity for us is everybody who's dabbled in extraction shooter games before, have seen what it could offer, but they just couldn't get through a lot of the cruft," Ziegler continued. "We are hoping to make it more approachable to that group, where they can get past that cruft and into the survival storytelling a little bit faster and a little bit better. Basically, everything they're hoping an extraction shooter gives them from a tension standpoint, from a survival standpoint, is there without trying to relearn how to play a game."

"It's the easiest way to give the controller to a friend and be like, 'we can play this game,'" gameplay director Andrew Witts added. "There's not a [huge] amount of explanation to get in there. That's kind of what the Bungie action game is, you can give it to somebody else and have that feeling, so you could share that experience a bit better without being like, okay, let me tell you a whole new novel way of how to play. We're really trying to make sure that it's really approachable. The action fantasy of the gameplay is really easy to understand. You know when you press a button, you're like, oh, that felt really good and I really like this."

Elsewhere in Bungie's news blowout, the company announced that Marathon would be coming as a paid release in September on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.

After playing Marathon for 8 hours, I don’t think Bungie’s extraction shooter will be the next Helldivers 2 hit, but I don’t think it will be the next Concord bust either