I came into Marathon with the brain of a Destiny player, honed on hundreds of hours of a particular flavour of dopamine spike, where mastering the completion of five simultaneous bounties was the height of satisfaction, rather than lining up the perfect headshot. Where the illuminated maps of the game’s science-fantasy solar system became objects not of arcane study but strategic efficiency. In those hallowed times, isolating the one location where multiple separate-but-interlocking tasks (kill 30 hive acolytes with submachine guns while performing precision solar damage) was the deepest knowledge one could acquire (typically from Reddit). 

No doubt this is no longer what Destiny is: Destiny was forever the shifting sands beneath my feet, the new, shiny plate-spinning replacing the old, dusty plate-spinning, the currencies, now worthless, resting in my bottomless (newly expanded) vault, my memory of their worth hazy at best. Destiny, as a game, as a universe, is about accrual, and unsurprisingly the game itself seems doomed to accrue more and more things until its weight will eventually carry it below the surface, towards the abyss, where it will remain for eternity. Bungie have tried to resist this, of course, cutting off whole chunks of Destiny 2 like panicked whalers, balancing the value of the blubber they were removing with their ability to stay afloat, but we know that it is a doomed enterprise. Destiny 2 is almost at the seafloor now, unreachable by all but the most intrepid new players, who, even if when they do reach its lower pressures, find it esoteric and unreadable, like the timeworn etchings of cuneiform dialects on sunken cities.

The point being that Destiny is maximalism disguised beneath a minimalist sheen. More and more it groans, but with elegance, in Swiss type and 1px linework. Weaned on Destiny, I arrived to Marathon disappointed, disgusted even, by the lack of more. Marathon inverts the pattern. It has a maximalist sheen, if there is such a thing, an exhausting busyness to its entire reality. There’s stuff everywhere, but also everything is stuff. It is a reality made entirely of products, taken to some dizzyingly insane conclusions. Is a building a product? A wall? A window? Marathon thinks so, and will brand them as such, like someone with a newly acquired label-maker. You get the sense that each blade of grass, if inspected close enough, might reveal a barcode. And yet … the skin shop is mostly empty (No Kylo Ren, no Geralt of Rivia, no God of War anniversary fur-piece) the maps are few, the currency singular. And, most disgusting of all, you can ONLY COMPLETE ONE MISSION AT A TIME.

It is hard to express, despite my use of all caps, how repulsive this feels to a Destiny player. How cruel. Are you telling me I need to “equip” the “kill ten runners” mission separately to the “get ten kills” mission and “kill ten people with submachine guns” mission, and complete them all on separate runs? I can’t just have all three tucked in my pocket and kill ten runners with my submachine gun. Where is the glee, the joy, the efficiency? Why would I even go to Reddit anymore, knowing that there were no secret techniques to discover, only tired complaints? This was minimalism that could sink the whole enterprise, I thought, just as Destiny’s maximalism would be its downfall. I didn’t get it. But in time, I understood that the problem was Destiny. The problem was Destiny players. The problem was me.

What kind of a story can be told with numbers? Your immediate response to this question is probably confusion or disgust. Stories aren’t made of numbers. They aren’t qualitative—they are quantitative, human, expansive, etc, etc. I am aware of this, but I am also a game designer, and so making stories with numbers is my job. Every kind of story, I am afraid, can be told with numbers. But that doesn’t mean that all the numbers tell a good story. “Kill 30 hive acolytes with submachine guns while performing precision solar damage” doesn't tell a good story. The logic of why a Guardian would even do such a thing is hazardous, if not toxic, to the entire idea that Destiny even has a story. I probably felt that when I first encountered one of these stories, but at the same time I also remember being enamoured by it.

I loved the “Thorn” quest in Destiny, a quest that is a bounty disguised as an inventory item. The item is a Depleted Hand Cannon, one that begs for more murder in its flavour text. It asks you to kill 500 hive enemies. Now this could be a good story; a weird, dead gun that demands you kill 500 of its brethren, that begs for more and more power. But it is also a story best completed by reloading the same checkpoint of a single mission over and over (“We’ve woken the hive!” uttered in Peter Dinklage’s voice is something I will never forget, which is good, because they patched it out of the game). Here is the yin and yang of Destiny. Lovely flavour text and brutal efficiency. Stories and numbers at cross purposes. If you need further convincing, try watching this INCREDIBLE 11-year-old guide to a quest that no longer exists, with systems that no longer work like that, and a wonderful number of unexplained proper nouns. A story so esoteric it almost becomes interesting again with time. Almost. I can’t even imagine what this sounds like to a non-Destiny player.

