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 out 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.

I haven't played Marathon, but I did get into the ARC test. This will mostly be some ramblings...

I'm still waiting to play ARC with some friends. I only did some solo stuff.

I'm coming from this as a big Hunt Showdown player (1,200+ hours) and someone that's played a bit of Forever Winter (~20). I still like Hunt better; I think it's the only extraction shooter that didn't take a ton of influence from Tarkov.

I wasn't crazy about the marathon art style, but I'm not ready to pass judgement on it until I've been in the world.

ARC's art style I found beautiful but also perhaps too sparse. There were so many wide open spaces ... I just don't see that being a good thing for an extraction shooter. The world felt vast and empty ... I prefer Hunt's more cluttered and dense design.

ARC does seem to have a lot of potential in like how it's designed its AI, Hunt's is very primitive in a lot of ways and kind of secondary. I think the AI is going to be a bigger deal in ARC.

Third person also feels worse to me than first person. I hope they add a first person mode to ARC, but I kind of doubt they will.

I definitely agree that ARC felt like it was being set up to tell a story and felt very cinematic at times.

The UI also felt like the best extraction shooter UI I've ever encountered.

I'm concerned about the long term health of ARC. The progression system seems like it will certainly lead to established players dominating newer players. The lack of a primary objective that's shared by all the teams on the map ... I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it may lead to a more relaxed experience, on the other hand, it doesn't curate players towards each other like Hunt does; it seems looting and crafting are the primary motivators instead.

The fights that I did get into, they lacked the complex environment and buildings in Hunt so I didn't find them nearly as engaging, they were much more straight forward gunfights than leveraging the map to use it to my advantage. I think that aspect will ultimately hurt the game as it makes it feel like a bit of a generic shooter.

Overall ARC felt very middle of the road from what I've played of it so far. I had a similar feeling about The Finals. Embark seems like a talented studio and I wish them the best as they go up against Bungie and Crytek.

They're both going to be dead in less than like 2 years because they are both PvEvP Extraction Looter Shooters. Combining the top 10 playercounts on Steam in this genre adds up to only like 10k more than the peak player count of Helldivers 2, which is a PvE Extraction Shooter. This genre of game, without a PvE only mode, is dead. Its only good for streamers and content creators, because it is fun to watch someone crash out after losing gear they grinded to get for 50+ hours, but the viewers don't want to play the game because feeling that themselves is not fun.

This genre of games is basically a wet dream for toxic people. Because the PvP players know that the PvE players dont want to fight them, and take advantage of that to camp, grief, etc. What other genre of game rewards a player intentionally ruining someone else's gaming experience?

I am grateful the toxic sponge exists so I dont have to deal with those players in other games, but these development studios keeps trying to make this genre popular, and it literally can never be popular.

I think a big part of this sentiment has to do with Bungie burning a lot of bridges with their fan base in recent years. I'd played Destiny 2 for several years (from Shadowkeep through The Final Shape), and in that time Bungie had made a lot of very unpopular moves. From things like the "Destiny Content Vault" (where old content was removed from the game to make room for new content), expansions getting delayed by several months, massive studio layoffs, apparent mismanagement of an entire expansion (Lightfall), more studio layoffs... It's just really hard, as a player, to back a Bungie project right now. I no longer feel like their priorities line up with mine.

Meanwhile, I've also been a huge fan of Embark's previous game, The Finals. It's a totally different type of FPS compared to Destiny, yet they managed to capture my interest by doing correctly all the things Bungie did wrong. They nailed the monetization of the game and it doesn't feel predatory, they listen to their community, and they constantly show a commitment toward making The Finals into the best game it can be (and not necessarily the most profitable game it could be).

So while Marathon looks like it's got all the makings for an amazing game, I just don't feel like Bungie fans have enough faith left in Bungie anymore. For a lot of people, myself included, The Final Shape was the "end" of Destiny; not because Bungie stopped making it (they're still releasing content), but because we got the closure we wanted out of Destiny's story and we're just done with Bungie's antics.

That said, I just don't like extraction shooters. I played a bit of Arc Raiders to see how it is, and it's just not for me. Honestly, I hope both games do well, because it's clear that both studios put a lot of heart into these games and I'm interested in learning about both games' stories. But right now, Bungie has to overcome their reputation if they want Marathon to succeed.

So I’m coming at this as a MASSIVE Destiny nerd. I was in the original’s Alpha, I own the first six lore books, and over the series have a bit shy of 4,000 hours (granted I imagine a few hundred hours of that is just chilling in orbit waiting on/chatting to my fireteam. It has been a very important game to me as I still game with my clan mates from D1 to this day.

Bungie gunplay has always been my favourite in the industry, the encounters are satisfying when you have a competent fireteam, and the gameplay loop kept me going for a long while. For me personally though; my friends and the overarching story were key.

After a decade, things are going to get stale. So I would take breaks here and there and come back when I actually wanted to play. Then the studio became an absolute nightmare to be invested in. The Skeletor Destiny videos are an extremely hilarious but accurate depiction of my feelings towards it all.

I was one of the handful of players that actually enjoyed playing CoD’s extraction variant, and was willing to give Bungie a chance to the extent that I participated in the ARG when Marathon was first announced. Everything since then has been negative in my personal view; from the internal drama of job cuts and accusations of poor workplace conditions to the actual game mechanics and story.

Marathon has great lore and it jogged so Halo could run. Now they’re saying there really won’t be a story right away. I actually like the character and map designs, and the gunplay is basically just Destiny 2’s with some small modifications, that’s just how the Tiger engine looks. With all that I’m just not excited.

TL;DR: I’m not going to pay 40$ so I can be a beta tester for a game that isn’t really promising me anything. I’ve done that for the last decade and largely it’s worked. Bungie has lost the prestige it really needs to make this the ‘next big thing’ IMHO