Bungie announces Marathon after layoffs

Bungie has been largely silent on its future mining shooter marathonwhich still has a 2025 release window. In a developer update released on Monday, the game’s director confirmed that it’s still in the works, but it’s too early to share more details.

In the nearly 10-minute video, which you can watch below, director Joe Ziegler showed off two new pieces of concept art — one for a character codenamed Thief (pictured above) and another for a character codenamed Stealth. .” Ziegler didn’t provide any information about these runners, but from the names you can guess what styles of play they fit.

Otherwise, the video goes over the basics of the game again, describes how it connects to Marathon’s existing IP, and gives a brief update on the development progress. Ziegler confirmed that the game is coming, but Bungie couldn’t provide more details or show any footage because different parts of the game are in different stages of development. The team hopes to show more by mid-2025 after expanding playtests to more players.

“We’ve been making a lot of aggressive changes to the game over the last few years, and we’ve been iterating quite a bit,” says Ziegler. For example, the environment is “starting to come together” but the character models are “not quite ready yet.” “They’re not all together, but when they all come together, we’re really looking forward to showing you what it looks like.”

in marathonyou play as a runner who has to explore maps on a planet called Tau Whale IV and complete objectives to make it out alive. Each of the runners will have different skill sets and you can customize them with gear. If you don’t extract, you will lose all your items.

The game is a continuation of one of Bungie’s earliest franchises, which started back in 1994 and continued throughout the 1990s. Ziegler says that the new marathon will take elements from the original, particularly its creepy atmosphere, but it will be a “new story” in a “new world”.

marathon was discovered in a PlayStation Expo in May 2023but since then there have been few announcements and disclosures. Bungie is also dealing with some internal chaos, with numerous dismissals and a restructuring with parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment. Bungie is going to focus more on this fixation Fate 2 and develops marathon instead of other projects, though the new studio will be working on an original sci-fi/fantasy action film.