Comment on Marathon vs. Arc Raiders - Discussion of the games' opposite opinions
gusgalarnyk@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
To be as specific as I’m feeling right now, feel free to tell me to dial in further, and coming from having only played Arc Raiders and only watched Marathon vods here is the main difference - Marathon’s devs are making a lot of promises vs Arc Raiders delivering on those same promised plans.
- For instance marathon is promising to launch with 3 maps, arc has 3 maps today.
- Marathon is promising tense extractor gunplay with high stakes loot, everything I heard from multiple streamers/reviewers say the tension isn’t there and the loot isn’t there. Arc has tension and definitely has loot. Their guns have clean 1-4 ranking and the weapons are rarity binned. I’ve yet to use most of the weapons available in Arc because I haven’t focused on crafting them and haven’t found them, theres already a ton of width to the pool.
- Marathon is promising strong PvE encounters with raid boss like content (or maybe the raid boss promise was actually people just speculating on where they could take this). Arc has boss like encounters with the Queen (and honestly fuck the Rocketeer and the Bastion those guys are tough little bastards that will punish you if you make a mistake).
- Marathon is promising dynamic events during the match. Arc Raiders already has dynamic events on a per map basis, night raids, and in server events like rocket landings, middle barages, etc.
I would pay $60 bucks today for Arc Raiders as it is now. My friends and I would play the fuck our of it. And if they would do DLC instead of battle passes we’d continue to financially support the game.
Based on what I heard and saw of marathons identical closed alpha, I don’t know if there’s enough content there for more than 10 hours and none of it excited me because it seemed like 20% of what they promised.
I think people are hyped by the concept of Marathon and the hope for an old Bungie game. But I think right now the reality is they’re not the same Bungie as the one that gave us Halo, I personally never got into Destiny, and they’ve only gotten more corporate not less.
If in 6 months they can spin up what seems to be 80% of a game, then I’ll be there and interested. But if Arc released next week, or spent the next 6 months adding content and I had to pick one, I’d be playing Arc without question.
arakhis_@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
the timing seems very crucial for swingcustomers (as in swingstate, not the dirty way I know you thought that) - good for us consumers if they drop it earlier short term.
On the other hand, in regard of long term quality of the game, I kinda wish they ensure to expand and refine first before releasing, since even its embark… idk updates once in post-production dont offer gamechanging features anymore. As listed in the arc-but’s (why my neologism game seem dirty) above theres lots of things that might cause a drop in success overtime similar to division.
Would love your thoughts on how they specifically delivered or unsatisfied the listed promises
gusgalarnyk@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m struggling a bit with what you’re asking for but here’s what I think you’re asking for. You brought up two worries with Arc
I think gunplay is at a really good point systems-wise in Arc. I think at this point the important long term factors are balance and variety. Balance is anyone’s guess in any single game or with any single company, sometimes they get close at the start and just make nothing but bad calls from then on like in Helldivers 2. So no comment on Arc’s long term balance but I’d give them no worse odds than Bungie to fuck that up - and based off the technical alpha feedback Arc is in a great place in terms of balance and Marathon is most definitely not.
Variety is an easy solve with extraction shooters in my opinion because you can control so many variables. You can have a busted gun but it’s ammo or durability decay is so large you only use it one run per find, you can make it a legendary drop, you can make it only good against players or only good against bots, etc. There’s a lot of factors in what makes a gun good when an economy and RPG elements are brought in. I imagine if they released a new gun every season or every 6 months or released a set of consumables and legendaries the variety would be maintained for a decade. Again, because there’s a bigger PvE emphasis in Arc than in Marathon from what we’ve seen, I’d bet Arc is able to keep things fresh for longer. Imagine a Javelin in Arc - it sucks against players but it crippled the Queen, that’s cool as hell and reasonably feasible. Marathon screams Apex gun design and I think Apex didn’t do a good job with their gun pool - every expansion felt like it hurt the pool instead of making it more diverse IMHO but that could have also come down to balance - I suspect marathon will be the same.
Meta progression is easy. Arc has a skill tree that I like (although it’s missing details which I think is important) and bench upgrades (and maybe vendor levels?). They also have battlepasses but this is actually a negative for me, I think current battlepass design sucks even if they’re going with the friendlier Helldivers style passes. They’re just boring. Still, more little “achievement” targets and rewards.
Those have been very compelling. Marathon has quests for a half a dozen vendors. I believe that’s it. I don’t recall a skill system, I don’t recall bench upgrades, just quests. I like the aesthetic, and I don’t really mind it all being just quests but between the lack of personalization in meta progression AND the fact it’s a hero shooter the game lacks the golden itch of individuality that I love when games have. I think marathon has significantly worse meta progression today AND I don’t think they’ve promised to make it better. That’s super important to me. Hunt Showdown is a great game but it’s lack of meta progression has made it feel shallow for me. Marathon, I imagine, will feel the same way.
Again, this comes down to Arc being good to go today with systems I can dream about them expanding. Marathon isn’t accessible outside the US right now and I imagine even if I could play it it wouldn’t feel even close to a finished project - and with a bunch of corpos making promises to the cameras my gut says if the game is good it’ll be in a year or two and even then it’ll be corporate good and not artist good.