Bungie plans to attract a part of the sandbox audience to Marathon with deeper and more meaningful stories
Joe Ziegler, the director of the upcoming extraction-shooter Marathon, is confident that the genre has a huge potential for growth, largely due to the incredible success of sandboxes and battle royale games.
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GamesRadar+ recently spoke with Ziegler about all aspects of Marathon, and journalists asked why Bungie team is so confident that their game will become "the next big thing in PvP experiences", given the relatively niche popularity of the extraction-shooter genre. It turns out that Bungie hopes to attract a part of the big sandbox audience with deeper and more meaningful stories.
"I really think the bar can be raised higher than it is now," said Ziegler. "And part of that is because I think we have a whole generation of people growing up in sandboxes. We have battle royale players, players for whom other sandbox shooters have been their main game since they were kids. And for them, they create a lot of stories, but most of those stories are shaped by the systems that support those games, right?"
"And we are trying to take the next step. What if we take it to the next level? What if you want to create emotional stories that have ups and downs in different ways, and create an emotional texture that makes you feel something new and different based on some of the things you know?"
In survival games, players find themselves in critically dangerous situations, usually in search of valuable loot that is necessary for their survival.
Ziegler and his team hope that sandbox players will feel a deeper emotional engagement due to the high stakes in Marathon.
"For us, when we talk about 'survival', we're really talking about a session-long survival experience that leads to a chain of stories. That story we created within that session has impact. We got the loot or we lost the loot, depending on the circumstances, and that affects the next session. And over time, you create this texture of different sessions that come together to form different stories."
Marathon is scheduled for release on 23 September 2025 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Source: GamesRadar