But I am a Destiny player, for my sins, and 11 years of Destiny was long enough for me to stop noticing—for me to follow the logic enough times that I accepted it as a reality. So when Marathon told me the fundamental rules I had internalised were no longer true, I was upset. I wanted to be efficient, more than I wanted to play a story. I was wrong, and I believe that at some point in those 11 years someone at Bungie realised their mistake just as I did. Because in the Thorn quest there is a story. Go back and play that video above and tell me it isn’t a story, tell me it isn’t entertaining. Not because of the numbers (500 enemies, what a ridiculous choice!) or the quest steps, but because a person played it all. Because Datto “barely even saw Xyor the unwed!” That’s a good story. A story that emerges from the numbers, live and exciting. A story you want to tell someone the next day. Someone at Bungie must have realized that, because Marathon loves that kind of story, it is willing to do anything to make it happen. It is willing to frustrate you, to block you, to halt efficiency, to stymie progress, to ruin the numbers, and their eternal climb upwards, just to tell you a good story. A story where you lose, and you enjoy it.

Let me be specific. Marathon has its fair share of “kill ten runners”, but what it also has are tasks. Go to a specific location. Access a computer. Summon an enemy. Kill the enemy. Take the enemies' things. Get out alive. That’s a task, and you aren’t allowed more than one. You take that task, and that’s your run. The most efficient thing you can do? Complete that one task in your run. No stacking, no plate-spinning. Just get it done. It doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it isn’t meant to. In story terms, this is the arc. This story will start with you arriving on a map, somewhere random. You might be close to that first location, you might be on the other side of the entire place. The story will continue as you cross the map, access a building, maybe dodge some traps. The story will finish with a rush to the enemy you have summoned, a brief and violent encounter. And then it will conclude with a race to the finish, a run to the door. One hope in your head: get out. OK, that’s an improvement, that sounds interesting. But then there’s this: You are on a map with an undisclosed number of other players. At any point in that story you might encounter them. If you do, you will likely die, unless you see them first. They are all on their own tasks, their own vectors. They are carrying their own weapons, maybe even gaining new ones. They have items, treasures, and secrets. They might even be hunting you, waiting for you at any of the locations on your task list, with the knowledge that you will be on your way shortly. That’s not a story. Those are conditions. And the story emerges from all that. And it is one hell of a story.

Sometimes it's a comedy, a dark kind of slapstick as you run straight into a hail of buckshot after you round the first corner. Sometimes a tragedy, where you complete all the steps only to find yourself face to face with another player in the extraction circle, one far crueler than you. Typically it's some hybrid of the two, where the shifting conditions create opportunity and conflict in equal measure. That other runner was hiding at the computer, damn, scratch that run, but then if you kill them, perhaps they are carrying just the gun you need to take down that stubborn enemy later on. Opportunity from adversity. Improvisation. Tension and twists. Now we are talking good stories. Good stories that fill the hours, and the numbers are going down. This is incredibly inefficient, you think, as you watch another player pick through the equipment you left behind, your favourite gun zipped up in a bag. But then as you watch them take it out, equip it, and inspect it, maybe a little solidarity takes hold. Maybe you whisper, “enjoy it” as you return to the lobby, having wasted your evening on one beautiful, impossible, singular task. You know they too are telling a story, one where they found an incredibly sick gun on some idiot who didn't even seem to know how to use it. We all play a role, and the clown is far better than the optimiser, if you ask me.

To kill 500 enemies for a new gun is a kind of sick joke. When you get the gun you are almost disgusted. You fire it once and you like it or you don't. In most cases you don’t, because it isn’t really efficient to learn to use a new gun anyway—you killed those 500 enemies just fine with the other one, and you are used to it now. And so the new one goes in the vault. I always imagined tossing my Destiny weapons into a Scrooge McDuck swimming pool when I did this. Bungie called it the vault, so they must have been thinking the same. Maybe I should have been disgusted, but I liked the story I was being told. I wanted to hear more, and this was the cost of admission. And so why not make that cost go easier? Why not be efficient in following the story? But efficiency kills the story of course, compulsively, aggressively. The story is stillborn, delivered dead to us at the end of the struggle. In Marathon, the story is the struggle. Who cares if you got the macguffin? Who cares if you won? 

How, the audience ask, with bated breath, did it all go down?

Win forever? Or lose it all in one night? Now that’s a real fantasy.

***

Gareth Damian Martin is a writer, designer and artist. They make games as the one-person studio Jump Over the Age, and are the creator of the Citizen Sleeper series, In Other Waters and a third new thing they can't wait to tell you about.